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Yiech Pur Biel was 10 years old when his mother left him.I wanted to go with her, but a man prevented me, Biel said, remembering that morning in 2005. If you accompany her, he said, I will beat you.The man restrained Biel at the urging of the boys mother, whod been forced to make the most painful of choices as she fled her home in southern Sudan. Her familys grass house had been repeatedly burned to the ground by the Sudanese army. The soldiers had torched the whole village and shot scores of peasants.It was the culmination of Sudans civil war, which lasted more than 20 years and caused an estimated two million deaths, with the violence continuing even after South Sudan became a sovereign nation in 2011.Biels mother was trying to escape to Ethiopia. But could she feed all four of her children en route? Couldnt the oldest, Yiech Pur Biel, survive on his own by finding food in the bush? She left him. As she disappeared down a footpath, Biel remembers her crying out: I will see you again very soon.Biel has not seen his mother since then. He does not know if she is alive.He will be thinking of her when he makes history in Rio de Janeiro. An 800 meter runner, Biel is one of 10 athletes on the first refugee team to compete in the Olympics. Unaffiliated with any nation, the squad also includes two Syrian swimmers, two Congolese judo players and an Ethiopian marathoner who fled to Luxembourg.At the teams core are Biel and four other South Sudanese middle distance runners, all of whom live together at a bare bones training camp just outside Nairobi, Kenya. It is a one-time orphanage in the Ngong Hills, where they train together on red clay paths, weaving through corn and potato fields, ducking under wire fences and trotting past herds of cattle and goats.The South Sudanese Olympians -- three men and two women who will compete in the 400, 800 and 1500 -- are newcomers to track and field. Until 10 months ago, Biel had never owned a pair of running shoes, and he was not sure which way to circle the track in races. He was, however, very fit. He was a talented soccer player, a sandlot star at a northern Kenyan refugee camp. His stride was silken and long-legged.A devout Christian, Biel sang in a Baptist choir, and he harbored giant dreams of becoming a humanitarian.I dont want other people to suffer as I have suffered, he thought after finishing high school last year. I want to help people. I want to study international relations and then go home to bring peace to South Sudan.There are now more than 65 million refugees on earth, the highest number in history. Most of them are young, and most are isolated and mired in poverty, unable to tap their potential.Until last fall, Biel was likewise stuck. He was killing time with no money for college. Along came a Kenyan runner, Tegla Loroupe, who in the mid-1990s was arguably the worlds premier female marathoner. Now 43, Loroupe has spent the past decade working as a peace activist.In late 2015, Kakuma, the refugee camp, swelled with nearly 200,000 residents, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Most of them were South Sudanese, and Loroupe felt sympathy.Any one of us could be a refugee, she said. I was displaced once myself, in 1999, when all 40 of my cows were stolen away to Uganda. These refugees, it wasnt their wish to be put in a camp, and they need our help.Loroupe decided she would give Kakuma something to be proud of. She started a running team composed of refugees, and on a hot day last September, she hosted three time trials at the camp. She asked the young athletes to run either 5 or 10 kilometers on a dirt road.Biel ran the 10K. He ran it barefoot.?He had never run more than a mile without stopping.I felt like I was going to collapse, he said.He finished in 35 minutes. He was more than eight minutes off world-record pace, but his time would have placed him amid the top 1 percent of Americans who entered a road race last year. He placed third out of 100 in the Kakuma race and made the team.Loroupe, in her generosity, elected to bring 27 Kakuma runners to her rustic camp in Ngong, and for many, the rigors of daily training were overwhelming.Id wake them up in the morning to run, said Joseph Domongle, a Kenyan coach at the camp, and theyd say, Im too tired. When Id ask them to run a hill 10 times, theyd do it twice and sit down, saying, Who are you to tell me what to do?Thirteen athletes returned to Kakuma. Biel stayed. He bunked with three other runners in a cramped, barren, concrete dorm room. He ran three times a day. He finished his first 800 on the track in 2:08 and gradually whittled his time to 1:57, which would have been faster had two campmates not halted, mid-race, in his path.He watched the news in the camps TV room. He strolled into Ngong town and bought stalks of sugar cane for 20 cents and hung out with friends in a pasture. When it cooled one evening, he set a battered school chair on the camps rough lawn and sat down. Bony cows strayed in from the dirt road nearby to pick at the grass before meandering away in the fading light. Biel relaxed and remembered his earliest days.I had a lovely father, he said. From the time I was 7, I would work