Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 127, February 2020 | Page 36
TRACK & FIELD
Going for
Tokyo Gold
If all goes according to plan, South
African 100m record holder Akani
Simbine will line up for his race with
destiny on Monday 3 August, in the
100m final of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics
– and his goal will be simple. “Gold. I
want the gold. I want to win,” says the
most consistent sprinter ever produced
by Mzansi. – BY MANFRED SEIDLER
A
look through Akani Simbini’s stats shows just
how hugely impressive he has been in recent
years in the 100m sprint. Since breaking the
10-second barrier for the first time in 2015, he has
gone sub-10 a total of 24 times, has never been
ranked outside of the world top 20 in the event, and
for the last four years been ranked in the world’s top
10. His 9.89-second SA Record, run in 2016, makes
Akani the fourth-fastest African ever, and he claimed
the gold medals at both the 2018 Commonwealth
Games and Africa Championships.
A time of 9.93 in London two years earlier would
have earned him a World Champs silver medal, and
just four 100ths of a second separated second from
fourth in Doha in a very tight race, but Akani is frank
as to why he was so upset. “There were things that
I wish we had done in the season, training wise, that
we didn’t do. We tried to do things at kind of the last
minute and it obviously did not work out. I kept going
back to that and said to myself ‘if only I had done
this’. I knew in my races, and kept telling my coach,
Werner Prinsloo, that we need to fix that last part of
my race.”
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ISSUE 127 FEBRUARY 2020 / www.modernathlete.co.za
Before that he finished fifth at the Rio Olympics in
2016 and fifth at the World Championships in London
in 2017, and more recently took fourth place at last
year’s World Championships in Doha, but he was not
pleased with that performance. “I was upset. I was
angry and disappointed. I was upset with myself,
disappointed in myself.” That’s how Akani sums up
his immediate post-race reaction after the men’s
100m final in Doha on 28 September, where he ran a
season’s best time of 9.93 but had to settle for fourth.