With 80,000 track fans temporarily silent, the starter’s gun cracked and the runners exploded from the blocks.
Except one.
In theory, 400-metre runners spring from the start and accelerate madly, but in this instance Zamzam Mohamed Farah of Somalia reacted sluggishly and seemingly slowed down from there.
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Her reaction to the gun was recorded at .405 seconds, more than twice as long as the quickest women in her heat.
And once winner Francena McCorory of the United States finished in a sprightly 50.78, the Olympic Stadium crowd had almost 30 full seconds to recover from that thrill and take the full measure of the slight Somali as she plodded around in lane 2.
As she neared the finish line the crowd noise rose, and as she stepped across, Farah was showered with applause – none of it ironic.
She had just run the 400 in 1:20.48, a spectacularly slow time and perhaps one of the most ponderous in big-meet history, but the point here is not to belittle her for it.Just the opposite, in fact.
The 21-year-old from Mogadishu, who carried the country’s flag at the opening ceremony, is actually a 1,500-metre runner, though she isn’t especially fast at that discipline either.
It’s hard to develop world-class speed when decades of anarchic civil war have reduced all your country’s running tracks to piles of urban blight.
If the Olympics are really about embodying the spirit of humanity in competition and not just collecting medals, Farah is to be saluted with the seriousness that befits her nation’s situation.
The war-torn country has only two athletes and a small support team in London, and those who made the trip did so in defiance of threats from an al-Qaida offshoot in the country.
Sports are a favourite target: Somalia’s Olympic committee president Aden Yabarow Wiish was assassinated in a theatre bombing in April.
After her race on Friday, Farah waved to the crowd and slowly wandered into the bedlam of the media mixed zone in the bowels of the Olympic Stadium.
Mixed-zones – a labyrinth of partitions that winds through a thicket of several hundred journalists – are noisy, confusing places after track events, and Farah looked on with what certainly appeared to this writer to be incomprehension.
She waved away questions (from the Globe and from an English reporter, pointing at her racing bib: “did (British 10,000-metre runner) Mo Farah give that to you?” “No, it’s my name.") before relenting when she spotted countryman Abdiaziz Godah.
Events like the Olympics always seem to attract a motley assortment of interesting characters like Godah, who for the past 14 years has lived in a small city in southern Finland, where he is a basketball coach (he also said he’s involved in coaching Somalia’s under-18 squad, how he does this from Scandinavia wasn’t immediately clear.) The talkative, personable Godah is also the president of the Somali Sports Press Association, which explains his presence in the mixed zone.
Godah tried to press a mobile phone into Farah’s hands so she could say a few words to a radio station back home – until an Olympic official intervened and forced him to put it away.
“It was great to be here to participate in the Olympic Games and tell people Somalia is still here,” Farah said through Godah, who was sporting a track suit in Somalia’s (and Finland’s, come to think of it) official colours of white and blue.
After the brief exchange, Farah, who races wearing a hijab and a loose-fitting black body suit that covered her arms and legs, started wandering slowly through the throng, mostly if not entirely unnoticed by the hundreds of media in attendance.
They missed a pretty good story.
waar galadaan dhiib badnaa masakiinta meey iska dhafaan
oh God please lets stop this.
