Olympic 200m champion Letsile Tebogo said on Wednesday he could have become a delinquent if the sport of athletics had not given him a focus. Tebogo, who stunned the field in Paris last year to became Bots\u00adwana\u2019s first Olympic gold medallist in any sport, said he would take the lessons he learned from his childhood into his new role as a global ambassador for the Kids Athletics scheme. \u201cSport has really helped me a lot because I think without sport \u2026 probably I would be a criminal by now,\u201d 21-year-old Tebogo told reporters on a video conference call. \u201cIn the neighbourhood where I grew up there were a lot of criminals, it was the only way to survive. \u201cBut then with sport I knew I had to go to school and with training you are tired. You don\u2019t have time to roam the streets and go into people\u2019s houses,\u201d he added. \u201cSo once I discovered that I tried to pull in a few friends of mine \u2026 and now they are playing football. \u201cWe always talk about if this didn\u2019t work out, where would we be?\u201d The Kids Athletics programme, overseen by World Athletics and targeted at children aged four to 14, is focused on maximising participation and enjoyment through modified games and competitions based on track and field events. Tebogo, who after the call took part in a relay event with around 1,000 children on the same grounds in Botswana where he used to train as a boy, recalled that he initially preferred football. \u201cI was more of a footballer, a left-winger. The teachers at my primary school forced me into athletics,\u201d he said. \u201c(Athletics) wasn\u2019t that popular in Botswana back then, until the Commonwealth Games 2018. \u201cFrom my side I just wanted to see where it would take me. Athletics was just a part-time thing for me.\u201d His switch of sports paid off handsomely at the Olympics when he crossed the line at the Stade de France in an African record of 19.46sec, leaving Kenny Bednarek of the USA second and 100m champion Noah Lyles in the bronze-medal position. Tebogo called Lyles \u201carrogant\u201d after that race and suggested the cameras would always prefer the brash American. He clarified those remarks on Wednesday, saying: \u201cWhen you get onto the track, it\u2019s all about business. \u201cWhen we finish, you can be friends, life goes on. \u201cBut the \u2018arrogance\u2019 (of Lyles)\u2026 he is good to sell our sport. But with me, I\u2019ll always shy away from doing that because that\u2019s me.\u201d Tebogo came second in a rare outing at 400m in Melbourne last weekend and will run a 200m race at a meeting in Botswana next week as he sharpens his speed before heading to the Diamond League meetings in Xiamen and Shanghai on April 26 and May 3 respectively. He said he expected his rivals to be gunning for him as they build towards the World Championships in Tokyo in September. \u201cEverybody who\u2019s there on the line-up, it\u2019s a rival. You cannot eliminate somebody because he didn\u2019t perform well at the 2024 Olympics or 2023 World Championships,\u201d Tebogo said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Olympic 200m champion Letsile Tebogo said on Wednesday he could have become a delinquent if the sport of athletics had not given him a focus….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23830,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23829\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}