Volume 50 Issue 9 - September 2012 : Sports
No Fancy Lifestyle For Amos
Author : Mothusi Soloko
From the bright lights of London to the dusty rural village of Marobela, London 2012 800m silver medalist, Nijel Amos, remains an unchanged man. Infact as the interview drags on he occasionally interrupts the conversation to chat with his friends back from his home village, a confirmation that since joining the elite world of sport instant fame has not gone to his head.
“Nothing has changed about me, I still do the same things that I used to do before winning the silver medal. I relax at home and chat with my friends,” he says. Before he ascended the world stage to receive his silver, Amos played social soccer for his home club, Makula. However, he is now contemplating quitting to focus on the track.
“I have to avoid injuries and anything that may distract me from my endeavour to stay relevant and continue winning and I have decided that I will no longer play soccer,” he explains. As he basks in the breezes of fortune that earned him over P700 000, Amos has already knows where to invest the money. His dreams are far from those of his peers. His talk is not that of fancy cars or clothes. Instead, he is passionate about investing in cattle farming. With close to P1 million in his pocket, Amos has no intention of ditching his rural background to relocate to a more urbanized area. Conversely, his intention is to stay at the cattle post looking after his cattle.
“I am going to buy cattle and drill a borehole at the cattle post with the money that I have. Throughout my childhood I have always stayed at the cattle post and that’s where my heart is,” he quips. While he is still immersed in the pleasure of winning silver medal as a newcomer, he is, however, also aware of the challenges ahead. One of them is to beat Kenyan athletes, David Rudisha, for him to be counted amongst the world greatest. In all fairness, this is an uphill battle.
“Rudisha is my role model. We talked before the final race and he told me how he was going to run the race. But toppling him is not going to be easy. He is a lead runner and I am a back runner, I have to learn to be a lead runner for me to be beat him but that will not be easy,” he admits. Ironically, while the rest of the nation raptured in the razzmatazz of the youngster’s silver, Amos himself was celebrating the time he took to run the race. “I was happy about the time and not the medal. I have won several medals before this event and the time I took to run the race is a sign that I am improving.
That made me happy because it is sign that I have the potential to win gold,” he reckons. Now with the Olympics over, his next focus is the Southern African Junior champions where he hopes to bag another medal as well. ENDS