From top sprinter to homeless in London – what happened next to Jimmy Thoronka// NEWS
I first met Jimmy Thoronka in a London park in March 2015. He had been homeless for around five months, and a stranger who knew my work as a reporter had suggested we meet. Jimmy’s case was highly unusual: a gifted athlete, he had vanished after competing at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow the previous summer, when he ran in the 4x100m relay for Sierra Leone. West Africa was then in the grips of the deadly Ebola crisis and, fearing for his life, Jimmy had overstayed his visa, travelling south from Glasgow to London. For a few months, he had a place to stay; but when that came to an end, he had found himself on the streets.
Over the years, I have interviewed many asylum seekers and people seeking protection in the UK, as well as many homeless people. But there was something different about Jimmy: a heightened vulnerability. While he may have got by on the streets, the 20-year-old seemed to lack survival skills and a sense of initiative. He was also very thin: when he removed his trousers to reveal the tracksuit he wore underneath, it was a shock to see how far his hip bones protruded. But, despite his hunger, Jimmy had been running on the park’s paths whenever he had the energy, or working out in the free outdoor gym. “I need to keep training,” he explained as he walked me around Burgess Park, his roofless home.
For months, Jimmy had survived by begging, or carrying people’s heavy shopping in exchange for money to buy the cheapest bread or a bag of chips. He washed himself and his few clothes, pilled from over-scrubbing, in the public toilets, then spread them out to dry on the icy grass.
Sometimes, a man he had met allowed him to sleep on a chair in his flat; Jimmy would wait patiently outside in the cold until he got home, often very late. On the days the man didn’t return, Jimmy travelled from night bus to night bus, dozing fitfully and trying to stay warm. When he hadn’t scraped together the money for the bus, he slept in the park. In his small black rucksack, he carried his clothes, a badly chewed toothbrush and a half-empty packet of paracetamol he had purchased in a pound shop. “I took an overdose because I wanted to end my life,” he told me, apparently unaware it would take more than that. “I was just moving around – I had no future.”
newspaper From top sprinter to homeless in London – what happened next to Jimmy Thoronka// NEWS | |
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