Abebe Bikila
Ethiopian double Olympic marathon champion
Abebe Bikila (7 August 1932 - 25 October 1973) was a double Olympic marathon champion from Ethiopia. He was the first black African Olympian to win a gold medal representing his own country.[1] He is most famous for the gold medal he won in the 1960 Summer Olympics at Rome. He won the marathon while running barefoot.[2] He won his second Gold medal in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.[3] This made him the first man ever to win two Olympic marathons.[3] He competed in the 1968 Summer Olympics. Bikila was injured in an automobile accident in 1970.[4] It left him a paraplegic. He died at the age of forty-one on 23 October 1973. This was due to complications from his earlier accident.[4] A stadium in Addis Ababa is named after him.
![](http://up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/Abebe_Bikila_1968c.jpg/200px-Abebe_Bikila_1968c.jpg)
Abebe Bikila
References
change- ↑ Edward Seldon Sears, Running Through the Ages (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), p. 296
- ↑ Michael Hurley, World's Greatest Olympians (Chicago, Il: Heinemann Library, 2012), p. 10
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Edward Seldon Sears, Running Through the Ages (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), p. 297
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Dictionary of African Biography, eds. Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Vol I (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 42