As the loudspeakers finally fell silent and the last medals had been handed out, visitors began drifting towards their buses. Organisers dismantled banners, volunteers folded away barriers, and the music that had vibrated across the surrounding farmland since early morning gradually dissolved into the afternoon air.

Bokoji’s stadium was returning to itself.

On one side, spectators had spent the morning perched on embankments of piled earth serving as makeshift terraces. Beyond them stretched an uneven grass field, bearing little resemblance to the polished arenas that usually stage international athletics. Yet for one weekend each year, this modest corner of Ethiopia’s Arsi Highlands becomes the centre of a celebration unlike any other. 

I had travelled about five hours by bus from my home in Addis Ababa to witness the fifth edition of the Ethio Telecom Great Bokoji Run.* More than just watching the race, I wanted to understand why this quiet farming town continues to occupy such an outsized place in the imagination of world athletics. 

*The town’s name is also commonly spelt “Bekoji” but local stakeholders prefer “Bokoji”, so I’ve followed that spelling throughout.  

Organised as part of the Ministry of Tourism’s Discover Ethiopia Classics series, the annual Great Bokoji Run seeks to celebrate the town’s extraordinary running heritage while showcasing its potential as a destination for sports tourism. More than 100 elite athletes lined up alongside over 2,500 local runners for the 12-kilometre race, while separate under-15 and under-11 events offered a glimpse of the next generation hoping to follow in the footsteps of the town’s Olympic champions. The course started at the stadium then looped through the town on dirt roads before extending into the surrounding outskirts and returning to the stadium to finish. 

Before the starter’s gun had even fired, one topic kept surfacing in conversations with organisers and participants who had travelled from Addis Ababa: the crowds. For a town the size of Bokoji, home to around 50,000 people, the turnout has become one of the defining features of the race. Inside the unfinished stadium, the atmosphere was electric. Families filled the earth embankments, children squealed with excitement, and every runner was welcomed by waves of applause and encouragement. At times, it felt less like spectators watching a race and more like a community determined to be part of it. One could almost imagine the crowd spilling onto the course to run alongside the athletes had it not been for the barriers and the need to keep the route clear.

After the last runner had crossed the finish line and the cheers had faded, the stadium’s brief transformation began to unravel. For a few hours, this unfinished bowl of earth and grass had been the beating heart of Ethiopian athletics. Now the stage was coming down, loudspeakers were being loaded onto low-bed trailers and Isuzu trucks, and the arena slowly reverted to the quiet, windswept field it is for most of the year. As the convoy of logistics vehicles and waiting buses prepared to leave, they became magnets for the local children, whose attention shifted naturally from the race to the visitors departing their town.  

Later, as I wandered across the field before leaving myself, a small group of boys watched the scene with quiet curiosity. I asked whether there was anything I could give them. I was thinking of sweets, perhaps a packet of chewing gum for the walk home. Instead, one of them asked if I had a small training bag.

Not for schoolbooks. For carrying water bottles to training.

It was not the answer I expected, but in Bokoji, it is the only one that makes sense. Here, running is not a lifestyle choice or a weekend escape. It is an ambient condition of existence, woven tightly into the fabric of everyday survival and ambition. This unassuming highland town has produced an astonishing concentration of distance-running talent. Derartu Tulu, Fatuma Roba, Kenenisa Bekele, Tirunesh Dibaba, Tiki Gelana and Genzebe Dibaba are among those who grew up or trained here. 
 

At the 2008 Summer Olympics, athletes from Bokoji won three of Ethiopia’s four gold medals in the long-distance track events. Many residents still speak of those years as the town’s golden era. While Bokoji has continued to produce world-class runners, coaches, organisers and former athletes say sustaining that extraordinary legacy has become increasingly challenging as economic change, shifting lifestyles and limited investment have altered the conditions that once made the town such an unrivalled cradle of champions.

But some here have plans to turn Bokoji’s fortunes around, to restore it to being a cauldron for Olympic talent, and these are the people I’m here to speak to. Meanwhile, despite its historic ledger, Bokoji remains remarkably modest. Blink while driving through the Arsi Highlands and you could almost miss it. A handful of streets, modest homes, fertile farmland and grazing cattle give little immediate indication that this quiet agricultural community reshaped the geometry of global track and field.

