Little Ethiopia District Gets the Runaround
It is a small change, one caused by planned construction miles away, but routing the Los Angeles Marathon course around a Westside neighborhood rather than through it has caused an uproar in one marathon-mad community.
Last year, runners headed east on Pico Boulevard before turning north on Fairfax Avenue -- a route that took them directly through an area known as Little Ethiopia.
But while participants in the 18th L.A. Marathon on March 2 will also head east on Pico, they won’t turn north until Hauser Boulevard, missing the heart of what might well be the marathon hub of the city.
“It makes no sense,” said Yafet Tekle, a member of the Ethiopian community who has competed in the last 15 L.A. Marathons. “This race should go through Little Ethiopia.”
Runners in that community, he said, “will be cheered on by people who are passionate about the marathon.”
The Ethiopian community had all kinds of festivities planned for runners and wheelchair athletes this year, he said.
Nick Curl, vice president and director of operations for the L.A. Marathon, expressed regret over the change, calling it “an oversight.”
A stroll through the district, a stretch of Fairfax bordered by Pico on the south and Olympic Boulevard on the north, provides a glimpse of the reverence Ethiopians have for champion distance runners.
In the heart of the community is the Marathon restaurant, featuring a 3-foot-high poster of Ethiopian Abebe Bikila running barefoot, as he did in winning the men’s marathon at the 1960 Rome Olympics.
Nearby is a poster of Bikila being hoisted onto the shoulders of countryman Mamo Wolde -- winner of the 1968 Olympic marathon -- after Bikila won his second Olympic marathon in 1964. The headline: “Marathon Hero” is printed in Amharic, Ethiopia’s official language.
Other photos and posters are of Ethiopians Haile Gebrselassie, winner of the men’s 10,000 meters in the 1996 and 2000 Olympics, and Fatuma Roba, the women’s Olympic marathon champion in 1996.
“They are national heroes,” said Berhanu Asfawso, who also has photos of Bikila and Roba in his Ethiopian Messob restaurant, two doors from the Marathon. “They are regarded like Michael Jordan is in this country.”
Community activists hit the ground running three weeks ago after a map of the new 26-mile, 385-yard course was posted on the L.A. Marathon’s Web site.
On Thursday, Taye Atske-Selassie, Ethiopian consulate general in Los Angeles, met with race officials to see if they would be willing to change the course so it again would run through the heart of the district.
They weren’t. With less than a month before the race, officials said, it would be a logistical nightmare to make changes in a course approved by the City Council in November.
That didn’t sit well with marathon runner Tekle. “Where there is a will, there’s a way, but they didn’t want to be inconvenienced,” he said.
Atske-Selassie is confident that marathon officials will reconsider.
“I told them that the marathon is very highly regarded in Ethiopia,” he said. “I told them that we really have it in the bottom of our hearts to cheer and support all the runners. It’s something that is a very big part of our culture.”
Marie Patrick, executive vice president of the race, came away from Thursday’s meeting impressed with the Ethiopian community’s passion for the marathon.
“They want us, and they want us badly,” she said. “Right after this year’s race, we want to sit down and talk with members of the Ethiopian community. I’m really excited about working with them in the future.”
The course change that affected Little Ethiopia was prompted by proposed construction on Grand Avenue between Temple and 2nd streets downtown, requiring the start and finish of the race to be moved.
“We got a call in April from the county of L.A. saying that a construction project on Grand would start in January and narrow the width of the street considerably,” Curl said. “So we basically had to get rid of the first three miles of the race.”
The project, which is expected to take eight months to complete, has yet to start because of the state’s budget shortfall. But marathon officials said they had no idea that would be the case several months ago, when they began redrawing the course.
Moving the start of the marathon to the intersection of Figueroa and 5th streets and the finish to Flower Street between 5th and 6th were relatively easy decisions. Several previous races had started and finished in those spots before last year, when race officials revamped the course in an effort to make it flatter and faster.
Organizers say the course this year is just as flat, and therefore should be just as fast. It just won’t go directly to the city’s biggest marathon fans.