The 18-year-old from Sacramento had been tapped to be the lone male track athlete representing the Marshall Islands, his parents’ homeland, a tiny group of islands in the Pacific Ocean. In Rio, he would compete in the 100-meter dash. But before facing Bolt, he tried racing some junior college students from Northern California.
He came in dead last.
Simeon was frustrated. He didn’t know a thing about sprinting, just that everybody who competitively sprinted was much faster than him.
"For two weeks, I had my head down," said Simeon. "How can I keep up with the guys at the Olympics if I can’t keep up with the guys here?"
But the Marshall Islands National Olympic Committee sent him a message. They wanted Simeon to keep his head up, keep training, and get as fast as he could in five months.
He might not have been able to beat a single person in a low-level race in California, but if he kept trying, he would race in the world’s biggest track meet against the fastest man of all time.
Simeon is one of hundreds of athletes at the Olympics whose athletic credentials aren’t quite up to the level of those competing for golds and silvers. They come to Rio with little hope of winning, but filled with hope that their mere participation in these events can cause something to change.
* * *
Most athletes at the Olympics qualify for the Olympics -- but not all do.
In athletics and swimming, the process for qualifying is pretty simple to understand. The federations that run those sports, the IAAF for athletics and FINA for swimming, set qualifying standards for every event. In theory, if you hit that qualifying standard, you’re in the Olympics. In the men’s 100, that standard is 10.16 seconds.
But if the Olympics went just by that standard, they’d look weird. 18 Jamaican athletes — Usain Bolt, Asafa Powell, Yohan Blake, Nickel Ashmeade, Senoj-Jay Givens, Omar McLeod, Kemar Bailey-Cole, Jevaughn Minzie, Jason Livermore, Michael Frater, Julian Forte, Warren Weir, Everton Clarke, Rasheed Dwyer, Chadic Hines, Oshane Bailey, Dexter Lee, and Nigel Ellis — hit that time in competitions this year. Meanwhile, the 48 nations comprising Asia had just 16 runners total who hit that time. And none of the Pacific island nations, like the Marshall Islands, had any runners who hit that threshold.
So there are some caveats to the qualifying standard. One limits nations from having too many athletes. In track, you can only have three competitors per event. In swimming, the number is two. That way, we don’t have a heat of eight Jamaican runners fighting for first in every sprint event.
And if your nation doesn’t have an athlete who hits those standards, you're still allowed to enter athletes in the Olympics. FINA and IAAF allow each nation two "universality places" — one for a male athlete, one for a female athlete — in case none of that country's athletes are actually good enough to compete on merit. So no matter what, every country can enter two athletes and two swimmers, should they so choose.
* * *
Simeon says his favorite thing about the Marshall Islands is the tight-knit community — a necessity on an archipelago whose islands rarely have more than a few square miles of landmass.
"Everybody knows everybody," he says, "And even if you’re at the house of somebody you don’t know, they’ll still feed you."
In a strange way, that sense of community is how he ended up here. In 2014, Simeon posted a video of himself playing high school football to Hudl, a site many high school recruits use to get their highlight tapes noticed by colleges. No schools bit, but he did get a bite from an unexpected source: The Marshall Islands National Olympic Committee.
The Marshall Islands are not capable of producing a home-grown sprinter. The islands are atolls, strips of land rarely thicker than a few hundred meters. It is tough to logistically imagine where a regulation 400 meter track would even fit. It is even tougher to imagine the country, whose economy is almost entirely dependent on aid from the United States, spending its limited resources on such a facility.
So to find sprinters to fill their two Olympic berths, the committee had to improvise. They could find somebody willing to practice on the islands’ limited real estate, without any semblance of proper facilities or training. This is what Tuvalu, an even smaller island nation, had to do. They converted Etimoni Timuani, a defender on the country’s national soccer team, into a sprinter. He spent most of his time training on the nation's airfield.
The committee chose the second option: They sought out an athlete with Marshallese citizenship living abroad in a place where he could use resources unavailable in the islands.
Simeon’s family and friends watched the video of him playing football. They showed it to their friends, they showed it to their friends, and, well, there are only 52,000 people on the Marshall Islands. It didn’t take long before somebody at the NOC saw it. So they reached out and asked him if he’d like to go to the Olympics.
Simeon told me he was a running back in high school, but watching his highlight reel, he was really more of an inside linebacker and fullback. While most Olympic sprinters are tall and built for speed, Simeon is about 5’10, and when asked what he liked about football, replies, "I like to hit" -- not exactly a useful trait in sprinting. The video reveals that he has decent straight line speed, but he probably wasn’t the fastest player on a team that finished below .500 in both his junior and senior years.
Next, the committee gave a call to Rob Dewer, the head track coach at Sacramento City College. He ignored the first few emails and calls from the Marshall Islands, assuming he was being pranked. But eventually, he realized this opportunity was for real, and agreed to coach the novice sprinter -- the first time he'd ever trained an active Olympic athlete.
Is Simeon the fastest athlete from the Marshall Islands? There’s no real way of knowing. But he’s a pretty good athlete who lives in a city with facilities and coaching most Marshallese would have to uproot their lives to access. And so he was the country’s best Olympic hope.
* * *
They’re on the track for less than 12 seconds, and in the pool for roughly a minute. And honestly, that's still way too long. These athletes are finishing seconds behind their opponents in sports decided by instants. But they hope their short-yet-still-too-long performances have effects that can last a lifetime.
For some, it’s about strengthening a sport.
"I want the kids to know there’s something besides football," says Thibaut Danho, a swimmer who lives in France but is representing Côte D'Ivoire. The country does have Olympic-length pools, but Danho says they're "not very good," and he hopes that will change.
For others, it’s about gender equality. Nada Al-Bedwawi got to carry the flag of the United Arab Emirates in the opening ceremony, an experience she called "a great honor."
"I want to encourage women’s swimming, I want to encourage women’s sports," Al-Bedwawi said. "It takes changing the mentality of the people. As a country, we have been very progressive, except maybe in sports. We are trying to do that one step at a time."
Naomi Ruele is not the first Olympic female swimmer from Botswana, but she is the first black Olympic female swimmer from Botswana, a country that is only 3 percent white.
"It shows how far we’ve come along. It shows you don’t have to be scared," says Ruele. "Even if swimming’s not your best sport, you can do it if you put your mind to it."
For Simeon, it’s about climate change. No part of the Marshall Islands is more than a few meters above the water, and as the ocean creeps higher and higher, there’s worry that the whole country will disappear. He hasn’t seen the effects of the water’s rise first-hand, but he’s seen videos posted by friends of water going places the water definitely shouldn’t be.
"Everybody from the islands, they know what that is," Simeon says. "People from the four corners of the world, they don’t know. Just saying something about it, that raises a lot of awareness."
Pacific Islanders at the Olympics have carried this mantle. Kiribati weightlifter David Katoatau built a house for his parents with his weightlifting winnings, only to have the structure wash away due to abnormally high waters. He finished last in his weight class, but his dancing went viral and drew attention to the nation’s plight.
For his part, Simeon has taken pictures wearing the phrase "1.5°C -- The Record We Must Not Break," signifying the drastic effects his country might feel if the global temperature raises by 1.5 degrees Celsius.
These are just a few of the stories of these athletes. Each one is from a different place, with different problems, and different reasons to race. They won’t win medals, and they know it. They’re here to be seen, with the hope that their mere performance can change their worlds.
* * *