In Popular Culture
Bikila's victory at the 1964 Olympics is featured in the 1965 documentary film Tokyo Olympiad. Footage from that film was later recycled for the 1976 thriller Marathon Man.
Bikila was featured in the Bud Greenspan film "The Marathon". It chronicled his two Olympic victories and ended with a dedication ceremony for a gymnasium named for him shortly before his death.
2009 Atletu (The Athlete) is a film directed by Davey Frankel and Rasselas Lakew which focuses on the final years of Bikila's life: his quest to regain Olympic glory, his accident (the circumstances of which are changed), his determination to compete again. The film was shot in 35mm, from the Arctic Circle to the Equator.
In 2010, Vibram introduced the "Bikila" model of its FiveFingers line of minimalist shoes.
Robin Williams made reference to Bikila's barefoot running in his stand-up special "Weapons of Self Destruction", saying, " won the Rome Olympics running barefoot. He was then sponsored by Adidas. He ran the next Olympics; he carried the fucking shoes."
In 2010, the Rome Marathon celebrated 50 years of Abebe Bikila's Olympics Race. To honour him, Ethiopian runner Siraj Gena ran the last 300 meters of the race barefoot and won it (for this he was awarded 5000 euro bonus).
Read more about this topic: Abebe Bikila
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)