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At this time of year a chill wind chases through the snow-crowned mountains of Lesotho. The plains below are a medley of browns and yellows where the setting sun casts long shadows. Wrapped against the winter cold in traditional Basotho blankets, some workers still journey by donkey and toil the land by hand.
This is an increasingly rare corner of Africa to which mystery still clings for most of the outside world.
The impoverished “kingdom in the sky” is surrounded on all sides by South Africa and sometimes disparagingly referred to as its 10th province. But the Olympics, to which it is sending five athletes and a referee, are an opportunity to shout its name from the mountaintop.
Chaplin Mpomane, 55, is the national coach for long-distance running. He starts with one big advantage more usually associated with Kenya: high altitude, with more than 80% of Lesotho lying at least 1,800 metres above sea level. But the rest is a struggle.
“I look for young athletes far away in the mountains but where are we going to put them?” he complained last week. “We don’t have the sponsors, we don’t have a school of excellence, we don’t even have a sports shop – we have to get kit from South Africa.”
Lesotho is near yet very far from Africa’s biggest economy. Three in four homes have no electricity, a third have no running water, and nearly a quarter of adults are HIV-positive – the world’s third-highest rate. “Most of our adults come from poor families,” Mpomane said. “Sometimes the athletes come to train on empty stomachs. I have to give them shoes from my own money.”
One afternoon last week, amid unkempt bushes and long grass under the mountains, teenagers were playing netball and rounders while Mpomane put one of his Olympic hopefuls through his paces. Tsepo Ramonene, 21, is trying to earn money to feed his jobless parents, twin brother and sister, who live with him in a two-room house without power or water. He has never seen the Olympics on TV.
The marathon in London will only be his second, following a debut at the distance earlier this year, which he ran in an Olympic-qualifying time of 2hr 16min 36sec. “I’m happy to go to the Olympics because I want to win a medal for my country,” said Ramonene, who has been running since teachers spotted his talent at 14. “The Olympics could change my life. Any money I find there, I’ll try to build a house.”
His fellow men’s marathon runner is Jobo Khatoane, 20, who has to support his unemployed mother and three siblings. “They depend on me and, while I’m a professional and I’m earning money, it’s not enough,” said Khatoane, whose young lungs became accustomed to thin air at more than 3,000m, but who is now based in the warmer climate of Durban in South Africa. “It’s very difficult in Lesotho. It’s hard for us to attend races outside the country.
“I know London is where I’m going to meet all the world champions and compete with them. My target is to be the first one in the country to get a medal in the Olympics. I’m proud of being from Lesotho and I’m happy to represent it in the Olympics because I love the country. My aim is to put the country on the map so people know about it.”
Shudder
Lesotho’s best hope is the women’s marathon runner Mamorallo Tjoka, 27, the only member of the team with past Olympic experience – she ran in Beijing in 2008 but failed to finish due to a leg injury. She is also the only competitor to have visited Britain before, having finished runner-up in the Edinburgh marathon in May, and has won South Africa’s Soweto marathon five times.
When the local organisers held a launch event for Lesotho’s Olympic kit in Maseru last week, they visibly shuddered when news broke that Tjoka, their star athlete, had been involved in a car crash. They breathed a sigh of relief when she turned up in one piece a few hours late. “If I win the marathon, maybe Lesotho is very happy,” she said. “The high altitude helps us.”
The launch, at a sports club decorated with the flags of Britain, China and Lesotho, was modest and somewhat chaotic. After an awkward pause, models emerged tentatively from the toilets to display the kit, which has Chinese sponsors among others. An official introduced as China’s ambassador had to gently inform his hosts that he was a low-ranking official. There were technical problems with a video projector. The Olympic team took to the stage earlier than planned and two of their members were missing.
Tjoka had a good excuse but Masempe Theko, Lesotho’s first Olympic swimmer, was too shy to appear. Describing herself, at 25, as an old timer, she has been forced to give up professional swimming for a full-time job as a human resources consultant. She will compete in the 50m freestyle but cannot remember her personal best.
Noting that Lesotho has only one competition pool, she said: “Swimming is a very neglected sport. There’s a lack of infrastructure generally. Swimming is not taken seriously in the whole country. I can’t say Lesotho is a proud sporting nation. It’s selectively proud. Because of the difficulties we’ve got with infrastructure, it makes it difficult to comment on.”
But Theko, the middle-class daughter of a single mother, is excited about her first Olympics and first trip to Europe. “It’s an honour to be selected. I don’t know how to explain it, but in my head it really plays out big. I’m looking forward to the event, being in London and meeting new friends and acquaintances. Everything that side is exciting. It’s my dream location. When I think of London, I think of classic old buildings, traditional architecture. I’ll try to look around and take pictures.”
The team will go first to a pre-games training camp in Wrexham, north Wales. None of them knew of Wrexham before.
Theko remarked: “I’ve never heard about Wrexham but I guess it will be one of the exciting things to find out where it is.”
Lesotho is one of 80 countries never to have won an Olympic medal, though it did gain men’s marathon gold in the 1998 Commonwealth games. It would be facile to suggest that London 2012 will mean a great deal to its 1.9 million people: more than half languish below the poverty line, reeling from the decline of migrant labour opportunities in South Africa and struggling to find work in their own textile factories and diamond mine. Average life expectancy is 51. When it comes to sport, people are more interested in football.
But even here an increasingly resilient, resurgent, hopeful face of Africa can be glimpsed. Moshoeshoe Mokake, 39, a TV news producer who grew up watching Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee films, is thrilled to be going to the Olympics as a taekwondo judge after beating off 300 rivals.
“We are a nation proud about sport,” he said. “Our country is small and, because it’s landlocked by South Africa, people don’t know about it. It’s through sport that people can learn about Lesotho. We have a lovely country that we want the whole world to know about.”
Then there is the team’s sole sprinter, Mosito Lehata, 23, who lives in very different circumstances from the marathon men. The son of a government minister and a teacher, he lives in Mauritius, wears Puma sweaters and carries a tablet computer. “My father encouraged me when I was young and he would say, ‘I want you to qualify for the Olympics’,” he recalled. “He is now the happiest man in the world.”
When he wears the national vest and crouches at the starting blocks at London’s Olympic stadium, two tattoos will be visible on Lehata’s arms. One says: “I love my parents.” The other, recently acquired, is of Lesotho’s King Moshoeshoe II. The dynasty saw off invasions by the Ndebele, the Boers and the British in past centuries and the country remains a constitutional monarchy: the current king has been seen working out at the city gym.
“I did the tattoo so people will know where I’m from,” said Lehata, who will run in the 200m. “I’m really proud of my country and I want to do well for it. People say, ‘Where are you from?’ You say, ‘Lesotho,’ and they say, ‘Where’s that?’ It’s a small country but I want it to be known like any country in the world. The Olympics are a huge opportunity and, if I do well, people will be asking, ‘Where’s this boy coming from?’ ‘Lesotho.’ Then they will know.”
But can Lehata (best time 20.63sec) really hope to outrun Usain Bolt? “I know one day I’ll be among the best athletes in the world,” he said. “The time will come for him.”
Tsepo Ramonene, 21, a Lesotho athlete who will run only his second marathon at the London Olympics: ‘The Olympics could change my life.’ Photograph: Jordi Matas for the Guardian
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