Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo will have gone from winning Olympic gold in Paris, back to herding his cattle and then back again to racing in the Diamond League in Europe in a matter of weeks.
Tebogo stunned the favourites to win gold in the men’s 200m at the Paris Olympics on August 8, and after the closing ceremony he jetted back to Gaborone as he was given a hero’s welcome back home.
After the dust had settled, he was back minding his cattle as Tebogo has farming to fall back on once his athletics career comes to an end.
For now though, the 21-year-old is still rapidly rising in his athletics career as he is back in Europe as he prepares to take part in the Diamond League meeting in Lausanne on Thursday.
When he's not winning on the track in Bots 🇧![CDATA[]]>🇼 @tebogo_letsile_ lives a simple life and is winning on the farm 👨![CDATA[]]>🏽🌾 pic.twitter.com/rjaYNpgYie
— Thomas Mlambo (@thomasmlambo) August 20, 2024
‘It’s an investment for me’
“I was on the farm this morning. What I do is, I have cattle. I need to have a solid plan of what I’m going to do to increase the number of cattle [I have],” Tebogo told Thomas Mlambo in an interview with SuperSport over the weekend.
“It’s an investment for me. Athletics is not a long-term career. I need to have different opportunities and see if I can channel money into it.”
Tebogo’s mother Seratiwa died in May, and with the Olympics just a couple months away it left the young sprinter’s world turned upside down.
Tebogo’s mother, fortunately, had seen him become the first African man to win a medal at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest in 2023.
Tebogo admitted he was at a loss after the death of his mother.
“I believe she’d be happy with what I did. She saw the potential in me. She was there through thick and thin for me. When she passed away, I thought it was the end of the world for me. I wasn’t home as I was away for the Eugene Diamond League. When I heard the news, I changed the plans of everything to see what I could do.
“For me, I thought it was the end of my career. I’m grateful for the team that was around me. They just told me to take each day as it comes. Don’t put yourself under too much pressure. Step by step, I started to see the light and start to want to run again.”