{"id":7517,"date":"2024-11-30T18:11:37","date_gmt":"2024-11-30T18:11:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/emmanuel-wanyonyi-from-herdsboy-to-olympic-800m-champion\/"},"modified":"2024-11-30T18:11:37","modified_gmt":"2024-11-30T18:11:37","slug":"emmanuel-wanyonyi-from-herdsboy-to-olympic-800m-champion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/emmanuel-wanyonyi-from-herdsboy-to-olympic-800m-champion\/","title":{"rendered":"Emmanuel Wanyonyi: From herdsboy to Olympic 800m champion"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Growing up in extreme poverty in a small village in western Kenya, Emmanuel Wanyonyi’s daily life was marked by hardships.<\/b><\/p>\n

Forced out of school aged 10, he worked long hours herding cattle. Sometimes he earned less than $2 (\u00a31.58) a month.<\/p>\n

Wanyonyi endured exploitation, switching jobs regularly after sometimes going unpaid, yet the man who would become the reigning Olympic 800m champion<\/a> persisted because shelter and food were provided.<\/p>\n

“Life, and looking after cattle as a kid, was tough,” Wanyonyi told BBC Sport Africa.<\/p>\n

“I thought of quitting the job and going back home but remembered that I would still face the same challenges I was running away from.<\/p>\n

“When I got something small, I would take it home to my siblings so they could have something to eat.”<\/p>\n

One of 11 children, Wanyonyi had no choice but to leave school as his family could not afford exam fees of just 40 Kenyan shillings ($0.30\/24 pence).<\/p>\n

He eventually managed to return to education with some of the earnings gathered from his time as a herdsboy and a stint as a labourer, and discovered a sense of purpose and escape in athletics.<\/p>\n

Then came the sudden and unexplained death of his father, who worked as a caretaker at a dam, in 2018.<\/p>\n

“He had just dropped by the school to give me some money to buy running shoes with the payment he got that day,” Wanyonyi, now 20, explained.<\/p>\n

“It’s like he was strangled and placed by the water. He was found with a mark on his head as if he was hit.<\/p>\n

“What I think happened is that he placed his clothes there to swim and then someone came to rob him.”<\/p>\n

With no official post-mortem, Wanyonyi says his family “never found closure”.<\/p>\n

“That day, my world fell apart. It was painful but I didn’t have the luxury of grieving. I had to become the man of the house immediately.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Growing up in extreme poverty in a small village in western Kenya, Emmanuel Wanyonyi’s daily life was marked by hardships. Forced out of school aged 10, he worked long hours herding cattle. Sometimes he earned less than $2 (\u00a31.58) a month. Wanyonyi endured exploitation, switching jobs regularly after sometimes going unpaid, yet the man who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7518,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-athletics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7517"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7519,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7517\/revisions\/7519"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}