The Marathon Men Who Can’t Go Home

Tadesse Yae Dabi lined up with around three dozen other runners at the foot of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in Staten Island. He held his arms close to his chest and bounced on his toes to stay warm. Even after three and a half years, he wasn’t used to the chill of a mid-fall morning in the American Northeast. Back home, in the farmland of central Ethiopia, it never got so cold. Overhead, helicopters filled the air with their deafening whir. Behind him, more than 50,000 people waited to chase the elite field through the five boroughs in the 2019 New York City Marathon.

Tadesse knew that winning the race was a long shot, but it wasn’t impossible. Six months prior, he’d placed 2nd in the Pyongyang Marathon in North Korea, with a personal best of 2 hours 11 minutes and 26 seconds—the kind of time that made him an outside contender in even the most competitive international marathons. Tadesse’s placement in Pyongyang had earned him $7,000, about a quarter of his income for 2019. If he won New York, he’d get $100,000, roughly the equivalent of what the 31-year-old had earned in his entire life up to that moment.

At the gun, the runners charged up the Verrazzano. Through Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, Tadesse took turns at the front of an ever-thinning lead pack cheered by millions of exuberant spectators. Wearing a plain red singlet and a pair of black shorts, he surged alongside more famous athletes sponsored by companies like Adidas and Nike. The television commentators never once said his name.

As the pack approached the Willis Avenue Bridge, which connects upper Manhattan and the South Bronx, Tadesse fell back a bit. For the next five miles he held on, but once he entered Central Park, he faded, dropping, in the final mile, from 9th place to 17th. At the awards ceremony in Central Park, the winners were adorned with laurel wreaths and presented with engraved Tiffany crystal plates. Tadesse returned empty-handed to the midtown hotel provided by the race’s organizers.

The next morning, he shuffled to the subway and headed uptown, toward the Bronx. Half an hour later, he exited the number 4 train at the last stop, descended the metal stairs from the elevated station, and walked past an auto body shop and a dollar store to the austere two-bedroom apartment he shared with three other elite runners from Ethiopia. Each had come to America with the hope of making life-changing money that they could send back home to their families. What they found was an often desperate existence in their adopted homeland.

The following week, Tadesse flew back to Ethiopia to see his wife and young son, just as he had each fall since he first came to the U.S. in 2016, and to spend the winter training for his spring racing season. In the highlands of the Oromia region, a rugged landscape where dirt roads snake through the mountaintops and plateaus, he synced up with whoever could match his pace. It was never hard to find company—the vast majority of elite Ethiopian runners come from Oromia, and hundreds are just as fast as Tadesse.

After four months, he returned to New York on March 10th, 2020. A lot of potential paydays were coming up, including the NYC Half Marathon. But when he landed at JFK, he turned on his cellphone to learn that the race had been canceled while he was still in the air. Other cancelations soon followed, delivering a decisive blow to his bottom line.

Tadesse still hasn’t raced since the 2019 marathon. While the pandemic has cut off his primary source of income, another crisis has left him isolated from his family and friends back home. For decades, Ethiopia has been mired in civil war and deadly ethnic conflict, with a strongman government quick to crack down on any perceived threat to its authority. According to Tony Carroll, an expert on Ethiopian politics who teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, untold numbers of Ethiopians have spent time in prison for crimes they didn’t commit, or for no reason at all. Before he came to the U.S., Tadesse, too, was detained and beaten. “When the police arrest you, they hit you,” he says. “Your eyes, your nose, whatever they want.” In prison, he says, it’s worse. “They hit you more. Badly.”

Over the past six months, the situation in Ethiopia has only grown more dire. Since November 2020, government-backed militias have been carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the country’s northern Tigray Region, whose people are fleeing by the thousands to neighboring Sudan. Those left behind are subject to rape, torture, and execution. And in Oromia, police are reported to be executing people in the streets with neither accountability nor cause. “Until the government changes, I can’t ever go back,” Tadesse says. “I fear for my life.”

Scattered throughout the Bronx, some two dozen other elite Ethiopian runners share similar arrangements to Tadesse and his roommates. They came to New York to compete for an unassuming club called West Side Runners, or WSX for short. A loose collection of mostly immigrant athletes from Latin America and Ethiopia, WSX has no corporate sponsor, no organizational structure, and no recruiting system. Since 1978, the club has been run almost single-handedly by a now-81-year-old former Peace Corps volunteer named Bill Staab. It’s open to anyone who wants to join, though its members tend to be self-selecting: people for whom running represents a viable path to the U.S., but who may not have access to managers or agents. Staab says he gets requests from countless runners a year. He can’t possibly help them all.

