Background

When Bekana was a young boy, he spent his after-school hours looking after the family’s farm animals. Sometimes, his father would sneak up to see if he was doing his chores and sometimes find that he had wandered off. Then the chase began. “My father was a fast runner in the vicinity, and although he always caught me there was a time he could not catch me.” That’s when Bekana knew he had a talent for running.

His family wanted him to focus on education rather than become a runner, but when Bekana fell short of the grades he needed to go to university, he left to live with a distant relative in Addis Ababa without letting anyone else know. “Life was tough for me in the capital,” he says, but in October 2005 he easily won a qualifying race to join the Banks club. In early 2006 he placed ninth in the Ethiopian cross country championships and ninth in the national track championships as well, was in June last year was selected to the national team. His race in Brasschaat, which earned him a spot on the World Championships team, was his first outside of Ethiopia.