It is important that we tell you the story of Lopez Lomong now because in a month's time, when the Beijing Games are under way, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the guardian of the Games, will not be so keen on it.

For when Lomong was 6 and attending mass in his village in the south of Sudan, it was invaded by a government-backed militia and he, along with a number of his peers, were abducted and taken away to a camp to be trained as soldiers. His journey, from 1991, when he was in the hands of the militia and those around him were dying of dysentery and malnutrition, to the start line of the 1,500 metres in Beijing next month is the most amazing, tragic and uplifting story.

You could scream it from the Great Wall of China and shout about the miracle of sport and the Olympics - about how Lomong escaped from the militia and found his way to a refugee camp in Kenya and about how, when he and his friends, the “Lost Boys”, had been in the camp for nine years and ran five miles one day in 2000 to see the Sydney Olympics on a black-and-white television, where they saw Michael Johnson win the 400 metres. Lomong said to himself that day that he wanted to run like that man.

The problem with Lomong's story, however, is that the scars of his extraordinary life have not healed. How could they? He spent most of his life under the impression that his parents and siblings were dead. They thought the same of him and when he eventually found them again they showed him the grave they had made for him more than a decade earlier.

So when Lomong gets to Beijing there will be two subjects about which he feels extremely strongly. One is that he can put his heart and soul and every straining sinew into representing the country of his choice, the United States, and the other is that he may be able to talk freely about Sudan and how the Government that backed the militia that ripped him from his family is doing the same in the Darfur region today and that that Government buys its arms from China in exchange for oil.

When Lomong was 16 he won a place on a resettlement scheme and was sent to live with a family near Syracuse in New York. Seven years later he has qualified for the Olympics and at the US trials he talked about Darfur and his grave concern for the nation he left behind.

One way for Lomong to express his view has been to join Team Darfur, a group of nearly 400 international sportsmen and women who are using the Beijing Games as a platform from which to urge China to act to help the Sudan crisis. Around the Olympics venues in Beijing, however, Lomong will not be allowed to wear a Team Darfur T-shirt or wristband because the guidelines of the IOC on political propaganda forbid it. Even when in his room in the Olympic village he will be discouraged from displaying Team Darfur material. In following these guidelines, Lomong is being forced, during the Games, to suspend the truth of his past.

Until a fortnight ago the kind of story that the IOC found infinitely more palatable was that of Mahbooba Ahadgar, an Afghan woman who was due to run the 1,500 metres in Beijing in a headscarf and a tracksuit to cover her skin. A devout Muslim competing proudly in the Games, she was such poster-girl material that she was made the beneficiary of an Olympic Solidarity scholarship and was sent abroad to prepare at international training camps.

The fact that Ahadgar was not even a long-shot medal chance did not seem to matter. In an event run over three laps she would nearly have been lapped by the winner. But that did not stop her becoming an Olympic toast until, at the same time that Lomong was qualifying for the Games, she was secretly checking out of her training camp in Italy and making a run for it, setting off for Norway to ask for political asylum.

This was not the first time an Olympic Solidarity scholar has gone Awol. At the World Amateur Boxing Championships in Chicago last year two Ugandans and an Armenian were lost. Certain people within the IAAF, the governing body of world athletics, are furious about Ahadgar because last year they lost two Bangladeshis who were also nowhere near world-leading standards.

This is not to say that the Olympic Solidarity scholarships, which fund athletes from developing nations, are a sham. In the four years up to Beijing, more than 1,000 athletes have been funded to the tune of $16 million (about £8 million). At the Athens Olympics four years ago 583 scholars competed, of whom 54 won medals - and hats off to all of them and the fact that Olympic money helped sport to help these people to change their lives.

Yet one of the elements in its mission statement tells us that Olympic Solidarity is about “the promotion of a society concerned with human dignity and peace” and there can barely be a better description of the aims of Lomong and Team Darfur - the very aims the Olympic Movement is contriving to stifle.

Another element of the statement is that Olympic Solidarity is about “international co-operation, cultural exchanges, the development of sport and its educational aspects”, which would appear to explain Ahadgar and the Bangladeshis and the way they were promoted beyond their capabilities and directed, like missionaries, in the direction of the Beijing Games.

Yet Ahadgar was not a world-class athlete and she elected to leave her country rather than represent it. By using - or attempting to use - her, or people like her, to boost the impression of the Olympics as this all-enveloping, multicultural phenomenon, the IOC is guilty of propaganda of its own.

There are two pictures here. One comes slightly distorted and airbrushed and will be squeezed into a frame by the IOC and its Chinese hosts in Beijing. The other is a portrait of Lomong. Which would you rather have on the wall?

After Lomong had qualified for the Games, he gave an interview in which he talked about the two central pillars in his life: his running and his background. “I came a long way, for sure,” he said. “From running through the wilderness to save my life, now I am doing this for fun.” What a statement about sport. What an Olympian triumph that the Beijing Games and its hosts will be utterly unable to embrace.