Letsile Tebogo Had To Make A Painful Decision Involving Late Mother, Says Coach

At the Paris Olympics, Letsile Tebogo turned a packed stadium into a stage for history, sprinting past Noah Lyles and Kenny Bednarek to capture the 200-meter crown. His triumph, however, carried a private weight. The loudest voice in his life, his mother Seratiwa, was absent. She had passed away only weeks before, leaving the 20-year-old to celebrate his greatest achievement without her in the stands. The victory was bittersweet, shaped as much by loss as by glory. And behind it stood a story his coach later revealed in stark detail.

Seratiwa had long been the cornerstone of Tebogo’s rise. A former athlete who later worked as a secretary, she raised him alone and believed more in his sporting path than in traditional academic success. “It’s Africa before Botswana, so we are really thrilled,” she once told reporters after he won silver at the 2023 World Championships in Budapest, becoming the first African to medal in the men’s 100 meters. That same race saw her in tears of joy, telling her son that she was proud he had “put Africa on the map.” Their relationship, as she described it, resembled siblings more than mother and child, marked by closeness and trust.

The depth of that connection made the events of May 2024 especially painful. Tebogo was competing in the 100 meters at the Los Angeles Grand Prix when his mother’s illness took a sharp turn. He crossed the finish line unaware that her struggle had ended. His coach, Kebonyemodisa Mosimanyane, later recounted what happened.

“Before we left for LA, his mother, she was not well. We both knew that she was not well,” he told World Athletics. “And we were sort of going through the same thing because it was both our mothers going through the same thing. You know, so when we left, we sat down together. We spoke, you know, we are going to leave, and we are leaving both our mothers not well. And, you know, you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

The silence grew as days passed. “I kept in touch with the mother. And for three days, I didn’t hear from her. I think that was when she was really not well,” Mosimanyane explained. The moment of truth came shortly after Tebogo’s race.

“After the race, a few hours, we were having dinner, or it was just after dinner. And a call came in, and they told us about it. And I had to tell him. You know, I brought the news, and then we went and sat in his room. We just spent time together. We tried to recollect, but we couldn’t, you know. It was bad.”

The shock nearly drove Tebogo away from the sport entirely. “First of all, I felt like it’s over for me. It’s over for athletics. Just need to hand in the boots and everything. Just see where to next, cuz I didn’t have the confidence to go out there and do what I have to do,” he admitted to World Athletics. In the following weeks, he missed crucial training, conceding that he had lost two to three weeks of preparation for the Olympic Games. Yet in his grief, he found a purpose.

He would run in his mother’s name.

That vow carried him through the summer. Tebogo not only competed, but also delivered the defining race of his young career in Paris, sprinting to 200-meter gold. Afterward, he honored Seratiwa with a small but symbolic gesture, lifting a shoe in tribute. It was a reminder that while his mother was no longer in the stands, her influence remained at the center of his journey.

Every stride, every record, and every medal bore her imprint. For Tebogo, the Olympic crown was not simply a victory for himself or his country. It was the fulfillment of a promise to the woman who had believed in him from the beginning. This resulted in Letsile Tebogo’s fluctuating Diamond League performances in 2025. And it was a cause of the lingering impact of losing his mother, a struggle Justin Gatlin urged fans to recognize with empathy.

How Letsile Tebogo struggled to outrun the pain of losing his mother?

Grief rarely follows the logic of calendars or competition schedules, and for Letsile Tebogo, that truth appeared inescapable this season. The young sprinter, who carried Botswana to unprecedented triumph in Paris, entered the Diamond League circuit under the long shadow of his mother’s passing. What unfolded on the track did not speak of diminished ability, but of a man still carrying weight unseen by the crowd. His uneven results, ranging from a seventh-place finish in Xiamen with a 10.20 to a stronger 10.03 in the Yangtze River Delta Gala, drew scrutiny. Yet the numbers alone did not tell the story.

Justin Gatlin, a man who had himself navigated both glory and hardship across decades in athletics, offered a perspective that cut through speculation. On his podcast, he noted, “Tebogo ran 10.20 the last race, now he has come back and ran 10.03 this race, and that goes to show you don’t know what people are going through.” In those words lay an acknowledgment that performance could not be separated from the private burdens carried to the start line. Gatlin reminded listeners that the athlete’s loss remained recent and the healing, incomplete, while also observing the resilience evident in Tebogo’s willingness to compete despite such turmoil.

For Gatlin, the trajectory itself suggested promise rather than decline.

“Watching go from a 10.20 down to a 10.03, that tells me, oh, he good, he going to be good,” he concluded with confidence. The veteran’s faith was grounded in the recognition of Tebogo’s enduring depth of talent and his belief that time, not doubt, would shape the young champion’s path forward. In this light, the fluctuation in results became less a cause for alarm than a reminder of the human cost behind an athlete’s public struggle.