Their ranks include some of the fastest runners in the Northeast, and, every so often, a truly world-class talent. Among them is Tadesse’s friend Girma Bekele Gebre, who raced the 2019 New York City Marathon alongside him. Denied entry into the elite professional field, Girma raced in an anonymous numbered bib, like the amateurs behind him, prompting TV commentators to dub him the “citizen runner.” It wasn’t until he finished 3rd, just 25 seconds behind the winner, that they called him by his name. Girma won $61,000 for his performance, but he has yet to receive it. He’s back on his farm in Ethiopia and doesn’t have a U.S. bank account.

In a sense, WSX is a team of “citizen runners.” Despite their success, none has an agent or a shoe deal or even a coach, and none receives appearance money for showing up at marquee races, as many comparable pros do. Potential paydays like the New York City Marathon are rare; mostly they rely on the meager prize money they earn at smaller competitions—$200 at a local 5k here, $500 at a half marathon there. Living four, sometimes five to an apartment is the only way most of them can afford to stay in the city.

Such razor-thin margins make it necessary for most of them to race almost every chance they get, and even then, it’s difficult to patch together a livable income. In a good year, a top WSX runner like Tadesse might net $20,000 in prize money; in a great one, $30,000. In a year plagued by a pandemic that canceled races worldwide, he makes nothing. “Running is my business,” he says. “It’s my life. When the COVID came, it cut my business, it impact my life.”

The P1 athletic visas that allow most of the Ethiopians on WSX to live in the U.S. bar them from taking on other work. Some take their chances anyway, with what they call “cash jobs.” They work off the books at liquor stores. They deliver food. They stock shelves and mop floors. Whatever it takes. Most of them have families back home who are counting on their support.

Still, as restrictive as P1 visas might be, they at least provide a modicum of security for immigrant athletes who, without them, are merely undocumented. For most of these runners, a P1 visa represents not so much a dream realized as a nightmare averted. As one longtime member of WSX named Girma Segni puts it, “Just getting to America is a reward.”

Segni is unusual among his teammates: He came to New York nearly 20 years ago, at 16, when his older brother got a job at the United Nations. Now 35, he is a CPA for the city. For him, running is a hobby—a luxury that few Ethiopians on WSX can afford. Segni says many of the runners on WSX never went to school; some can’t even read. Running is their only shot, he says. And while making it to America is a victory, staying is a whole other matter—especially during a pandemic. Several runners on the team are waiting for their P1 visas to be either approved or renewed, and without racing results to show for their time in the U.S., they may not be. It hasn’t helped that the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia, which processes visa applications, was closed for much of 2020, bringing the gears of an already slow bureaucracy to a full and devastating stop.

Tadesse isn’t the only runner on WSX for whom deportation could mean death. Take the story of a 25-year-old named Urgesa Kedir Figa, who says he was detained in Ethiopia for three months, in 2016, for his family’s support of human rights. He says his uncle was killed by government forces. In prison, Urgesa says he was tortured at night with an electric cable. He has a deep, three-inch-wide scar that goes all the way around his left arm, just below the elbow, and a circular one on his right hip measuring five inches across.

A quiet, slight man with a gentle smile, Urgesa fled for the U.S. in the spring of 2019 on a tourist visa, to try to earn some money to send home to his wife and newborn daughter. That May, he finished 3rd in the Brooklyn Half Marathon, winning $500. It was his first race in New York. “Having that, while running, is heavy,” Segni says of Urgesa’s experience in Ethiopia. “So there’s a struggle here to make a living, right? And there’s a struggle mentally. The torture he has to carry.”

Tadesse and his three roommates live on the second floor of a six-story walk-up on a block of identical brick buildings. It’s a poor neighborhood in the city’s poorest borough, but Van Cortlandt Park, a bucolic urban escape of forests, fields, and lakes, is just steps away. The Ethiopians on WSX do most of their training there, up to 100 miles a week under normal circumstances, often before working 12-hour shifts at their cash jobs.

Such a demanding schedule does not leave much time for settling in, and Tadesse’s apartment has a spartan feel. In the undecorated living room, a single window looks out on a brick wall. Neighbors’ voices echo through the hallway and penetrate the apartment’s thin walls. When I visit for lunch one recent afternoon, I arrive to find the TV tuned to an Ethiopian movie, and one of the roommates, Tariku Abosete Bokan, fixing a spread of sautéed beef with hot chilis, spinach salad, and homemade injera, a traditional Ethiopian sourdough.

