Page 26 - Unlikely Stories 2

Asian Games

Well, to get back to Milarepa: he supposedly mastered a skill
known as lung-gom-pa, the ability to cross great distances at a speed
greater than a horse could run. To do this he learned to control his
body in ways that left the practitioner in a sort of trance, moving in a
blur and barely touching the ground. This sounds like a magic trick or
mass hypnosis, like the Indian rope trick. But in Japan today there
exist monks who run one thousand marathons in one thousand days,
and they have a tradition of warrior monks—again the intersection of
physical, spiritual and political power.
So this is what I think happened, and it is the only way to explain
what I saw. One of the Chinese marathon runners was really a
Tibetan monk, and unbeknownst to his Chinese coaches he was an
adept in lung-gom-pa. He intended to win the race in his Tibetan
colors, grab the attention of the world’s media, and publicize the
plight of Tibet. But he knew it was a calculated risk: if he revealed
himself too soon along the course, the Chinese would have time to
find a way to stop him; if he waited too long, he might not have a
chance to win. I happened to be just past the point he had picked to
turn on the afterburners and overtake the Africans. He couldn’t
foresee that the police were always on the alert for bad behavior by
China’s athletes and attempted defection by anyone else’s. And he
had the bad fortune to be taken out—by what means I cannot
imagine—before any of the foreign press had seen him.
Okay, let me pay for your drink. I guess I owe you that for
listening to me. Now you are going to doubt my sanity. I don’t care.
Let’s get going. Proof? Evidence? I told you the Chinese were very
good at cleaning up this sort of thing, like the Soviets used to do,
airbrushing out members of the Politburo in photographs. I did
manage to find a list of the original three runners starting that
marathon. One of them had a name that could have been Tibetan.
He was the one who never finished the race.

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