06 Mar 2017

Botswana 400m athlete, Lydia Jele has qualified for the 2017 IAAF World Championships to be held in London in August.
Jele showed her early season form and qualified after clocking 51:69 in some competition held in Pretoria, South Africa on March 4.

She is the first woman to qualify and she joins other 400m runners, Baboloki Thebe and Karabo Sibanda and the 800m specialist, Nijel Amos.
Immediately after the race, Jele said in an interview that she was excited to have hit the 400m qualifying mark.

“I enjoyed the race and I am happy that I have qualified. The weather here was just perfect unlike in my two races back home where it was raining. It is always good to qualify early because it eases a lot of pressure,” she said.

Now that she had qualified, she said it was up to her coach, Justice Dipeba, to determine whether there would any changes in her training plan.
On th other hand, Dipeba was also happy with Jele’s perfromance saying “I am very proud that she qualified early because that alone indicates that training is going well. We had anticipated that she would hit the mark and having done so soon will surely boost her confidence.”

He added that Jele was happy with the time and was looking forward to working hard to better her times.
Nonetheless, he said there was no need to change their training programme saying “we will try as much as possible to stick to what we had planned for this season. We will change the programme only when we approach the London competition. We will adjust where necessary. We know things might change if she gets invitations to compete overseas.”

Further, Dipela was also optimistic that with many good competitions, more athletes would hit the qualifying mark.
Meanwhile, this was not the first time Jele had qualified for a major competition. She had qualified for the Rio Olympic Games with a personal best of 51:50 last year. ENDS