What he wore on his feet. The Rome marathon of 1960 was run barefoot from start to finish.
The obelisk
Italy invaded Ethiopia in October 1935 and occupied the country until 1941. In 1937 Italian forces removed the Obelisk of Axum, a granite stele roughly seventeen hundred years old, cut it into three sections and transported it to Rome.
It was erected near the Ministry of Italian Africa, close to the Circus Maximus.
The 1960 Olympic marathon route passed it.
The runner
Abebe Bikila, twenty-eight, was a private in the Imperial Bodyguard of Emperor Haile Selassie. He was a late replacement for the injured Wami Biratu and was added to the squad shortly before departure.
The shoes
Accounts agree on the substance: the shoes available to him in Rome did not fit and caused blisters, and he chose to run without them, as he had trained.
The frequently repeated detail that Adidas had run out of stock is plausible and is how his coach Onni Niskanen described it, but the essential fact is the fit.
The race
Start at 17:30 on 10 September 1960, to finish in cooler air.
Bikila ran alongside Rhadi Ben Abdesselam of Morocco for most of the distance and broke clear in the final kilometre on the Appian Way.
He finished beneath the Arch of Constantine, the course lit by soldiers carrying torches, in 2:15:16.2, a world best.
He was the first Black African Olympic champion.
Tokyo
In 1964 he won the Olympic marathon again, in 2:12:11.2, another world best, forty days after an appendectomy. He wore shoes.
He was the first man to win the Olympic marathon twice.
After
In March 1969 a car accident near Addis Ababa left him paralysed below the waist. He took up archery and competed at Stoke Mandeville.
He died on 25 October 1973, aged forty-one, of a cerebral haemorrhage related to the accident. The funeral was attended by tens of thousands.
The obelisk, later
Italy agreed to return it in 1947 and did not. It was finally dismantled and flown back to Ethiopia in 2005, and re-erected at Axum in 2008.
Why it goes on a wall
Because the route was not chosen for him and he did not choose to run barefoot as a statement. The circumstances arranged themselves, and he ran through them faster than anyone ever had.
He ran past what was taken.