Tuvalu, a tiny Pacific nation with a population of around 11,000, will send a one-man sprint team to the Paris Olympics. Despite lacking a proper running track, Karalo Maibuca will represent Tuvalu in the men’s 100 metres.
The 25-year-old athlete, who is also Tuvalu’s sole representative at the Games, will be the flag-bearer for the second time after carrying the flag in Tokyo three years ago. Due to limited space, Tuvalu doesn’t have a dedicated athletics track. The airport runway in the capital Funafuti serves as a makeshift training ground for athletes, used in between the few international flights that come and go each week.
“It’s true we don’t have any track here for field events. If people come and train here, they run on the airfield,” said Melei Melei, secretary general of Tuvalu’s Olympic committee.
Tuvalu made its Olympic debut in 2008 in Beijing, sending athletes in athletics and weightlifting. However, the nation is yet to win an Olympic medal. Melei highlighted the challenges of training without access to high-performance facilities. “Without access to high-performance facilities, the challenge is to get our athletes up to that level,” he said.
Maibuca, who studies and trains in Fiji, will compete in his second Olympics. He aims to improve on his Tokyo performance where he set a national record but failed to advance past the preliminary heats. He hopes to lower his personal best time of 11.42 seconds, while recognizing the significant gap between his time and Olympic champion Marcell Jacobs’ gold-winning time of 9.80 seconds.
“Training has been good, all the preparation is on Paris, plenty of track work,” Maibuca said. He acknowledges that a medal is unlikely, but his focus is on achieving a new personal best at the Stade de France in front of 80,000 spectators.
“That is my target at the moment, to get a new personal best in Paris,” he said.
