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Paul McNamara

Kamran Khan began running at the age of 15 and became Hong Kong 800 metres champion at 16.
Now 24, and set to race over 800m and 1,500m at next month’s National Games, things have not come so easy for Khan since his golden start.
There have been shattered dreams, a brief detention on the Chinese border, the day he hid in a toilet to avoid racing, and a six-year battle to obtain his Hong Kong passport.
Having emerged from all that as the city’s best middle distance runner, it is no wonder Khan is unapologetically ambitious.
“If you’re in this sport you should want to reach the pinnacle, to get to the Olympics and World Championships and compete against the best,” Khan said. “If that’s not your goal, you’re doing the wrong thing.”

Khan was born in Hong Kong to Pakistani parents. His dad came to the city for work in the 1970s and married in the early 1990s.
Their oldest son attended Delia Memorial School (Broadway) in Kowloon. “It was a pretty brown school with Indians, Pakistanis and Nepalis,” Khan said. “I never felt excluded there.”
His first sporting love was cricket and the family would be glued to the television whenever Pakistan played. Khan was a fast bowler but he lost his zip when he transitioned from tape ball to hard ball. He was selected for the school first team at 13, nonetheless, but “didn’t get playing time and lost my confidence” among a squad of 16-year-olds.
“I lost my love for the game,” Khan said. “I missed a few training sessions and got kicked out. I was so happy.”
Football replaced cricket and Khan “got really good very quickly”.
Dashing around the field “like N’Golo Kante”, the former Chelsea midfielder, Khan’s speed and energy caught the eye of Roger Li, his PE teacher.
“He put me in a junior age-group 400 metres race and I won it with zero training,” Khan said. “After that he would virtually drag me out of the house to run races.”
Khan gradually and reluctantly reduced his involvement in football, until he stopped altogether at 16 to avoid injuries, despite being named school team captain.
“It was hard, but I had to accept I couldn’t do it any more,” he said.
A local athletics coach, Yakov Rubin, spied Khan cross country running and told Li that if the schoolboy trained with him he would be Hong Kong 800m champion within a year. In 2018, Rubin was proved correct.
“His main goal was to get people of Pakistani and Indian origin away from doing bad stuff and to help us have a better future in Hong Kong,” Khan said.
“If anything racist was said, which happened a couple of times, he would be the first one to stand up for us. Having him around gave us confidence.”

Khan was not so thankful to have Rubin in his corner at the 2017 Hong Kong Championships. Then 15, he was horrified to learn that winning his 400m heat meant progression to the semi-finals.
“I thought I’d run one round and be done,” Khan said. “I hid in the toilet playing games on my phone, then heard banging on the door. I had no idea how he found me. I’d missed my call time by one minute, so inside I was feeling very happy.
“But he was fighting for me. I was praying they wouldn’t let me in, but they did because he made such a big scene.”
Khan received his first Hong Kong summons for the 2018 All China Under-18 Athletics Championships in Hebei. As the owner of a Pakistani passport, it was one of the few competitions in which he was permitted to represent the city.
“I was so excited to be travelling with the Hong Kong team,” Khan said.
“My teammates all quickly went through customs but I was stopped. I thought it would take five minutes but they did all sorts of random checks. I was there about an hour while everyone waited for me at the gate. I felt embarrassed.”
That episode accelerated Khan’s desire to get a local passport. Rubin would also “tell me every day to get it”, so the teenager could compete internationally.

“My coach thought it would be easy, but going to immigration I knew the truth,” Khan said. “They’d tell me to wait until I was 21, then to wait until I had a job.”
Khan also felt he hit a roadblock because his dad could not work owing to a disability and his mum was a housewife.
Two months after the local association helped him write a letter to the city’s Immigration Department last year, he finally received his passport.
The Covid pandemic prevented Khan from lowering his school’s 800m and 1,500m records, which he said left him “devastated”.
Disillusioned with the shutdown of competition, and seeing teammates stream away from the sport, Khan did not run between November 2020 and May 2021, nor between December 2021 and April 2022.

