Abebe Bikila

Abebe Bikila was born in a village in the Ethiopian highlands and grew up herding animals. He joined the Imperial Bodyguard in Addis Ababa as a young man and was noticed by a Swedish coach, Onni Niskanen, who trained the guard's athletes. He ran his first marathon in 1960 and was a last-minute addition to the Olympic team that summer when another runner broke his ankle.

In Rome the shoes he was given did not fit and gave him blisters, so he ran without any. Nobody outside Ethiopia had heard of him. The course finished at night along the Appian Way, lit by torches, past the obelisk that Mussolini's army had looted from Ethiopia 25 years earlier. Bikila won in a world best time of 2 hours 15 minutes, the first Black African to win an Olympic gold medal.

Six weeks before the 1964 Tokyo Games he had his appendix removed. He ran anyway, in shoes this time, and won by more than four minutes, then did stretching exercises on the infield while waiting for the runner-up. Nobody had won two Olympic marathons before.

In 1969 he crashed his car on a road outside Addis Ababa and was left paralysed from the neck down, later recovering some use of his arms. He took up archery and table tennis and competed in games for disabled athletes in England and Norway. He died in 1973 at 41 from a brain haemorrhage related to the accident, and 65,000 people attended his funeral.