In 2011, the Philadelphia Inquirer identified Tariku as the favorite to win that year’s Philadelphia Marathon, but he tore his hamstring halfway through the race and didn’t finish. He got his green card cooking at an Ethiopian restaurant in Harlem; now he drives for Uber Eats and DoorDash. The hours are better than at the restaurant, he says, though COVID-19 has taken its toll on his livelihood. He barely worked last year.

Tadesse and I sit on the couch while the scents of Tariku’s cooking fill the apartment, rousing Diriba Degefa Yigezu from his slumber. He emerges from his room, offers a sleepy hello, and sits down on a plastic chair in the living room, moving with a playful swagger and flashing a wry smile. His roommates like to tease him for being a ladies’ man; he’s the only member of the household without a wife or fiance back in Ethiopia.

As a teenager, Diriba made the Ethiopian national team and competed for his country for six years. He came to the U.S. in 2013, at age 25, to train with the Nike Oregon Project, an elite international team founded by Alberto Salazar in 2001 and shut down in 2019 amid allegations that Salazar was doping some of his athletes. But in 2013, the NOP was considered one of the best teams in the world, counting among its ranks Mo Farah and Galen Rupp, Olympic gold and silver medalists, respectively. Diriba was in rare company, but he could hold his own; once he finished just three seconds behind Rupp in a 3,000-meter race. His race times earned him a green card.

Eight years later, he now drives for Uber. He hasn’t run much since last spring, although at 33, he still has the potential to be competitive. But he knows that in running, a very fine line separates failure and success. “Sometimes chance is more important than your ability,” he says. “I was training with Galen Rupp and I saw that he was not better than me in the training. He got tired before I got tired. But sometimes your ability is not enough.”

As Tariku cooks, the fourth roommate, Fikadu Dejene Dabushe, walks through the door and smiles, pleased to see a guest. He too competed for the Ethiopian national team, from age 17 to 23; now he has asylum in the U.S. The only member of the household with a full-time job during 2020, Fikadu covered their $1,500 monthly rent with the money he earns as a locksmith.

In addition to supporting his roommates, Fikadu sends money each month to his wife and five brothers back in Ethiopia. With whatever he has left, he treats himself: He likes designer clothes and wears a new Apple watch. An energetic 28-year-old with a steadfast gaze and the charisma of an actor, Fikadu is committed to living with his roommates, despite his healthy income. “In Ethiopia,” he says, “we have a saying: ‘A house is not yours. A house is God’s house.’ You can live in it, but when you die the house will stay there. The house is not going to die with you. So in my culture we say a house is God’s house. Everybody can come and you can live together.”

Fikadu says that for thousands of young runners in Ethiopia, even the slightest possibility of making it is a good enough reason to try. “You see some athletes, and they used to be like you,” he says of people like Haile Gebrselassie, who has set world records in the 10,000 meters and the marathon and was once one of Tariku’s training partners, and Tirunesh Dibaba, a three-time Olympic gold medalist in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters who comes from the same village as Diriba. “They win a lot of races and they have luxury cars,” Fikadu says. “They have big houses. Maybe you know them, maybe you are friends. So you see a future, and you always follow your future.”

Indeed, a few runners on WSX have found great success. In 2011, a member of the much smaller women’s team named Buzunesh Deba placed 2nd in the New York City Marathon and got a contract with Nike. In 2015, another named Tigist Tufa became the first Ethiopian woman in 14 years to win the London Marathon. But these are outliers. For even the best Ethiopian runners, Fikadu says, the future is rarely so bright.

He describes a runner he knows who once won $300,000 in cash at a single race in Dubai. “He win a lot of races,” Fikadu says. “Very nice athlete. Now he’s finished with all his money. Now he washes dishes in Washington, D.C.”

When Fikadu and Diriba were running for the Ethiopian national team, they say they were each given nominal government posts: Fikadu with the police, Diriba with the army. By their early 20s, they say, party officials told them they were not to run anymore; Fikadu was told to become a real police officer, Diriba a soldier. They refused. “I was an athlete,” Fikadu says. “I had to compete, I had to run.” Diriba felt the same way—“Running is my life,” he says—but he felt a moral imperative as well: “I didn’t want to kill people.”

In 2011 Diriba fled Ethiopia for Norway, where he was granted political asylum and lived for one year before moving to Oregon. Fikadu remained at home and met a harsher fate. In 2016 he was sent to prison, where for 20 days he was beaten and tortured. He was released with the expectation that he’d comply with the state. Instead he came to the U.S.

