BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 10 : SUMMER GAMES SPOTLIGHT : A ROUNDABOUT TRIP TO A WORLD FORUM

Somalia was not expected to request a bid to the Olympics.

It did.

Abdi Bile, a distance runner too seriously injured to compete, carried his poverty-stricken and war-torn country’s flag in the opening ceremony. Three non-competing members of his delegation followed.

Somalia expected to compete in the Olympics.

It didn’t.

Shidane Omar Ahmed, Somalia’s only official entry, never got to Barcelona to run in the 400 meters.

Detained in Yemen by customs officers, Ahmad, 22, left Somalia two weeks ago. He traveled by bus to the capital city of Mogadishu, then by boat across the Gulf of Oman.

Ahmad was scheduled to fly to Madrid and then Barcelona. He already had his Olympic credential. But customs authorities in Yemen asked the athlete for an exit visa--one he did not need--and detained him so long that he did not arrive in time for last Saturday’s race.

“My country almost dead,” Somalia delegate Ahmed Abdi (Charlie) Dahir told Art Spander of the San Francisco Examiner. “We are trying to keep it alive a little by competing in the Olympics and serving notice to the world that we still care and also that we need help.”

This a daily roundup of Olympic-related items from reporters in Barcelona from the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant, all Times-Mirror newspapers.