She was flanked by some of the world’s fastest women, but she tried her best to block that out and focus only on lane 8, where she was positioned—looking into the crowd and checking out her surroundings are not usually a part of her pre-race routine. She tries to censor out anything that might break her concentration, anything that might take her mind off of running as fast as she can down the straightaway.
“I’ve done this before,” she thought. “It’s just another race.” They’re not uncommon thoughts for athletes looking for a little self-assurance before competing on a major stage.
But this wasn’t just another race. Kamara, a Nottingham High School graduate, was one of four athletes representing Sierra Leone at the Olympics this summer in Rio, and on Aug. 12, she toed the starting line in the first round of the 100-meter sprint.
Her heat was the second of eight that night. As she waited for the starting pistol, some scattered thoughts squeezed their way in through her makeshift filter. Kamara was overwhelmed, but in a good way. She learned she qualified for the Olympics July 10—one day before the July 11 deadline—and suddenly found herself surrounded by the best of the best just four weeks later. She thought of Sierra Leone, where her parents and stepfather are from, and where she lived with her maternal grandparents for four years growing up.
Kamara, 24, usually never lets the atmosphere get to her head, but this time, it did. She tried so hard to block out the lights, the cameras and the crowd, that she was mentally exhausted before the race even started. She got a slow start off the block, and finished last in her heat. At 12.22 seconds, she was nearly a full second behind winner Dafne Schippers, a runner from the Netherlands who went on to finish fifth in the final.
Nearly 3,000 miles away in Sierra Leone, though, fans watched and cheered for Kamara. They called her, reached out to her parents, celebrated her race. The result didn’t matter. What she brought the country did.
* * *
Kamara’s road to Rio was a long one—it spanned five continents, eight countries and four states. She was born to Sahid Kamara and Mariama Turay (now Timbo) in Virginia in 1991 and lived there until 1993, when she and her siblings moved to Sierra Leone to live with her grandparents. Kamara has four younger siblings—Asma, Ayoub, Hashim and Sahidatu—and four older half-siblings—Bintu, Imam, Sahid and Fawdikatu, who were all born in Sierra Leone.
The intention was for Kamara and her siblings to stay in Sierra Leone until middle school or high school. War derailed that plan.
The Sierra Leone civil war started the year Kamara was born and ended in 2002, but when it came to a violent head in the late ’90s, her grandfather received a letter from the United States government saying that Kamara and her siblings had to be evacuated due to their United states citizenship. It was a whirlwhind of activity for the young children—they traveled from Sierra Leone with a United States representative first to London and then to the U.S. Kamara was young, so she doesn’t remember much about her years in Sierra Leone, or her evacuation. Photos often help jog her memory.
Her family started a life in New Jersey in 1997, first in New Brunswick, where Kamara went to school until second grade, and then in Hamilton. She went to Crockett Middle School, and then onto Nottingham, where she fell in love with sports.
She was involved with athletics year-round at Nottingham—she was a student athletic trainer in the fall, played basketball in the winter and ran track in the spring. It was the last one that really stuck. She initially started running to stay in shape for basketball, but she eventually made the decision to focus solely on track.
She discovered the sport long before high school, though. She just didn’t remember at the time.
“I have no recollection of this, but my older siblings told me when I was younger, I used to run around on the national stadium’s track [in Sierra Leone],” she said. “I played sports there, and picked up track in high school. It wasn’t until I saw pictures of myself that I found out.”
Kamara was primarily a sprinter at Nottingham, and earned first-team all-county honors in her senior season. She attended Coppin State University in Baltimore for two years, running some of the team’s top times in the 60m, 100m and 200m. She transferred to California State University, Northridge in Los Angeles, where her mother and stepfather, Alpha G. Timbo, live.
She was consistently one of CSUN’s top sprinters, advancing to conference championships and running times that landed her in the school’s record books in the 100m (11.61, ninth in school history) and 4x100m relay (44.43 team time, second in school history). She graduated from CSUN with a bachelor’s degree in exercise science in 2014.
After that, though, she still had an itch to compete, and Timbo encouraged her to represent Sierra Leone on the international level. Kamara’s uncle, Ibrahim Turay, helped put things in motion.
“He was one of the first people to believe in my dream and went to the Sierra Leone Athletics Federation with a proposal for me to join the national team,” she said. “From there, it was just completing some paperwork and proving my citizenship. Representing Sierra Leone goes beyond the Olympics and sports. I wasn’t born in Sierra Leone, but my parents refused to distance us from our heritage based on location. My parents raised us as Africans. Maintaining our language, our culture and our beliefs was key towards my success not just as an athlete but as a Sierra Leonean.”
She went all-in, moving to Phoenix, Arizona from Los Angeles completely to train at Altis World, a facility where elite athletes from all over the world come to train. She found a job and a place to live, and she completely supports herself. But that’s just the kind of person Kamara is: laser-focused on her goals and willing to do anything to reach them.
“When she sets her goals, that’s what she wants to do,” Timbo said. “She said she was going to move to Phoenix to train, so she did. She has no family there. We went, and she found an apartment. She’s working part-time, and she’s always been focused and well-driven. She cares about her family. She has a good heart.”
