In the running for Tokyo gold
Bendere Oboya A star in the making
The youngest of six, Bendere Oboya was always sprinting to keep up with her siblings, never realising that one day she would parlay that into a world-class career. “We used to run everywhere,” the Ethiopian-born athlete recalls. “My brothers ran off ahead, so I was always racing to catch up.”
Still, young Bendere never gave much hint of the talent that has seen her compared to 400m legends Cathy Freeman and Jana Pittman. “Running wasn’t something I was particularly good at,” she says. “I lost at school. I didn’t make my first state championships for so long!”
So why did she persist? “I just loved it,” she explains. “I was never a great student and I was very shy. With athletics, I could close off and be myself. My confidence started to come out and I knew if I trained well, I would get there one day. I knew there was so much more in me.”
Bendere, who moved to Australia as a three-year-old, also made a critical observation in her teenage years: all of the winners at the Little Athletics meets had coaches. She duly found herself one, and her times dropped so dramatically that she seemed to burst onto the national scene out of nowhere. In just over a year, Bendere had sliced more than 22 seconds from her 400m personal best (PB) to become the 2017 Commonwealth Youth champion.
Since then, she has gone from strength to strength. In April, on her 21st birthday, she won the national 400m title with a time of 52.20 seconds to secure her spot in Tokyo. Two years earlier, at the World Championships in Doha, she’d posted a Tokyo qualifying
