{UAH} JOHN AKII-BUA- UGANDA'S GREATEST EVER SPORTSMAN- NOW A FORGOTTEN HERO.

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UGANDA: John Akii-Bua, 47, Is Dead; Ugandan Won Olympic Gold - PHOTOS

John Akii-Bua, 47, Is Dead; Ugandan Won Olympic Gold NEW YORK TIMES - John Akii-Bua, a slender hurdler who surprisingly won an Olympic g...

NEW YORK TIMES - John Akii-Bua, a slender hurdler who surprisingly won an Olympic gold medal in 1972 and almost paid for it with his life, died last Friday in Mulago Hospital in Kampala, Uganda. He was 47 years old.

Roger Byamugisha, the third secretary of the Uganda Mission to the United Nations in New York, said the cause of death had not been announced. He did confirm that Akii-Bua had undergone treatment for a week for what had been reported to be abdominal pains. At his death, Akii-Bua was a senior superintendent with the Ugandan police.

In 1972, after only one international competition, Akii-Bua arrived at the Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. His opposition in the 400-meter hurdles included Dave Hemery of Britain, the world record-holder and defending Olympic champion, and Ralph Mann, an American. His only pair of running shoes was two years old, and one shoe was missing a spike.

But he was built ideally (6 feet 2 inches and 170 pounds), and he had trained with frightening intensity. In the six months before the Olympics, his training had included wearing a vest weighted with 25 pounds in lead as he ran 1,500 meters over five hurdles that were 42 inches high -- the hurdles for his race were 36 inches. He did four sets of those repetitions, twice a day, every day.

He won the Olympic gold medal in 47.82 seconds, a world record, leaving the silver medalist, Mann (48.51 seconds), and the bronze medalist, Hemery (48.52), six meters behind. Then he ran a victory lap and jumped over the hurdles again.Continue reading the main story

Akii-Bua's life would never be the same. Akii-Bua returned home as a hero, and to this day he remains the only Ugandan to win an Olympic gold medal in track and field. But his nation, under the dictatorship of Gen. Idi Amin, was torn by tribal factions and financial crises. Amin was purging the Lango tribe, and Akii-Bua was a Lango.

The Government, while celebrating his achievement, soon restricted his movements. It eventually barred him from taking his wife and children with him to international competitions, afraid he would defect. It cut off twice-a-year training trips to Germany. It reached a point, Akii-Bua said, where he had to stay home and do nothing except listen to Diana Ross records.

Friends told him that his life was in danger. He said it was difficult to even know who his friends were.

''You know how people become jealous when someone is getting such attention,'' his wife, Joyce, said in 1979. ''In Uganda, people who are jealous send others to kill for them.''

Akii-Bua did not defect. He said in 1978: ''If I had not won that gold medal, perhaps I could leave Uganda. But I won the highest honor in track for my country, so I couldn't leave it. Uganda was, in effect, a prison. I guess Amin wanted to put me in jail several times, but I guess he didn't do it because I was too prominent a person.''

In 1979, with Tanzanian troops about to capture Kampala, Akii-Bua, his wife and their three children fled to Kenya.

As a police official under Amin, he was jailed there for three weeks. He was almost shipped back to Uganda to almost certain death until the West German Embassy and Puma, the German sports-shoe company whose shoes he wore, helped him get his freedom.

He sent his wife and children to West Germany and soon joined them there.

But first he returned to Kampala to check on his family and home. He learned that five brothers and a sister had been killed (his father, a county chief who died in 1965, had 43 children with eight wives). He found his house destroyed by bombs. It had been looted. His Olympic gold medal was gone.

He could not defend his Olympic title in 1976 because black African nations boycotted the Montreal Olympics.

Because he had little time to sharpen his speed, he did not fare well in the 1980 Moscow Olympics and was eliminated in the semifinals. Under a new democratic government, he returned to Uganda in 1983 and became the national coach.

When he died, he was a widower with 11 children. His body lay in state yesterday in the parliament building in Kampala.

Prime Minister Kintu Musoke will lead the Government delegation at a state funeral today.=====FRIDAY JULY 27 2012, DAILY MONITOR
Akii-Bua's legacy: The story of Uganda's only Gold Medal

John Akii-Bua won Uganda's only Olympic Gold medal at the 1972 Munich Games in the 400 metres hurdles. Courtesy Photo.

For those that were not there to see it in real time, video footage is all there is to relive that moment...that moment when Uganda won its first, and still, only Olympic gold medal.

The year was 1972. The venue was Munich, the German capital. Physically, John Akii-Bua's presence on the track contrasted with that of his competitors; he, a dark skinned man, wore a red vest and a red pair of shorts, so small they seemed to cover only his buttocks. The other athletes were white, dressed in a combination of white, blue and black outfits.

He ran in the inside lane, the one where you start way behind everybody else. When the shot that set them off was fired, he was chasing the park. But by the time he turned into the final stretch, the park was chasing him.

By then, the adrenaline in the voice of the commentator on the video was now on a high. Akii-Bua leaped over the second last hurdle, right leg first, then the left. He swung his arms back and forth in rhythm with his legs. Even his head arched forwards whenever his legs and arms made their rhythmic cycle.

