2023-12-02 09:15:34
Published on December 2, 2023 at 10:15. / Modified on December 2, 2023 at 10:23.
These “Savoyards” are of a different type, almost impossible to catch up with. For several years, the L’Escalade race, a popular sporting institution in Geneva and the surrounding area, has been an opportunity to admire a small peloton of runners from East Africa who are competing for victory and places of honor in the Elite category. It is both a discouragement and a wonder to see their soles of wind swallowing the cobblestones of the Old Town with such lightness and ease.
This year again, they will be there. Some live in Geneva, like Tadesse Abraham or Helen Bekele Tola, others in Switzerland, like the South Sudanese Dominic Lobalu. Still others come from further afield, sometimes from Kenya, invited by the organizers for the best or by private sponsors for the luckiest. In Iten, an endurance racing mecca located in the Kenyan highlands at an altitude of 2,400 m, where several thousand world-class runners try to be the best in the area to afford somewhere else, a handful have crossed paths with two Genevans, two Juliens, Lyon and Wanders, who dreamed of the opposite path and set down their suitcases there a few years ago, in love with this land, its inhabitants, this way of life reduced to ‘essential.
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#African #runners #arrived #Escalade