The Architecture of the Stride

To understand the bedrock of this town, one must look to its schools. For decades, the local primary school served as the quiet launchpad for international sporting dynasties. It was here that Sentayehu Eshetu taught for decades, quietly guiding nearly every legendary athlete who passed through the town. He taught them on a simple, multi-purpose 400x400-metre square dirt pitch surrounded by a rudimentary track circle. This modest field was the crucible where sprinting fundamentals were formed. It was also where local phenoms like Dereje Dibaba – the outstanding brother of the Dibaba sisters who spearheaded his family’s legendary entry into athletics – first tested his lungs before fading from the spotlight. Today, that same school field remains more than a sports venue; it is a sacred civic space where town elders gather to converse and settle community affairs.

It was within this educational ecosystem that a professional system took root. While iconic figures like coach Sentayehu Eshetu are rightly credited with formalising the town’s athletic training, residents remember that the foundation was built collectively, aided by the tireless work of other dedicated sports teachers like Teshome Gebeyehu and Mekonnen.
 

For nearly four decades, Coach Sentayehu has devoted his life to developing young runners here. His influence cannot be measured only by Olympic gold or world records. Former athletes speak just as readily about the iron discipline he instilled, the quiet encouragement offered, and the small acts of generosity that never reached the sports pages. When young athletes lacked basic kit, he found shoes; when they needed guidance beyond the track, he became a life mentor.

Even after he has officially retired, little has changed. He remains the town’s one enduring constant, still rising before dawn to oversee training sessions in the thin mountain air while corporate clubs and temporary managers come and go.

“Talent alone is never enough,” Sentayehu says.  “Discipline is what makes the difference.”

The physical environment provides its own brutal discipline. At an altitude swinging between 2,800 and 3,000 metres above sea level, the thin mountain air forces a biological adaptation, gifting local runners massive lung capacities. But the training is also structural. Most children born in the surrounding rural outskirts do not run to train – they run out of daily necessity. Tasked with morning and evening chores like herding cattle to graze, they are forced to run long distances just to arrive at school before the morning bell rings. They are conditioned by the landscape long before they ever step onto a competitive track. 

The Terroir and the Bare Footprint

Running in Bokoji is inextricably tied to the native landscape and diet. For generations, the fuel of champions was gebs (organic highland barley), prepared into dense traditional staples like bread, porridge, beso (roasted barley flour mixed with water into a hearty drink or dough-like meal), and roasted qolo (a crunchy snack of dry-roasted grains and legumes). This heavy, nutritional grain gave the community its legendary physical strength. 

Yet, the modern world has introduced a quiet, bittersweet transformation to this highland terroir. In recent years, commercial beer companies aggressively shifted local agriculture, offering financial incentives that effectively reversed the farming landscape. The thin, nutritious native barley has been systematically replaced by thick, finger-sized malting barley tailored strictly for commercial brewing. Where organic nutrition once built the stamina of Olympic champions, industrial agriculture now claims the fields.
 

Simultaneously, the introduction of motorised three-wheeler Bajajs into rural villages has slowly eliminated the mandatory daily walking and running that defined the previous generation. There is less raw poverty now, and mobility has vastly improved, but a foundational burden has vanished – and with it, a unique athletic advantage. For over a decade, that unparalleled golden streak of endless global dominance has slowed to a crawl.

This shifting reality has kindled a fiery sense of protective urgency in Andualem, a prominent 41-year-old journalist who was recently named the town’s official cultural ambassador. The son of the revered local schoolteacher Getachew Feleke, Andualem has spent nearly two decades running Chilalo Media, acting as a fierce, unyielding voice for a community he believes the world exploits for headlines but ignores in reality.

“Global media networks like the BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera have all travelled to Bokoji to film polished documentaries,” Andualem tells me passionately.  “But they leave without understanding the true, unfolding internal narrative of the people who actually live here.”

The Barren Mother of Many

Andualem uses a devastating local phrase to describe his birthplace: “Mal gotore” in Oromiffa – ”What can you do?” – coupled with a poignant Amharic proverb describing Bokoji as a  “barren mother of many affluent children”. The town has single-handedly won roughly a quarter of all Olympic gold medals in Ethiopia’s entire sporting history, yet it has received virtually zero permanent sports infrastructure in return.

