27 May 2019

Presenting at a coaches’ conference in Gaborone recently, athletics coach, Justice Dipeba, said coaches were athletes’ parents, psychologists, mentors and advisors due to lack of other personnel.

He also shared his philosophy in making Isaac Makwala a world beater, adding that initially the athlete used to run 45 seconds in most of his races.

He said as they started to build  in the 2013-2014 seasons and Makwala improved, hence starting to run 44 seconds.

Consequently, Makwala was amongst three Africans who ran 200m under 20 seconds and beat his Personal Best of 45.25 more than 10 times.

Dipeba said in the 2015/2016 season, fans aired their misgivings through social media regarding Makwala performance and this distracted him.

“He lost focus because he was fighting with uncontrollable things and that affected his performance a lot, we even went to the extent of closing his Facebook account,” he said.

Dipeba said they saw huge improvement when he was out of Facebook because he was more responsible, controlled the way he handled situations, including how he handled the London 2017 issue.

In 2017, Makwala won the Diamond League trophy and did his races under 44 seconds three times in one season, finished season fastest in the world 200m, and he was first man ever to run under 20 sec and 44 sec in 200m and 400m in one meet.

Dipeba said they were successful in their endeavour because they built trust, confidence, formulating goals and ways to achieve such goals.

This resulted in the athlete registering a good performance, because he now had a positive attitude. ENDS