She represented Sierra Leone for the first time at the 2013 Region II West African Championship in Burkina Faso, where she placed second in the open 200m and 100m, and first in the Grand Prix 100m. She competed in the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Toronto, the 2015 World Championships in Beijing and 2016 African Championships in Durban, South Africa. She has World Championships in London coming up next August and the Commonwealth Games on Australia’s Gold Coast set for spring 2018. After that, her sights are set on Tokyo 2020.
* * *
Kamara wakes up every morning at 6:30 a.m. and eats the same breakfast: two fried eggs, two or three slices of bacon, avocado and a side of fruit. She trains and works out from 8 a.m. until the afternoon and then goes to her job as a physical therapy technician. She works until 5 or 6 p.m., whenever the last patient leaves. Some days, she works as a personal trainer. When she has no clients on her schedule, she’s home by 7 p.m.
It’s a lifestyle that might not be as glamorous as some Olympians’, but Kamara likes her routine.
That routine came to an abrupt pause, though, on July 10, the day she found out she qualified for the Olympics. July 11 was the qualification deadline. The tight window made her mind race.
“I was nervous,” she said. “I started planning out what I was going to do if I didn’t make it. I’m thinking I’m going to have to cut my season short, look for different avenues. Do I continue competing, or do I not?”
Fortunately, she didn’t have to go that route. Kamara left for Rio on Aug. 2. But the significance of where she headed was didn’t sink in until after she got there.
“It’s didn’t really hit me,” she said. “But everyone around me was freaking out.”
She adopted a lighter practice regimen to keep her body fresh and rested. More importantly, though, she worked on keeping herself mentally fit. Kamara has seen a sports psychologist on and off since college, and she immerses herself in sports mentality books and goal visualization.
She felt great physically going into the race—this is what she spent years training for, the pinnacle of international competition.
Mentally, though, she tired herself out before the race even started.
“I was trying so hard to not to overthink the atmosphere I was in, to the point where I fatigued myself mentally,” she said. “And that affected me physically. It’s something I continue to work on.”
Her friends, family and fellow Sierra Leoneans watching her race on television and streaming it online, though, didn’t sense that. They didn’t even care that she came in last. The Timbos received countless calls, texts, e-mails—even videos of fans dancing in the street—from loved ones back in Sierra Leone. Mariama proudly shared posts about her daughter on social media. Kamara even had the honor of carrying her country’s flag during the closing ceremony.
All of that got back to Kamara, too.
“The feedback that I was getting from not only my parents, my family but from the whole country put me in awe,” she said. “I didn’t expect me just being a part of the Olympics to inspire so much positivity. It’s not about me anymore. It’s about my country. I’m still stunned.”
Kamara immediately started brainstorming ways to give back to Mama Salone, as its citizens sometimes call it, when she got back to Phoenix. She came up with the Salone Dream nonprofit, a foundation she hopes to get off the ground soon.
“It just makes me want to be less and less indulged with myself and more into ways that I can help [more athletes compete],” she said. “I want to bring that image of professional athletes within Sierra Leone and put that viewpoint in front of the community. I want to give them that first-world mentality, that they can just go for it…It took less than 15 seconds for me to leave a lasting impression. Why not continue to do that while, at the same time, helping others reach that same level?”
She will start to put her plan into motion later this month, when she heads back to Sierra Leone for the first time since she left as a child. From Oct. 7-22, Kamara will meet with the community and speak to the sports ministry to find ways to improve athletic opportunities and outreach. There are nerves, but mostly, she said, she’s excited.
All of this on top of getting ready to apply graduate school for physical therapy once she takes the GRE in December. When she graduates, Kamara hopes to use her degree to travel the world providing underdeveloped countries with the medical assistance they desperately need. The Sierra Leone team almost always travels to major meets without physical trainers because the country simply cannot afford to provide one. They end up having to forge relationships with athletes from other countries to “borrow” their medical staff. Kamara hopes to someday be able to provide therapists and trainers to countries that don’t have them—maybe one therapist can represent two countries, she said.
Her enthusiasm to give back is not surprising to Timbo.
“Where we come from, it’s not really what you have that makes you happy,” he said. “What you’re able to give to others, that’s where happiness comes from. There’s poverty where we come from. Money, is that going to make you happy? That is a part of our culture, giving back. She’s an all-around girl. She’s very focused and committed. I know she wants to make a difference in somebody’s life.”
And she already has. A mother from Sierra Leone reached out to Kamara to tell her about her daughter, who saw Kamara on television and said, “I want to be just like her.” She practices and trains all by herself, aspiring to compete for her country someday. One day, rain cut the girl’s time outside short, so she came inside and ran laps around the house. Her mother sent Kamara a video of her improvised practice session.
Even after all of the phone calls, Facebook messages and texts, after all the activity after Rio died down, Kamara still finds herself appreciative—and shocked—by the response to her race.
“I never thought I would see something like this,” she said. “I’m just running.”
Nottingham High alumna Hafsatu Kamara carried the flag for Sierra Leone during the closing ceremonies of the 2016 Rio Olympics.,
Hafsatu Kamara (right) jumped into the spirit of the Olympics, posing for photos with athletes such as Spain’s Pau Gasol, a 15-year veteran of the NBA.,