The very stadium where the annual Great Bokoji Run is hosted was started nearly 25 years ago; today, it remains a simple field of mud, its perimeter fence lazily patched up year after year. International tourists arrive, eager to run on the tracks where living legends were forged, only to find a town devoid of a protected forest track or a standardised running facility. Unlike Eldoret in Kenya, where global sportswear giants built sprawling stadiums after athletes championed their hometowns, Bokoji has been left entirely to the elements.
 

This historical neglect has fostered a complicated, lingering resentment. While the childhood mud homes of superstars have been replaced by modern, walled villas, very little has been invested back into the public commons. Andualem notes that this estrangement stems from deep administrative scars. During Bokoji’s peak athletic golden era, the town administration developed an infamous reputation for systemic bottlenecking and demanding hefty bribes from elite runners who explicitly begged to invest their foreign winnings back into local businesses. Spurned and unwelcome, many athletes relocated permanently to Addis Ababa or Adama, leaving their awarded local plots of land fenced off, undeveloped, or eventually repossessed by land banks.

“There is a deep grudge, and I want to foster a true reconciliation,” Andualem says, noting his plans to involve the Aba Gedas (traditional Oromo elders) to bridge the painful divide between the town and its wealthy expatriate champions.
 

To illustrate the raw grit of that overlooked generation, Andualem shares a striking memory. Years ago, the cash-strapped local sports bureau lacked the meagre budget required to transport its young club athletes to a crucial regional tournament in Asella just 50 kilometres away. Rather than quitting, a group of young girls walked door-to-door through the town in worn-out sports shorts and plastic slippers, begging neighbours for donations to cover their basic bus fares. Among those kids knocking on doors was a young Genzebe Dibaba. Operating out of a tiny mud house that served as the sports headquarters, that underfunded, bare-bones squad travelled to the tournament on pocket change – and proceeded to bring home 18 out of the 20 available tournament trophies.

A Covenant with the Future

Despite the weight of historical grievances, the contemporary mood in Bokoji is shifting towards a cautious optimism. The arrival of a new mayor, Berhane Neges, has cleared away old administrative hurdles. Vital modern infrastructure, such as electricity and 5G cellular networks, has finally arrived, even though securing clean public drinking water remains an ongoing daily struggle.

The annual Ethio Telecom Great Bokoji Run has become a vital emotional anchor, a symbolic repayment and a precious gift from the Ministry of Tourism to a community that spent decades nursing its wounds in silence. The event turns the town into an unbridled celebration of heritage. During the 2026 edition, organisers had to place a strict 3,000-runner cap on the race because of high demand.
 

Andualem’s ultimate vision is to transform Bokoji into a global athletics tourism hub over the next few years. He believes that if the federal government constructs just one state-of-the-art training facility on the slopes of the spectacular Galama and Kaka mountain chains, private hotel investment will inevitably flood the region. The geographical advantages are undeniable: the town is a peaceful, culturally rich haven located just 225 kilometres from the capital, flanked by the pristine Wabe River and deep, emerald-green training forests.

The culture of hospitality here remains completely untouched by commercial cynicism. It is an egalitarian community where wealth is still measured by the size of one’s cattle herd rather than the car one drives, and where passing travellers asking a household for water are traditionally handed a fresh cup of milk instead. It is a land protected by the fierce, historic reverence of the Hade Sinke, the powerful elder mothers of Arsi whose cultural authority is so absolute that sticking their ceremonial staff onto a battlefield can instantly halt an active tribal conflict.

As our bus finally pulled away from the station, shifting gears against the mountain incline, another group of teenagers ran alongside the chassis, their voices cutting clear through the open windows:  “Please build us a stadium.” 
 

Within minutes, the town centre was swallowed once again by the rolling, endless green fields of the Arsi Highlands. It remains exactly the sort of quiet, agricultural place an ordinary traveller could drive past without a second glance.

Yet tomorrow morning, long before the sun hits the high-country valleys, somewhere out there another group of children will set out into the freezing fog. They will be carrying their water bottles, chasing one another’s heels through the damp red clay, and imagining exactly where those dirt roads might one day lead. For a town the world knows exclusively through the prism of its past heroes, Bokoji’s greatest ongoing triumph is that it continues to inspire the children who dream of joining their ranks.