Tadesse had always been fast, but he didn’t count on becoming a professional runner. He chose human resources, and got a job working for the government. He never expected it would land him in prison. One day in 2013, his supervisor accused him of finding jobs for people who were not members of the ruling party. He, too, was arrested, detained, and beaten.

As Tadesse recounts this story, Fikadu sits expressionless on the couch and nods. “We’ve all been to prison,” he says.

When Tadesse was released, after six weeks, he returned to his family farm, a quiet refuge in central Oromia where they grow grains and raise livestock. There he began to train in earnest, and in May 2016, he fled Ethiopia for New York, aided by Bill Staab. He moved into Staab’s apartment, where Fikadu and four other runners were also living at the time. Despite his personal upheavals, it was a good year for Tadesse. He earned enough in prize money to build his wife and son a small house in the country, far away from Addis Ababa. And living with Staab, he somehow managed to get by on the few thousand dollars he had left.

His good fortune changed in 2018, when Tadesse says the Ethiopian government demolished his house for the land it was on. He had no recourse and was never reimbursed the $20,000 he spent to have the house built. It’s a story he recounts without a trace of anger in his voice. His wife and son moved to Addis Ababa, the capital, to be near one of Tadesse’s brothers. Tadesse doesn’t know when, or if, he’ll get to see them again.

And yet these runners consider themselves the fortunate ones. Tadesse says that in May of last year, his youngest brother, Mideksa, a soldier, was tortured so badly by prison guards that he had to be released to a hospital, where he died from his injuries two weeks later. He was 23.

Fikadu was also just 23 when he was imprisoned, his best running years still ahead of him. He’d heard of WSX from other runners in Ethiopia, and when he was released from prison, he applied for a P1 visa and flew to New York.

In 2018 Fikadu flew back to Ethiopia to get married. He hadn’t seen his fiance, or even been home, in two years. He was excited; they’d planned an elegant outdoor ceremony and hired a photographer. But when he arrived in Addis Ababa, his excitement turned to terror: The authorities were waiting for him at the airport. Fikadu had shared his story of persecution with a French journalist and she published her article in 2017—a turn of events that allegedly displeased government officials. He was arrested and sent back to prison for another 20 days. Again, he was beaten, interrogated, and threatened with death.

Once released, Fikadu got married and then immediately returned to New York, where he applied for asylum. It was granted, in part thanks to the French journalist’s article. But having asylum in the U.S. carries a stipulation: At least for the foreseeable future, he cannot go back to Ethiopia.

Each of the runners in this article agreed to go on the record with their stories. They know the risks, but also the potential rewards of having their stories told. “Here, I can be safe,” Fikadu says. “If I am in my country, maybe I am dead.”

Bill Staab doesn’t like to draw attention to himself, but he’s hard to miss. For over four decades, he’s been a fixture at finish lines throughout New York City, where he can still be found carrying as many bags stuffed with his athletes’ changes of clothes and extra pairs of shoes as he can manage. In his younger years, Staab ran 28 marathons. Now, at 81, he moves more slowly.

He wears old blazers and button-downs, usually untucked; sometimes a tie. Almost always a hat. He speaks with a genteel calm; his vocabulary is from another era. His biggest passion besides running is opera, and sometimes he takes the runners from WSX. He says they especially enjoyed Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West. “Total Americana sung in Italian, of course,” Staab told me in his apartment one recent afternoon as he sifted through a stack of CDs. “And it’s easier for them to understand than five hours of Wagner.”

Staab, who’s never married or had children, lives alone on West 79th Street in a two-bedroom apartment he bought 42 years ago. Books line one wall of the living room; oil paintings and photographs of him with the WSX runners fill the others. Ethiopian tapestries made by one runner’s wife are draped over a row of dining room chairs. Trophies are everywhere.

Staab’s introduction to Africa came during a stint with the Peace Corps in Liberia. The experience solidified a value he’d been raised to honor: Help those less fortunate. Over the years, the Ethiopians on WSX have lived with him for periods of weeks or months at a time; some for more than a year. Even after they’ve moved into their own places, Staab gives them keys so they can come and go as they like. They say he never charges rent, takes a cut from their winnings, or asks for anything in return. The runners offer anyway.

One night before a race in Central Park, Staab says he had 14 runners packed into his three small rooms. He slept on the linoleum floor in the kitchen without any sheets. There weren’t enough to go around, he says, and it was “more important that they have them.” After all, they had a race to run.

