You get to understand that it’s a young person’s world when one of Team SA’s biggest hopes for 2024 Paralympic success is still a teenager – and his hero is a 22-year-old countryman who has already been to two such Games’ and won three medals.
Puseletso Mabote himself is just 19, a product of the Jumping Kids system, a non-profit company that supplies and maintains quality prosthetic equipment for children living with lower limb amputation or limb-related disability across South Africa and into the continent.
In 2010, the five-year-old Mabote underwent an emergency amputation after a truck crashed into the family vehicle on the way to school. The accident claimed his right leg from above the knee. He became a beneficiary of the Jumping Kids Prosthetic Fund in 2013 and was introduced to para-athletics to aid in his rehabilitation.
What you now see is a bright, shining inspiration, like so many of his Team SA peers as the 2024 Paralympics is about to start.
Mabote, who is in his Matric year at King Edward VII in Johannesburg, will himself be competing in his second Paralympics, taking part in the men’s T63 100 metres and the long jump. He has, by all calculations, a fine chance of winning a medal in the sprint at what will be an 80 000-capacity Stade de France. After all, he claimed the silver in the event at the 2024 Para Athletics World Championships in Kobe, Japan and also set a new African record in the long jump.
“The times that I’m running in training are amazing," Mabote said. “I’ve never run this fast in my life. So this is a new feeling for me.” Not that Mabote hasn’t got used to running fast times. Five years ago – yes, he was 14 – he broke the senior men’s T63 world record in the 200m at the World Junior Championships in Nottwil, Switzerland. It remains his most memorable moment of a career that is still in its infancy, given his age.
“I remember I was in the change room when the announcement confirmed a world record, and I jumped out of my seat. It was amazing. I loved every single second of that,” he recalled.
In Paris it will be duty in that T63m shorter sprint (100m) and the long jump and he’s mentally adjusted to what to expect at the Stade de France, given there were no spectators inside the Tokyo Olympic stadium owing to Covid-19 restrictions.
“I would have loved to have been spectators there but it was still a Paralympic Games. It was still that type of environment with the pro athletes and some some faces that I’ve only seen on TV and YouTube and all that stuff so and so, getting there and seeing them face to face and being told that I’m going to be lining up against these people was kind of a shock,” he told SuperSport TV.
“So I went in there with the mentality of, let me compete and see how far I can go. But at the back of my head, I wanted to win. I managed to reach the final. And in the final, it’s anybody’s game. In that final he ran 12.66 to finish seventh in the 100m and leapt 5.18m to place ninth in the long jump."
In Paris he has gone from a wide-eyed 16-year-old to a more mature 19-year-old in his second Games.
“Paris is going to be big. Paris is going to be the largest thing that I’ve ever been to. It’s going to be a full packed stadium with everything that the Olympics and Paralympic Games is supposed to be, and I feed off the crowd, so that’s going to be perfect for me. And yeah, it’s just going to be amazing. I’m aiming for full gold all the way.”
And not only will he have his Matric schoolmates cheering him on but an entire country will also help him speed down that track, fulfilling their hopes, and his dreams.
Komentarze