Countless celebrations have come through the track as athletics has recorded the most significant moments in Botswana's 58 year history. No code comes close to athletics in delivering decisive moments, with all four Olympic Games medals won since 1980, coming from the track. Botswana sport's most recognised son, Letsile Tebogo, is a product of athletics, and so are other greats like Amantle Montsho, Nijel Amos, Isaac Makwala, the list is growing. The first sport person to reach the finals of the Olympics, Glody Dube, was an athlete who achieved the feat during the Sidney Olympics in 2000.
Athletics produced Botswana's first world champion through Montsho, while Amos became the country's first Olympic Games medalist. Letsile became not only the first Motswana but also the first African to win an Olympic gold medal in the 200m at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Success stories from the track keep piling and after the country, through Dube's Golden Door Sports, was awarded the right to host a Golden Grand Prix, further good news were couriered to Botswana last week. World Athletics' president, Sebastian Coe, announced that Botswana had been awarded the right to host the World Relays next year May, a first for an African country. The good times are rolling for athletics, which spreads the feel good factor across all sport genres. But amid all the euphoria, there is the sobering reality that Botswana's golden child is literally homeless. Athletics, the biggest code by value (if there is such) is of no fixed abode, with no offices to call their own. Of course their address is given as somewhere at the National Stadium, bundled together with many other countless codes, some that have no clear significance. But this is the biggest code, the country's goose that lays countless golden eggs.