with him, taking care of the cattle, the sheep and the goats. He taught me to fish in the river, and every evening after supper, he would call us to the fire to tell us stories -- fables about animals. He told me, If Im not around, youll have to care for your siblings. Now that youre working, you are a man.Biel was only 8 at the time, and according to the traditions of his tribe, the Nuor, he was still a boy. Nuor males become men only when their brows are incised with a knife, to form a gar consisting of six parallel forehead scars.Why was his dad saying this? Its impossible to know.Before Biel turned 9, his father was gone. Did he leave home to fight in the war? Was he captured by the Sudanese Army? Biels mother was never sure. She just waited for her husband to come home.Five days became a month, Biel said. Then it was two months.Meanwhile, the north Sudanese soldiers began infiltrating Biels village, outside the larger town of Nasir, via underground tunnels. At night, they hovered overhead in helicopters, then dropped explosives that set the huts ablaze.Most nights, Biel said, we went into the bush.He has no idea how many times his mother took the family into the bush, away from the explosives and gunfire, when he was 8, 9 and 10 years old.After each helicopter attack, Biel slept on the ground for several nights -- or rather, tried to sleep as the mosquitoes hovered around him. The snakes scared him; he was afraid the lions would attack. To survive, he ate any fruit he could find, even if it was poison, he said. Routinely, he ate leaves. As the soldiers burned crops, there were simply not enough calories available.The population was very high, Biel said. Only the strongest were going to survive.By the time his mother left in 2005, after two years of military assaults, many of Biels fellow villagers had starved. But the biggest threat to Biel was the guerrillas fighting for South Sudanese independence. As they battled against the Sudanese army, the rebels began sweeping into southern villages, seizing boys as young as 8 to serve as soldiers.In March 2005, two months after his moms departure, a UN official recognized Biels vulnerability and made sure he relocated. As he rode north, he felt guilty, he says. Shouldnt he have been back in South Sudan, waiting for his dad to return?Kakuma, the refugee camp, was safe. But at first, water was scarce. Often, it was so dry that the refugees had to dig in the mud for water. When the UN installed running water at Kakuma, it was sometimes available only for brief windows of time. Some days, Biel waited at the tap for hours, only to be sent home empty-handed. At times, dark confusion and pain swept over him.It hurts me to live without parents, he said.About a year ago, however, a relative of Biels visited South Sudans capital, Juba, and talked to him. He reported that both of Biels parents are still alive, as are all three of his siblings, as well as two new ones. Biel doesnt believe it, though.When youre far away, they dont have to tell you the truth, he said. I think he was just trying to make me feel good.Even if Biels family was OK a few months ago, that was a few months ago in a part of the world where conflict is a constant. Since South Sudan became independent five years ago, it has been riven by tribal warring. Since 2013, one power struggle -- between Biels tribe, the Nuor, and the ruling Dinka -- has claimed at least 50,000 lives and displaced more than two million in a country of just over 11 million people.The U.N. has called South Sudans new civil war one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world, and even for South Sudanese who have fled their homeland, this war is impossible to ignore. As one of Biels fellow runners, Puk Deng, lounged on the grass in Ngong recently, he called family in Juba, only to learn that his 19-year-old nephew had been killed.There was fighting behind the UN compound in Juba, he said. He hid under his bed in his hotel, but they found him and removed him and shot him.Biel is afraid to go back to South Sudan.In Juba, they will kill me, he said. They will know I am Nuor in a moment. Even if you dont have the gar, they know. They ask you to open your mouth and speak Dinka, and if you cant, they kill you.The Dinka and the Nuor have a long history of minor conflict, mainly over cattle and land, but their relations have often been peaceful, and recently, as Biel rode a team van home from a tough workout, he was playfully slap fighting with his two female teammates, both of whom are Dinka.Do you like those girls? someone asked. Biel ducked his head bashfully, his teeth glinting as he smiled. They are like sisters to me, he said.The next morning, he headed out for an easy, 45-minute jaunt. Then lunch, a few scraps of goat meat on a heap of white rice, and that afternoon, he and his teammates laced up their bright, new running shoes, donations from Germany, before loping along through the corn fields toward a dirt track in the hills.When Biel steps to the line in Rios Olympic Stadium on Aug. 12, he hopes to drop his time to 1:49. Such a vast improvement -- eight seconds over 800 meters -- would border on miraculous. Even so, had Biel run 1:49 at the London Olympics four