Curtworth Masango-Zimpapers Sports Hub
IMAGINE that just weeks before the Youth Olympics Games, the country’s new ‘golden boy’ Ropafadzo Mzondo was not part of the Zimbabwe team to represent the nation at the Games in Dakar, Senegal.
It was not until one morning when his coach Aaron Whyte received a call from the Zimbabwe Olympic Committee while driving to Old Georgians for training. The call notified him that his 17-year-old prodigy had been added to the team, following the allocation of an extra quota slot by the YOG Organising Committee.
The other members of the Zimbabwe team had already been training for three good months, while Mzondo was off-season, and virtually away from the track for about two months.
This meant he had only four weeks to prepare for his 200m competition.
“I was in shock because I knew it was such a short space of time,” said Whyte.
But Whyte had every reason to gamble with Mzondo, whose father Liberty was a former sprinter himself, who is well documented for pushing his son beyond limits in the track as early as 2020.
As fate would have it, Mzondo won the country’s first ever Youth Olympic Games medal on Tuesday, taking the men’s 200m title in 21.04 seconds.
Until Dakar, no Zimbabwean athlete had won a medal for the country at the Youth Olympics.
“My dad really inspired me a lot, because he’s the person who pushed me to start athletics,” Mzondo told Olympics.com after his win at the Complexe Iba Mar Diop.
“Without him, I wouldn’t have been a Youth Olympic gold medallist right now, because he’s the one who’s been pushing me over and over and over.”
And yesterday he received a hero’s welcome at the Robert Mugabe International Airport when the team returned home.
The 17-year-old specialises in the 200m and 400m and has made remarkable progress since beginning formal training about three years ago.
Mzondo won gold in the 4x400m relay at the African Union Sports Council Region 5 Youth Games last year and also reached the Under-18 finals of both the 200m and 400m at the African Under-18 and Under-20 Championships in Nigeria.
Then came Oregon 2026 World Athletics Under-20 Championships.
Mzondo ran 46.51 seconds in the 400m heats to set a national Under-18 record and reach the semi-finals in August.
He also helped Zimbabwe reach its first men’s 4x400m final at the championships, with the quartet setting a national Under-20 record of 3 minutes 08.56 seconds in the heats. Back in Zimbabwe, he won the 200m at the Southern African Schools Championships in Bulawayo.
When an extra quota place opened up for Zimbabwe in Dakar, the work Mzondo had done for Oregon gave Whyte a starting point. Even so, the first few sessions back were hard.
“When he came to Harare, we didn’t start with the usual base work. We went straight into specific stuff. He was already conditioned, though he struggled in the first few sessions,” Whyte said.
“But he’s a focused young man. When he wants something, he puts his all into it and he goes for it.”
Muzondo ran a personal best of 21.02 seconds in the semi-finals. He was two hundredths of a second slower in the final, and it was enough for gold.
“We are elated. It’s something that we in the camp expected, but I don’t think the nation was ready for this,” said Whyte.
National Athletics Association of Zimbabwe president Tendayi Tagara never doubted Mzondo’s capabilities.
What he had seen in Oregon convinced him that he could handle the pressure in Dakar.
“I’m over the moon. I saw it coming,” Tagara said.
“When he left Zimbabwe, I just said ‘Mzondo must be in the final’.”
Tagara said the teenager should concentrate on his age-group as he builds towards another World Under-20 Championships in 2028, with his school Goldridge College in Kwekwe, parents and NAAZ helping him prepare for senior competition.
He will be part of the Zimbabwe team at the upcoming Region 5 Youth Games in Maputo, where he is due to run both the 200m and 400m.
