Refugees on the Run

Yves Sikubwabo has no doubt that running has changed his life. “Everything I have now, I owe to running,” he says, “and to the people I’ve met through running.” The 18-year-old Ottawa running phenom, a Rwandan refugee, candidly describes his debt to the sport that brought him to Canada.

Kirk Dillabaugh, Sikubwabo’s high school coach, believes there’s even more to it. “Yves’s incredible talent opened doors,” he says, “but his good character and approach to life have allowed him to walk through them. Furthermore, while many students struggle with poverty and homelessness, Yves’s story has become very public, and he has accepted this.”

Sikubwabo grew up in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. He started running seriously when he was nine, hoping to improve his fitness for soccer. By age 14, he joined a running club and was training twice a day. At 16, his workout schedule also included running 11K to school, and then home again in the evening. He won the 1500m at the Rwanda high school championships twice, and found out a few weeks before the 2010 world junior championships that he would be Rwanda’s sole representative at the meet.

At the world juniors in Moncton, N.B., last July, Sikubwabo ran a personal best of 3:50.15 in his heat, but failed to move on. When he phoned his aunt back home to tell her his race results, she urged him to stay in Canada. She had raised him after his Hutu father and Tutsi mother were killed in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. She told him that the people responsible for murdering his parents were back, and they were asking about him.

Sikubwabo wasn’t the only athlete to seek refugee status in Canada following the Moncton world juniors. Momodou Lamin Kujabi, a 400m runner from Gambia, stayed in Moncton. Sikubwabo, because he’d grown up in the Rwandan capital, believed he’d feel most at home living in Canada’s capital city. He used his cash allowance to buy a bus ticket to Ottawa and spent the rest of his money staying one night in a hotel. He claimed refugee status and ended up living at a youth shelter downtown. “I didn’t care that I had no money and was hungry,” Sikubwabo says. “I was just happy to be safe.”

Unique Talent

On the Labour Day weekend last year, Sikubwabo was doing repeats at the Terry Fox track in Ottawa. Coach Geordie McConnell, who was setting up for triathlon and running races the next day, noticed his speed immediately. He took Sikubwabo over to meet race director Terry McKinty, who waived the teenager’s entry fee for the half-marathon. McConnell also contacted Mike Woods, who holds three national records on the track and who had just started the Ottawa Elite Running Team.

Woods, 24, came out to watch Sikubwabo win the first half-marathon he’d ever entered and could hardly believe what he saw. “Great runners have a certain look, and even from far away, I could tell Yves was one of them. Then as I got to know him, I saw how he was helping other kids and the staff at the shelter, and how his running talent was just part of the story.” They became close friends — talking every day on the phone —and Woods introduced the young Rwandan to Dillabaugh.

“Mike wanted to get Yves back into school and running to restore some sense of normalcy to his life,” Dillabaugh explains. Sikubwabo’s mother tongue is Ikinyarwandan but he was also fluent in French when he arrived in Canada. Daniele Riendeau, winner of the 2009 Army Run in Ottawa and a bilingual member of Woods’s running group, took the lead on finding a school for Sikubwabo. She wasn’t able to enroll him in a French-language school, but he was accepted in the English as a Second Language (ESL) program at Glebe Collegiate Institute. He started Grade 11 there last October and qualified for the provincial high school (OFSAA) cross-country championships, where in early November he won the senior boys 7K race in 21:22.02.

In the meantime, as the fastest runner of any age in Ottawa, with his bright smile and unforgettable running form, Sikubwabo started attracting media attention. Nicole Le Saux, a local physician, heard about Sikubwabo’s resettlement struggles and the help he was getting from the Ottawa Elite Running Team. “I read a newspaper story about Yves and how he was living in a homeless shelter,” explains Le Saux. “I also recognized Daniele Riendeau’s name as someone my daughter knew from daycare a long time ago. I thought to myself, ‘Someone needs to take Yves in. Come on Ottawa, we are better than this.’ His situation kept haunting me.”

In November, Le Saux called Riendeau and invited her and Sikubwabo for dinner. “When you meet Yves, you can tell immediately he is a wonderful person, intelligent and kind, so between dinner and dessert, my husband and I conferred in the kitchen and then went out and asked him to come live with us.”

“He’s just a regular kid, but he’s had a steep learning curve. He hadn’t taken a bus, or eaten North American food, or used an automatic dishwasher. But Yves has learned English very quickly and his school marks in physics and math are improving.” Sikubwabo misses his aunt and his life in Rwanda, but now refers to Le Saux as his mom.

In the spring, Sikubwabo started training three times a week with the Ottawa Lions track club. Veteran coach Ray Elrick, who used to coach Dillabaugh, says Sikubwabo is a talented, spontaneous person, and a very hard worker. “More mature physically and mentally than other kids his age, he’s been on his own a lot and has figured things out.” Elrick has coached national champions and Olympians, but says Sikubwabo, as he matures, could turn out to be faster than all of them.

Given Sikubwabo’s citizenship status, Elrick gears his training to the high school season. (Sikubwabo has been granted refugee status and applied for permanent residency, but is currently ineligible to compete at national championships and qualify for national teams.)

Last June, Woods, a former national team runner, told Sikubwabo he should aim to break his regional high school 1500m and 3000m records. Sikubwabo accomplished that goal and then won the same track events at the OFSAA championships.

Dillabaugh is delighted with Sikubwabo’s achievements and what he’s done for the school’s running programs. “Success breeds success. Yves has gotten the kids at the school excited about running. When he shows up at a practice, our attendance doubles. One day when Yves was doing repeats on the track, the football players who were also practicing kept stopping to watch our workout.”

Sikubwabo says his immediate goals are to work hard on his studies and defend his cross-country title at OFSAA in early November in Ottawa.

Le Saux believes anything is possible for Sikubwabo if he works hard enough. “Watch Yves five years from now. He’s somebody special.”

Lost in Translation

Just a few weeks after he came to this country, Rwandan refugee Yves Sikubwabo woke up at the downtown Ottawa youth shelter and headed off to run his first half-marathon. The race was part of a weekend of running and multisport events called “The Canadian.” Sikubwabo won the half-marathon but found the whole experience a bit bewildering, and not just because he’s used to running much shorter distances.

“During the race, even though I was in the lead, I slowed down quite a bit because I didn’t understand what the people cheering me on were saying,” recalls Sikubwabo, who spoke French when he first arrived in Canada but almost no English.

It seems amusing to him today, but it wasn’t then. “They were shouting encouraging words like ‘Bon travail’ and ‘Good work’ to me and I did not understand this Canadian expression at all. It’s not one we use in Rwanda. I thought ‘Good work? But I’m not working! I’m running. This is not my job. Do people think this is my job, and if they do, maybe I am not supposed to be doing this?’”

Even without using his top gears, Sikubwabo won this race alongside the Rideau Canal in 1:12. “But this was not a very good time for me,” he notes.

Sikubwabo has made many friends and worked hard to build a new life for himself since then, and is now much more familiar with Canadian colloquialisms in both French and English. He’s concentrating on high school distances (1500m and 3000m) for now, but vows to run much faster the next time he does a half-marathon.

Theresa Wallace is a freelance writer in Ottawa and a contributing editor to Triathlon Magazine Canada.