Letsile Tebogo Discloses Main Reasons Behind Difficult 2025 Season

Olympics 200m champion Letsile Tebogo says the exertions of the 2023 and 2024 seasons caught up with him in 2025, leading to a drop off in some of his performances.

Tebogo was not at his brilliant best in most of his races last year and hit a low at the World Championships in Tokyo when he failed to get a medal in his favourite 200m and got disqualified from the 100m final.

Having struck Olympics gold in 200m and stayed largely unbeaten over the distance as well as a number of wins in 100m in 2024, Tebogo could not replicate those performances last year when he won a couple of 200m races in the Diamond League but missed out in two others, including the final.

In 100m, he could not win any of his four meets, the best being third place while the others returned two seventh place finishes and eighth in another one even though he stayed unbeaten at home.

His hopes of finishing the season with a flourish at the 2025 World Championships went up in smoke when he failed to add a world title to his Olympics gold, finishing a disappointing fourth in the 200m final, his specialty, while in the 100m final he was disqualified over a false start.

“Last 2025 was an off-season because I wasn’t at my best mentally, physically,” Tebogo said in Rome on Wednesday ahead of the Diamond League meeting in the Italian capital on Thursday.

The 22-year-old feels he needed a break but could not get it in a championship year in 2025 which had a huge impact on his performances. There was a silver lining, however, when he was part of Botswana’s 4x400m relay team that won gold.

“It was just an off-year even though we made it into each and every final but I believe we needed that break, as much as people really know how much impact that gold medal and what we had to go through for that gold medal. So, I believe now until 2028, is all about having fun until we decide to leave the sport,” added Tebogo, who is keen to use 2026 as his season to recharge given there is no major championship before next year’s Worlds in Beijing and then the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Tebogo has still had mixed fortunes in 2026 as while he won 4x400m gold with his Team Botswana colleagues at the World Relays in May, he has followed it up with three Diamond League losses, finishing seventh and then eighth in the 100m in Shanghai and Xiamen before second place in 200m in Rabat last week.

He will hope for better tidings in Rome this week where he will run the 100m but he is up against a strong field that includes American Noah Lyles, Kenya’s Ferdinand Omanyala, who has been in great form, as well as South Africa’s Akani Simbine.