He runs on a slender dirt road the color of rust. His legs churn with an easy rhythm as he passes clumps of snow, then thorn trees and sage swaying in the winter wind. Out here on the Arizona desert, he is easy prey.

It's January, and there's a stillness about Feyisa Lilesa, even in the 12th mile of a workout. He is with another runner because it's riskier to train alone. With every compact stride, Lilesa lands on the balls of his feet and then flicks his size 9 Nikes, creating a soft shushing sound. The stillness surrounding him belies the feelings in his heart.

Until late last summer, the 27-year-old called Ethiopia, not Arizona, home. But since the Rio Olympics, when he won a silver medal in the marathon and engaged in a dramatic finish-line protest against the Ethiopian government, Lilesa has been in exile and does not dare go home again.

His Olympic protest was a plea for the Oromo, his ethnic nation, which despite being the largest such group in Ethiopia's population of roughly 100 million, has for decades been denied power and dealt with harshly by a succession of rulers. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, since November of 2015, Ethiopian troops have used "excessive and lethal force" against mostly peaceful opponents angered by being marginalized and a government plan to annex traditional Oromo land. Hundreds have been killed, many of them children, and thousands have been injured, arrested or gone missing. "Ethiopia is a country where there is no space for speech against the government," says the author of the report, Felix Horne. "Anyone who speaks out against what is going on is threatened with arrest -- or worse."

As Lilesa runs, he pictures Oromia, the green, sweeping region populated by his forebears, where he grew up in a dirt-floored hut. He thinks of his wife, Iftu; their daughter, Soko, 5; and their son, Sora, 3. They remain in Addis Ababa. He has not seen them in months. He worries about them and about his own safety. After Lilesa's protest at the Olympics, a spokesman for the Ethiopian government said he had nothing to fear, that he could return home and be a hero. Lilesa doesn't believe it. He fears the government might track him down and injure him to keep him from running or even kill him.

When he trains on the lonely roads outside of Flagstaff, he will hear a pickup truck rumble around a bend -- probably a rancher, or maybe a hunter heading for practice at one of the nearby shooting ranges. But Lilesa says he can never be sure. He keeps running, he says, cycling his feet against the dirt -- but he watches the truck.

"There is nothing I could do to stop it if someone wanted to do something to me out there," he says through an interpreter. "I am alone, just like I am alone in this country. All I can do is stay strong and keep going."

The next afternoon, Lilesa sits in a sparse apartment near Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, holding a black cellphone. He checks Facebook, always alert for news from Ethiopia. He cringes, reading an update on a tragedy: Dozens were killed weeks before in a stampede after government police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse anti-government demonstrations at a religious festival southeast of Addis Ababa.

Sometimes he escapes into replays of his Olympic race. "Come watch," he says. The marathon begins in the Sambadrome on a rainy day in Rio de Janeiro, and as the camera zooms closer, Lilesa toes the starting line. He uses his left hand to brush a 2-inch tattoo on his right shoulder. It depicts an Odaa tree, an Ethiopian sycamore, in red, black and green ink. A symbol of Oromo pride. In halting English, he explains from the couch that he had been planning his Olympic protest for three months, from the moment he made the Ethiopian team. "The time to stand up had come," he says.

Lilesa is the firstborn son of a family that farmed vegetables and herded cattle in a rural region about 70 miles west of the nation's capital. In keeping with Oromo culture, he was raised to think of sacrificing for a larger cause, even if it meant putting himself in danger. He also was raised to be politically aware, part of an idealistic and vocal generation of Oromo that came of age after the collapse of Ethiopia's communist regime in the early 1990s. He'd pictured himself speaking out about injustice since he was a teenager. Not long after a 2015 election in which the ruling government, dominated by a minority ethnic group called the Tigray and its allies, won 100 percent of the nation's parliamentary seats, the Oromo faced increased crackdowns. Protesters were beaten and fired upon.

Preparing for Rio, Lilesa felt desperate to call attention to a crisis largely ignored by the international community. He needed a medal. Only gold, silver and bronze finishers would get significant media coverage. He had won big races in Europe, the United States and Asia, including the Tokyo Marathon at the start of 2016. But he wasn't a heavy favorite in Rio. His time in Tokyo had been 2:06:56, only the 31st-fastest marathon of the year. Rio would be the race of his life -- a race for his people. He kept his plan a secret, even from his wife and children. If he'd told them, he would have been swallowed by emotion. If he had felt Iftu's sorrow, he might have lost his nerve.