He jumped over his last hurdle with victory in sight. "The African is going to win it," remarked the commentator. He did it in less than 48 seconds, a new world record for the 400 metres hurdles. The first Ugandan to win an Olympic gold medal, the first African to win a gold medal in any race under 800 metres. John Akii-Bua had cemented his name in history. After the race, he continued running along the track as if the race was not over.

If that video could be the best way to relive that moment of acclaim, his gold medal is probably the best reminder we have of his feat. And the story of that gold medal, how it has lived the past 40 years, could be representative of more than just the medal itself. It tells the story of a man that won but felt unappreciated, it tells the story of a country and how it treats its heroes, it tells the story of a simple family, caught in the loops of history.

Sacred 
Nothing about the apartment on Kitintale hill where we found the medal would suggest anything historical was lurking about. But it is in here, at the home of Tony, Akii-Bua's son, that we found it. He had assembled it on a sofa, and it simply lay there, as if oblivious of what significance it holds. It sat back in the comfort of other artefacts from Akii-Bua's successful days – that famous red vest he wore at the race, the flag he held on his return, and the jackets with his names printed on the breast that he wore at the tournament. Tony refuses to divulge information of where he keeps the medal, or the artefacts for that matter. "I keep them in storage," is all he says, "safe storage". He is the eldest son and says that is the reason why he is the one who keeps it.

As you talk to Bua-Akii, you sense that the family, or at least he, holds a strong sense of reverence towards the medal. He and his siblings clean it once every six months with cotton wool and a dry towel, he says. In fact, at times they just feel like pulling it out and cleaning it, and away they go, he adds.

So intense is the sense of reverence towards the medal, Bua-Akii does not allow anyone to touch it. The only people he says can touch the medal are family, members of the police force (John Akii-Bua was a career police officer), Members of Parliament and journalists. And not all journalists can touch it. "It would have to be someone who really knows what it means to hold it," he says.

This sacredness has been part of the family since childhood. Bua-Akii says his father used to keep the medal in a drawer while they were young. And as children, "We would walk and run around it and see it there, but we would not pick and play with. It is something you would be ready to defend."

Two gold medals
But the gold medal has seen some tough times. Akii-Bua fled Uganda to Kenya in 1979 as the surging artillery of Tanzanian-backed forces roared towards Kampala to oust Idi Amin. In the scuffle and haste, he forgot his medal behind. His son says Akii-Bua arrived in Germany later, thinking he had lost the medal. He asked for a replacement and it was given. But the original medal was not lost.

Akii-Bua's brother had buried it in a suitcase stuffed with clothes in Abako, Lira District. He would be reunited with his original medal in 1981, and from then, the family has kept the two gold medals. When the suitcase with the medal was dug out from the ground, all the clothes inside had been eaten away by all manner of micro-organisms, and only the medal remained intact.

Bua-Akii says in in 2004 their family was thrown out of their house President Amin had awarded to Aki-Bua as a reward for his feat in Germany. His father had been dead seven years by the time. He says this was the only time the thought of selling the medal occurred to him.

"If there was someone who had the money, he would be owning it by now," he says. He did not have any particular monetary value he attached to it. He just wanted to sell it and buy a house in which to keep his father's artefacts, he says.

"But I put myself in my father's shoes," Bua-Akii says. "There were lots of emotions in play, and the last question you have is would your dad do that?" This, and the fact that the Uganda police force was there for the family, kept Bua-Akii from selling off the medal. Physically, the original gold medal has lost a bit of its shine. The newer one has a stronger sparkle, and still has its holding chain. On the front is an image of a woman holding an olive branch, with the words "XX Olympiade Munchen 1972," for "The twentieth Olympics Munich 1972" above. There is also an image of pillars from ancient Greek arenas, to which the Olympics owe their origin. At the back is an image of two nude men, holding each other at the shoulders. In ancient Greece, participants in the Olympics used to compete while nude.

John Aki-Bua museum
Bua-Akii says the family plans to collaborate with the Uganda police force to turn John Akii-Bua's house in Kamwokya into a sports museum. Bua-Akii says there are many sports personalities who have been forgotten, or even just not celebrated at all and yet they achieved huge milestones for the country in sport. This museum, he says, would help to correct that. It would cater for all sport and not only athletics, and it is here that he plans to finally put up his father's gold medal on display.

The son of the gold medalist says since his childhood, he has not seen anyone, other than family and friends, who has come up and showed interest in even simply seeing the gold medal or artefacts of his father.

You can sense the feeling of being deserted in his voice as he speaks. Every so often, he interjects his sentences with talk about being neglected and being unappreciated especially as seen in the way they were evicted from the house. All that yet he feels – and he is probably right – that his father was such an important figure in not only the country's sport, but the country as a whole.

In all fairness, you cannot deny John Aki-Bua his rightful place in Ugandan history. And the longer it takes before that elusive second gold medal at the Olympics comes, the more significant his feat will be. John Akii-Bua's gold medal is a milestone with which we could gauge our progress in sport. 

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