Therell be noise complaints Peter Bols family in Perth gear up for 800m Olympic final

There’s a door that leads to the Bol family lounge room with a huge dent in it. 

On Sunday night, the house was packed wall-to-wall with family and friends who gathered to watch 27-year-old Sudanese Australian Nagmeldin 'Peter' Bol qualify for the men's 800m final at the Tokyo Olympics.

“You can see by the wall, one of the doors is broken. I think everyone was jumping in their own spot," Bol's brother Izeldin, 19, tells SBS News.

People will come from across Perth's southern suburbs "from Maddington, Gosnells, Thornlie," to watch on Wednesday, he says.

"We’re going to get a couple of noise complaints.”

Peter Bol's family in their Perth home.

Aaron Fernandes, SBS News

Wednesday night will see Bol become the first Australian man to run in the 800m Olympic final since 1968.

The Bol family is planning an even bigger watch party in Perth than the one that introduced them to the Australian public last week when mobile phone footage of their exuberant celebration was shared on social media. 

“I helped him train, so I’ve seen him train here and in Brisbane. I’ve been seeing his improvements," Bol's cousin Abra, 21, says.

"[Sunday] was crazy. If you were here, you would have been in shock. It was nice seeing him win.”

Inside their home in Perth’s southern suburbs, a widescreen TV takes up most of the lounge room’s feature wall, with dozens of Bol's - and his siblings' - athletic medals proudly displayed in front.

A reluctant runner

Bol's race for gold on Wednesday night will be the latest chapter in a family story that began in Africa decades ago.

His father, Abdalla Mador Bol - who is from what is now South Sudan - and his Sudanese mother, Hanan Kuku, left Khartoum during the Second Sudanese Civil War. They spent four years in Egypt, effectively stateless.

From Cairo, the family applied for humanitarian visas to resettle in Australia, arriving in 2004.

The family first lived in Toowoomba, Queensland, where youngest daughter Nyi was born and father Abdalla worked on a farm.

“I couldn’t speak much English when we arrived, only a little. But the situation was better here than in Egypt,” he says.

They then moved to Perth to seek better work opportunities and Bol received a basketball scholarship to attend high school at St Norbert College.

While he was a standout on the court, his abilities in athletics went unnoticed until the then 15-year-old received a chance invitation.

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“We had an athletics carnival in 2008, and I needed a runner. A student said to me, ‘Miss, Peter can run,’" Bol’s former teacher Helen 'Hels' Leahy says. 

“I said, 'Peter, can you run the 400m?' And he said, ‘how far is that?'

"I said, ‘once around the track’. He said ‘yes, I can do that.’”

Mrs Leahy says Peter ran an astonishing race that day, beating his competition by 80m.

“So I asked him to run the 800m, and he said ‘how far is that?’ I said, ‘it's two laps around.’ He absolutely blitzed it.”

Peter Bol winning the men's 800m semi-final in Tokyo on Sunday.

AP

Bol was initially hesitant to embrace running and let go of his first love of basketball, but the following year Mrs Leahy introduced him to her father, Brian Moore.

Mr Moore, who died in 2015, kept record books of Bol's races and served as a mentor and friend during his developmental years. 

“We met with Peter and his family and it went from there," Mrs Leahy says. 

"He joined a club, very soon won gold at the Australian championships. He progressed very quickly.” 

Helen Leahy helped introduce Bol to athletics.

Aaron Fernandes, SBS News

Bol’s siblings say they noticed his habits around the house start to change.

“I saw a few of his races at school and he would come home with trophies. I think that’s when we realised,” Izeldin says.

“He started changing a little bit. I didn’t even know what Weet-Bix was. I started seeing Weet-Bix, then bananas. I had only seen them on TV.

“Sometimes having his own meals, I thought he was kind of weird, but he was just doing him.”

Bol won the national junior 800m title in 2013 before moving to Melbourne in 2015 to be coached by Justin Rinaldi.

“I was coaching Alex Rowe who was the Australian record holder at the time and Peter was a young up and coming athlete,” Rinaldi says.

“But he was living in Perth, and I just thought if he had a bit more structure to his training and his approach that he could actually progress really well.

“His goal was to make the Olympics in 2016, I knew he could do that. But when he came to Melbourne, I realised how much talent this kid had. And I've been a big believer in him ever since he came to Melbourne because I just saw the dedication that he put in and the raw talent he had.”

It's a talent that will have an entire country, and one household in particular, fully behind him on Wednesday night.

The men's 800m final takes place on Wednesday 4 August at 10.05pm AEST (8.05pm AWST). 

Read more Tokyo 2020 stories here.

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