years ago, he would have finished about 40th out of 52 finishers in the first round. The world record for the 800 is 1:40.91, set by a Kenyan, David Rudisha, at the 2012 Games.Perhaps it doesnt matter how Biel finishes at Rio.Were going there to the Olympics to tell our message, he said. Some people, when you say the word refugee, they think, They are violent. We will show the world that as refugees, we can do anything that a human being can do. Being a refugee is not the end of everything. We will tell that message to other refugees, and it will open doors for them. It will give them hope.For Biel, hope has already taken root. It happened in June, when he was named to the Olympic team.There are two times in my life that Ive cried, he said. When my mother left me and when I was chosen to go to be on the team.Currently, Biel is hoping to find a running sponsor. Visa maybe, or Adidas, he said, only vaguely familiar with the corporate landscape. He also hopes that somehow hell find funds for college. God willing, he says, going to Rio will open a way for me.But what Biel most longs for is a reunion with his parents. At some point, he said, he will go back to his village to look for them, even if that means touching down at the Nasir airstrip for an hour or two to search.I could not stay, he said. It is too dangerous, but I need to go, for it is my duty to find them. Kaleb McGary Jersey . Denis Coderre, the former federal MP who was elected mayor on Nov. 3, has drawn the ire of some Montreal Canadiens. During last nights game he tweeted: "Hello? Can we get a one-way ticket to (minor-league) Hamilton for David Desharnais please. Tony Gonzalez Youth Jersey . Sgt. Eric ONeal says most of the arrests at Monday nights game were for public drunkenness, though one person was taken into custody on suspicion of trying to steal a seat from the stadium. http://www.falconsrookiestore.com/Falcons-Qadree-Ollison-Jersey/ . After a replay, the winner will meet Sunderland in the quarterfinals. Sagbo did well to control Sone Alukos right cross and fire past Brighton goalkeeper Peter Brezovan. Aluko was making his first start in four months after recovering from an Achilles injury. Deion Sanders Falcons Jersey . -- An ugly goal by Nick Bonino helped the Anaheim Ducks overcome the defensive-minded Phoenix Coyotes on a night when their ragged power play continued to struggle. Takkarist McKinley Youth Jersey . Dukurs winning time was 1 minute, 45.76 seconds, a quarter-second better than Russias Alexander Tretiakov. Lativas Tomass Dukurs was third, 1.41 seconds off the pace. Jon Montgomery of Eckville, Alta. BOSTON -- David Ortiz hit a three-run homer and Rick Porcello remained unbeaten at home as the Boston Red Sox beat the struggling San Francisco Giants 4-0 on Tuesday night.Brock Holt also homered for the Red Sox, who won for the seventh time in eight games despite a strong start by former teammate Jake Peavy.San Francisco remained winless since the All-Star break with its fourth straight loss. The Giants had just five hits and only three runners advanced beyond first base.Porcello (12-2) scattered four hits over 6 1/3 innings, striking out three and walking two while improving to 9-0 at home. Porcello settled down after allowing singles to the first two batters he faced.Porcello ended up striking out the side in the first and the Giants had two hits over the next five innings. Porcello left after walking Jarrett Parker with one out in the seventh. Reliever Robbie Ross got a quick double play to end the threat.Peavy (5-8), a key member of Bostons 2013 World Series champions, struck out six over six innings and held his former teammates to three hits, but two left the park.Holts solo homer to center in the third was Bostons first hit and the Red Sox tacked on three more runs when Peavy faced Ortiz in the fourth.Dustin Pedroia led off with a walk and Xander Bogaerts followed with a single, setting up Ortizs shot to right that cleared the bullpen and several rows of seats before finally landing.ddddddddddddIt was the 23rd homer of the season for Ortiz and the 526th of his career.The Giants were in Boston for the first time since the Red Sox swept a three-game interleague series in 2007.TRAINERS ROOMGiants: OF Hunter Pence (strained left hamstring) had a couple of days off during a rehab assignment with Triple-A Sacramento. Pence rested Sunday after getting hit by a pitch the day before and Sacramento was rained out Monday. ... Manager Bruce Bochy said IF Joe Panik (concussion), also rehabbing with Sacramento, could be back in the lineup as soon as this weekend.Red Sox: RHP Junichi Tazawa (right shoulder) could return to Bostons bullpen by Friday, manager John Farrell said. ... C/LF Blake Swihart is closer to returning from a sprained left ankle, but it is not clear if he will catch again this season, Farrell said.UP NEXTGiants: RHP Matt Cain (1-5, 5.34 ERA) will get his first start since June 13 after spending more than a month on the DL with a strained right hamstring. The Giants plan to activate Cain before the game Wednesday.Red Sox: LHP Drew Pomeranz makes his Boston debut since coming over in a trade with San Diego last week. Pomeranz was 8-7 with a 2.47 ERA with the Padres. ' ' '