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Clutching his cellphone, Feyisa leans forward and watches the tape of his stride toward the finish line at Rio. He remembers the hair on his neck standing straight those last 100 yards, as if he had touched a live wire before winning the silver medal. "It was like I got everything off my chest. Like when you feel something so powerful, and then you just let it out, and here you go -- I did the unthinkable." On screen, as the final seconds of the race unspool, he raises his arms and crosses them, curling his hands into fists. It's an Oromo gesture of defiance. He looks like a rebel resisting his shackles. He repeats the move four times. He can't know what will come next, but he knows nothing will be the same. Someone in the stands offers him an Ethiopian flag to hold high or to drape around his shoulders. Lilesa refuses it. "I could not do it for a country where I have no rights," he says, "where my people have no rights."

As Iftu and others in Feyisa's family watched the race on television at their two-story home in Addis Ababa, they were on their feet cheering until they saw him lift his arms above his head. "It went completely quiet," Iftu says. "It was like a dream. There was shock and sadness. Nobody made a sound. Suddenly, the question we had was this: How the hell is he going to come home after doing this?"

After the protest, Lilesa walked to the media tent unsure about how he would communicate his message to a world that pays little attention to his homeland. The Ethiopian interpreter assigned to help him with reporters refused to translate for him. Left to speak in his uncertain English, Lilesa turned to the TV cameras and said: "Ethiopian government killing Oromo people. I support Oromo protest. At this time, many people in prison. If you talk your rights ... they kill you. If I go to Ethiopia, maybe they kill me. If not kill me, maybe they will charge me. If not charge me, they will send [me] to another country."

He had no plan, but a network of Oromo expatriates moved quickly. Offers of help came on Facebook and by text message. An Oromo just outside San Jose, California, started an online campaign that would end up raising over $100,000 to help Lilesa begin a new life. An Oromo in Minneapolis booked a Rio hotel for him and urged him to get away from the Olympic Village as fast as he could. Bayissa Gemechu, a sports agent in Washington, D.C., and an Oromo, flew to Brazil to stay with Lilesa and help him obtain the immigration papers he would need to resettle in a new country.

The Ethiopian government says publicly that Lilesa is in no danger. "He is always welcome," Getachew Reda, the Ethiopian communications minister, has told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, calling Lilesa an "Ethiopian hero." Lilesa distrusts what he hears from the government. He says four of his friends have been killed after standing against the government since 2005. His brother-in-law, he says, has been jailed -- and beaten -- for participating in a college demonstration.

Lilesa had never been to Brazil before the Olympics. He spoke no Portuguese. He holed up in a cramped hotel room with Gemechu, wondering where to go, where to make a new life. When Brazilian police showed up at the hotel lobby, asking for him, he thought, "I won't go back. I will fight to the end." Bonnie Holcomb, an American anthropologist and advocate for Oromo issues who had seen the protest, had reached out to friends in Rio, and they had arranged a police escort to the airport so he could get the immigration forms he needed to stay in Brazil until he decided what to do.

Nearly two years before, Lilesa had begun an application process for a visa allowing him to train occasionally in the United States. Now he discovered that he was on file in the U.S. immigration system, and this gave him a foothold. At the same time, a Denver educator named Mary Gershwin, who runs a nonprofit exchange program for students in the United States and Brazil, found out about Lilesa's plight and sent advice on whom to see and what to say at the U.S. Embassy as he completed his application. He stayed at the La Costa Hotel in Rio for 17 days. During that time, he learned through Facebook that a close friend in Ethiopia had been arrested for protesting the government and had died with 22 others when the Addis Ababa prison burned to the ground. He felt sick. He fell to the hotel room floor, his chest heaving.

He is our Steve Biko, our Nelson Mandela. - A fellow expatriate

When Iftu called, he could not pick up the phone. He didn't know what to say. It took him two days to call her back. There was fear and anger in her voice. "Why didn't you tell us what you were doing?" she demanded. "You gave us this good life, and now our lives aren't as good. What plan did you have? You've risked everything. Why did you make this decision?" She knew her husband had been pained for years. She knew that he felt stifled, that he'd kept quiet for fear of reprisal. She knew he had visited imprisoned protesters and had given clothing and training shoes to needy Oromo. Deep inside, she knew the answers to her questions.

"Don't worry," Lilesa said. "The family will be together in a few weeks."

In truth, he had no idea whether that was possible.

His daughter, Soko, got on the telephone: "Baba, baba, when are you coming home?"

Tears ran down his face.