In May 2019, a 20-year-old runner named Dominic Lokinyomo Lobalu, from what is now South Sudan, won a 10K road race in Geneva, Switzerland. Lobalu, who was separated from his parents as a child during the second Sudanese civil war, was competing for the Athlete Refugee Team—a World Athletics-backed initiative that recruits talented individuals from refugee camps and helps get them into prestigious events around the world. A rising star in the ART ranks, Lobalu was living in Kenya at the time and training under the former marathon great Tegla Loroupe. As a teenager, he’d competed in the 1,500-meters at the 2017 World Championships. The 2020 Olympics seemed like an attainable goal. But after that race in Geneva, Lobalu made a decision that would radically alter the trajectory of his young athletic career: early the next morning, he absconded from his hotel with the intent of seeking asylum in Switzerland.
What happened next sounds like the stuff of sports fiction. A few months after he defected from the ART, a Swiss refugee center put Lobalu in touch with Markus Hagmann, a schoolteacher in Saint Gallen, who coached…
