Bendere Oboya

A star in the making

The youngest of six, Bendere Oboya was always sprinting to keep up with her siblings, never realising that one day she would parlay that into a world-class career. “We used to run everywhere,” the Ethiopian-born athlete recalls. “My brothers ran off ahead, so I was always racing to catch up.”

Still, young Bendere never gave much hint of the talent that has seen her compared to 400m legends Cathy Freeman and Jana Pittman. “Running wasn’t something I was particularly good at,” she says. “I lost at school. I didn’t make my first state championships for so long!”

So why did she persist? “I just loved it,” she explains. “I was never a great student and I was very shy. With athletics, I could close off and be myself. My confidence started to come out and I knew if I trained well, I would get there one day. I knew there was so much more in me.”

Bendere, who moved to Australia as a three-year-old, also made a critical observation in her teenage years: all of the winners at the Little Athletics meets had coaches. She duly found herself one, and her times dropped so dramatically that she seemed to burst onto the national scene out of nowhere. In just over a year, Bendere had sliced more than 22 seconds from her 400m personal best (PB) to become the 2017 Commonwealth Youth champion.

Since then, she has gone from strength to strength. In April, on her 21st birthday, she won the national 400m title with a time of 52.20 seconds to secure her spot in Tokyo. Two years earlier, at the World Championships in Doha, she’d posted a Tokyo qualifying time and current PB of 51.21 – just outside Cathy Freeman’s under-20 PB of 51.14. “I look back at that race and know I had so much more,” Bendere says. “I just never realised I was that close to her.”

While the comparisons to the Sydney 2000 gold medallist are flattering, Bendere says she would rather be known as “the first Bendere Oboya” than “the next Cathy Freeman”. “I look up to myself,” she says. “I know it’s weird saying that, but I know what I have gone through and how many times I’ve had to pick myself back up.”

Bendere is open about the mental health struggles she endured in 2019, which almost saw her give up her Olympic dream. It took a change of coaches to reignite her passion, she says. “I now have a coach who really cares about my mental health.” John Quinn was the sprint and relay coach for the Australian track and field team at the 2000 Olympics.

At 21, Bendere is still a relative baby in the 400m event, where athletes tend to peak in their late 20s. Cathy Freeman was 27 when she won her gold medal with a time of 49.11. Yet Bendere is not letting her youth limit her ambitions. “My coach always tells me, ‘You are not here to volunteer, you are here to compete,’” she insists. “I am going to put everything on the line in this race. My goal is 50 seconds.

“Of course, anything faster than that I will take too!”