US athletes show backbone on Darfur

Just read a very interesting post by Randy Harvey over at the LA Times. US Olympic athletes chose Sudanese lost boy, Lopez Lomang as the American flag bearer at the Beijing Olympics.

Lomong, 23, was 6 when he was abducted from a Sudanese church by militiamen trying to turn children into boy soldiers. He and three other boys escaped and walked several days until they were arrested by Kenyan police because they had unknowingly crossed the border into Kenya… Lomong, made the Olympic track team by finishing third in the 1,500 meters at the U.S. track trials, spent a decade in a refugee camp in Kenya as one of the “Lost Boys of the Sudan.” He resettled in the United States as a teenager with a family in Syracuse, N.Y.

On the other side, Olympic speed skating champion Joey Cheek had his visa revoked by the Chinese government preventing him from attending the Beijing Games.

Mr. Cheek, a 29-year-old gold-medal-winning speed skater in 2006, wasn’t going to compete in Beijing but had planned to attend in order to draw attention to genocide in Darfur, which critics say Beijing abets through its ties to the Sudan government. His organization, Team Darfur, urges athletes to support peace in Darfur.

Both athletes are members of Team Darfur. (Now why wasn’t I aware of this group before?)

I’m so proud of these guys 🙂

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UPDATE: Here is Joey’s interview with Riz Khan (of Al Jazeera)