Rabah Yousif was a penniless 14-year-old Sudanese when he arrived in Britain. Now he is set to represent Great Britain in the Olympic Games as a 400m sprinter. Chris Webber hears his story

FRIGHTENED and with no English a 14-year-old, Sudanese boy ran away from his army athletic team compatriots and wandered into in the strange, cold, foreign city of Sheffield.

There he and a friend, older, just as terrified, found a solicitor's, went inside, and claimed 'asylum,' a word he had never even heard before.

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So began a journey that took Rabah Yousif to the North-East and has ended with him becoming one of Britain's premier athletes, due to represent our country at next year's Olympic Games.

Back in 2002 when Rabah first came to Britain, Sudan was an Islamic authoritarian single-party state, a country beset by civil war which only ended in 2005 after 200,000 people had been enslaved and up to four million displaced.

But young Rabah, that scared 14-year-old, was no political rebel. Even today, as we speak in a Costa cafe in the centre of Middlesbrough, this confident, chatty, proud Teessider is reluctant to to discuss politics - his family are still there - beyond expressing a vague dislike of the Sudanese government.

Instead he tells of the harsh life he could expect after, along with all young, male athletes, being forcibly recruited to the Sudanese army to fight men's wars he knew little about.

"My dad (who was himself once a champion sprinter) had told me not to come back when he heard we were going to be sent to Sheffield for a training camp," he says, explaining the team were en route to the World Junior Championships in Jamaica. "He had been in the military himself, but he told me and my friend, 'you guys will not have a life here.' My friends in the army were later send to southern Sudan (where there was a war.)"

Rabah, his passport held by his coach and scared he was too young to be allowed to stay, "lied and lied and lied" as he sat there in that solicitors. He claimed to be 20 years old, "if you could see a picture of me then, you'd laugh, I was so young" and he gave a false name.

Mixed with the confusion and fear the young Rabah says he experienced another, unexpected emotion that day: relief. "It's hard to explain," he says, "I was scared but I wasn't. I felt free."

That night he and the older athlete slept behind the home near where the Sudanese boy athletes had been staying but he was then taken to accommodation in Wolverhampton. After some weeks he called his mother and remembers her tears. It was many years before he saw his family again.

Understandably, given he had given a false name and age and story, Rabah's first application was turned down. "They just didn't believe me," he explains.

The truth finally came out when he was spotted by his former Sudanese coach at a later sports meeting. By now living in Stockton and running at Middlesbrough's sports village, two Home Office officials met Rabah at Durham Tees Valley and this time, older and wiser, he told the truth.

Rabah's serious talent as a sprinter had already excited the British athletics world. He had long-standing, committed support from athletic coaches including Middlesbrough's Carol Williams "my second mother." It was the support on the track that has led to him earning a bronze medal in the relay at the recent World Championships where he was also an individual finalist and became the sixth fastest Briton ever to run the 400m, running at 45.01 seconds.

But in Stockton he found other, even more more important, kinds of support. The refugee support team, especially Kath Sainsbury, at the Justice First group supported his legal asylum claim but, even more importantly, young Rabah, a man by now, fell in love with a Thornaby girl. Marriage and two children, Noah and Taiba, followed.

Reluctantly he ran for Sudan in the World Championships of 2009 and then the London Olympics of 2012 without actually returning to the country. It was 2013, 11 years and nearly half his life after entering that Sheffield solicitors, before he was told he was, at last, a British citizen.

Asked if Britain should take more refugees, Rabah, who now lives in Middlesbrough, says: "If genuine people need genuine help it is good to help them. At the same time, Britain doesn't have to and we can't help everybody. If I go to your house I can ask for help but I can't demand it.

"I just want to make everyone here, who has helped me so much, and this whole country proud at the Olympics."