Running the City : Urban Marathon as (Story)telling

Starting from Arjun Appadurai’s notion that “We need to think ourselves beyond the nation” (Appadurai 1998), I will consider how this operation of “thinking beyond” has been symbolically and practically reflected in the experience of the city marathon as a conscious or unconscious appropriation of an urban space that does not belong to the runner and that is progressively resignified through the very act of running through it. I will primarily consider two different profiles – Fred Lebov & Abebe Bikila – and two films documenting their experiences – Run for your life & The Athlete – that will be approached also in relation with the overall implications of psychogeography. Focussing on the Jewish immigrant from Transylvania who transformed a small competition held in the streets of the Bronx into the New York City Marathon and on the Ethiopian athlete who won the 1960 Olympic marathon in Rome running barefoot through the previous capital of the Italian colonial empire, I will develop a reflection on the act of running a symbolic enactement of the journey from the space of the former colony to the space of the postcolony (Appadurai 1998), at the same time raising issues related to the impact of globalization on the practice of sports, both professional and at the amateurial level. It is my position that sport as a cultural and social experience is increasingly becoming a language whose words are spoken by postcolonial subjects to make their voice heard in a surprisingly resonating context.