“I did a lot of hiking and crazy core stuff, so I was keeping fit,” he said. “I knew I wasn’t done with the sport, they were just hiatuses. I went for a jog after the second break, saw my coach and went right back into it.
“I had to start from the bottom, but I brought the fire from not having the school records to go for others.”
At this year’s Asian Championships in South Korea, his first major senior event, he set the city 800m record of one minute and 50.12 seconds.
Khan began piling up Hong Kong titles, but became acutely aware that he was different from his rivals.
“I came from a very small school where everybody knew each other and we were all friends, which gave me confidence as a person,” he said.
“When I began competing, I was against runners from powerhouse schools like Diocesan Boys and La Salle, but I was beating them convincingly.
“I felt I had my whole school backing me, and it was great to put them on the map.
“It took time to be accepted by everyone [on the athletics scene]. People knew me as the 800 guy, or the Broadway guy, but they got to know my name.”
Khan is the first member of his family to demonstrate serious sporting prowess, although he attributes his “super-competitive” streak to growing up in a house with two younger brothers.

His mum and dad would have preferred him to “focus on other things … but I saw a future in running”.
“It’s just how they grew up, they would prefer me working and earning money but they’re not too strict,” Khan said. “In some families from my background, if I wasn’t working by now I’d be kicked out.”
After completing his studies at the University of Hong Kong this summer, Khan has become a full-time Hong Kong Sports Institute athlete.
“I can already feel a difference … everything is more fluid, and I have more time to invest in training,” Khan said. “It was frustrating in the past seeing people who were less consistent and delivering fewer results than me getting all this support.”
Hong Kong records and titles no longer satisfy Khan. He wants to break 1:50 for 800m. Increasing his training distances to around 100 kilometres per week, from 20-40km over the past couple of years, has also allowed a renewed focus on the 1,500m.
Khan said he would reach the National Games in “good shape” and in “better condition for the 1,500m than the 800m for the first time”.

He is aiming to reach both finals in the Guangdong Olympic Sports Centre, but his training plan has been devised to peak for next year’s Asian Games in Japan.
“I am still young in terms of competition experience, I missed so many junior and Asian championships,” Khan said. “I will get better and more confident with every big race. When I feel I belong in that environment I will be dangerous.”
Khan is unequivocal about his sense of belonging in Hong Kong.
“I grew up here, I eat the food from here and I love it here,” Khan said. “I’ve always seen myself as a Hongkonger and felt equal to everyone. Representing Hong Kong is an amazing feeling.
“I also do this to motivate South Asians; to show we can get to the top of Hong Kong sport despite hardships along the way.”


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Kamran Khan is fiercely proud of running with the Hong Kong name on his vest. Photo: Handout

Kamran Khan has upped his training distances to 100km per week. Photo: Handout

Coach Yakov Rubin (front) with several of his charges, including Kamran Khan (centre). Photo: Handout

Kamran Khan with Yakov Rubin and US runner Sean Fontaine (right) following a race in Hong Kong. Photo: Handout

Kamran Khan speeds through the rain during a race in Taiwan. Photo: Handout

Kamran Khan has been putting in the hard yards in pursuit of his ambitious goals. Photo: Handout

A young Kamran Khan, alongside Ykov Rubin, savours an early taste of victory. Photo: Handout

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Sport

Hong Kong

Kamran Khan was a Hong Kong champion at the age of 16 and then the trouble began. Now the 24-year-old has his eyes on National Games glory


Kamran Khan was a Hong Kong champion at the age of 16 and then the trouble began. Now the 24-year-old has his eyes on National Games glory.


Hong Kong, China Association of Athletics Affiliates

National Games: from hiding in a toilet to avoid a race to chasing gold for Hong Kong

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Kamran Khan was a Hong Kong champion at the age of 16 and then the trouble began. Now the 24-year-old has his eyes on National Games glory

Kamran Khan was a Hong Kong champion at the age of 16 and then the trouble began. Now the 24-year-old has his eyes on National Games glory