The runners often stop by to say hello, to accompany him to doctor’s appointments, or to just cook and enjoy a meal together. “Bill is older,” Fikadu says, “he needs some help. We know.” Sometimes they sleep in his second bedroom so they can get up early to train on the bridle path in Central Park, just a block from Staab’s front door. They take the freight elevator because some of Staab’s neighbors have complained about their presence in the building. The co-op board has banned Staab from allowing the runners to stay longer than a night or two at a time. Staab calls it racism. The runners just accept it.

He’s devoted endless hours to writing letters in support of their visa applications, to race directors, and to anyone else who might be able to assist them. He maintains binders full of race results dating back more than 40 years and can speak about every athlete who’s ever run for WSX from memory. “He’s willing to spend whatever it takes to help these runners,” Girma Segni says. “He doesn’t have to do it, he doesn’t get anything from it. But I think it gives him something.”

Staab is quick to deflect credit. “It just feels good to help people,” he says. “It’s what life is about.”

On holidays Staab invites the runners on WSX to dinner at his modest family home in Essex Fells, a tony, old money suburb of Newark. Around a dozen typically join him. At Easter this year, after a big meal of lamb and stewed vegetables, some of the runners helped Staab clean up while others retreated to the upstairs bedrooms to rest. Diriba and I sat down by the fireplace in the living room. We talked about why they run for WSX, when other local teams might offer better incentives, like free gear and travel fees to international races. “Bill has done so much for us,” Diriba explained. “Running for him is the least we can do.”

Diriba compares WSX to his experience with the Nike Oregon Project. He says that despite his talents on the track, Alberto Salazar never spoke to him directly. Diriba believes it’s because his English wasn’t good enough. After six months, he was tired of trying. He won a local race and used the prize money to fly east. At a race in West Virginia, Diriba met a member of WSX who told him about a generous man who lives in New York and helps immigrant runners with visa applications, entry fees, and housing. He had a key to the man’s apartment, so he invited Diriba to go with him back to New York. Diriba had no reason to say no. He had nowhere else to go.

For Tadesse, that kindness has taken some of the sting away from being separated from his own family. “Bill is like father,” he says. But the runners and Staab also know that he won’t be able to do this forever. And unless someone steps in to assume the mantle, one day West Side Runners will simply disappear.

A soft breeze carries the scent of lilacs and magnolias through Van Cortlandt Park. It’s a pristine afternoon in early May and Tadesse, Fikadu, Diriba, and Tariku appear in the distance, four figures running in lockstep. As they get closer, they appear effortless. It’s the first training session they’ve done together in months. I watch from the sidelines, mesmerized by their fluid form. They seem not to run, but to glide.

The mood is light. Birds are singing, and the four runners joke with one another in their native Oromo between intervals. They stretch and do drills, skipping along the path with the levity of children. Afterward, as we make our way out of the park toward their apartment, Diriba tells me that he hopes to return to Ethiopia this winter, if he can. He believes that with the right training, he can win the Boston Marathon. He just needs a few months in the highlands of Oromia, he says, and to lose three pounds.

In February this year, President Biden publicly condemned the violence in Tigray. But after six months, the crisis has shown no signs of abating. Close observers fear that Ethiopia will splinter into ethnic factions and cease to be a state at all, similar to Syria or Yemen. The runners on WSX just hope for peace and stability. In the meantime, they will continue to survive in New York as best they can. Urgesa is applying for asylum. He had to include a detailed account of what the government has done to his family, and even photographs of his scars, with his application.

Tadesse, too, is applying for asylum. He hopes this article will help. If it’s granted, he knows that he may never go home again. But at least he can earn a living, with legitimate work, and support his wife and son.

It’s been more than three years since Fikadu last visited Ethiopia. Back at their apartment, he shows me pictures of his wedding. In them, he wears a tuxedo, his wife a white dress. They look happy, betraying no sign of the 20 days of horror Fikadu had endured just before they were married. I suggest that maybe one day his wife will be able to come to New York. He nods and looks away. “Yes,” he says. “It’s hard.”

Tariku’s fiance, too, is awaiting his return. He got engaged in Ethiopia last year, just before returning to New York to earn some money for their future together. Until then, he’ll continue to deliver food and, he hopes, get another chance to race while he still can. He knows those chances are diminishing. He’ll be 40 soon.

As music from a gathering on the street below drifts through the open window, Tariku walks into the kitchen area and lays a cutting board on the counter. He retrieves a large cut of beef from the refrigerator and begins to slice it into perfect, uniform strips. His roommates disappear into their bedrooms to change. It’s 3 p.m. Almost time to go to work.