More than 40 sport codes are officially registered under the umbrella body, the Botswana National Sport Commission (BNSC). All have recorded success in their small way, but one has remained peerless as the rise of Botswana as a global athletics powerhouse reads like a fairy.
A nation of just above two million people now finds itself standing shoulder-to-shoulder with established powerhouses like the United States of America and Jamaica.
When Glody Dube became the first local athlete to reach the finals of any race at the Olympic Games in 2000, it could have been dismissed as just another moment. But it proved to be a launching pad as 11 years later, the foundation that had been laid by Dube and other pathfinders yielded the first significant fruit when Amantle Montsho was crowned a world champion. Montsho achieved the feat, a first for the country when she won the 400m during the World Athletics Championships held in Daegu, South Korea.
The Montsho moment became the springboard on which later success was to be built. After Montsho’s glorious moment, it did not take long for Botswana athletics fans to be back on their feet, celebrating an equally significant achievement in 2012. This time the epicentre of the victory celebrations was London as then a relatively unknown Nijel Amos raced to a silver medal in the fastest 800m race in history.
This was Botswana’s first ever Olympic Games medal, ending a 32-year wait. After that, the floodgates of success swung wide open as Amos and Montsho took turns to win Diamond League races. In 2018, Botswana was dominant at the Commonwealth Games in the Gold Coast where Makwala, Montsho and both the men's and women’s 4x400m relay teams all bagged gold. At the Tokyo Olympics Games, held in 2021, Makwala led the 4x400m team to a bronze medal, handing Botswana its second medal from the Olympics. As the sun set on the careers of leading athletes like Montsho, one of Botswana’s prodigious talents emerged in Letsile Tebogo.
Since Tebogo burst into the scene, breaking every local short sprint record, Botswana’s athletics landscape has undergone a vertiginous shift. The contribution of athletes who came before Tebogo has been widely acknowledged, but the Kanye-born 20-year-old has made the entire universe sit up and take notice. He is arguably Botswana's best sportsperson since the country broke from the yoke of British rule in 1966. Within a short space since his introduction into the world of athletics, Tebogo broke the 100m world record at the World Junior Championships in Cali, Columbia last year.
He has had several breathtaking runs, which tempted the athletics world into comparing him to the undisputed king of sprint, Usain Bolt. Since his arrival on the big stage, Tebogo has become integral to Botswana’s athletics story. In fact, he was the main actor in the Cinderella fairy. It, therefore, came as no surprise when Tebogo won two medals at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, becoming the first African to win a medal in the 100m. In the process, he broke Namibian, Frankie Federicks’ long-standing 200m record. Unsurprisingly, Tebogo was again the talking point this week when he was the star of the show when he ran the fastest split to lead Botswana to its golden moment at the World Relays. Athletics is the only code that has qualified for the Olympics and Paris could turn into yet another stomping ground, where the truly Botswana track marks will be engraved.
