Letsile Tebogo: Ultimate Championships provide emotional return to Budapest

Those memories now sit alongside everything that has happened since for Tebogo.

A year on from his success at the 2023 World Championships, Tebogo scaled greater heights by becoming Botswana’s first Olympic champion when he won the 200m at the Paris 2024 Games, carrying his mother’s initials on both his shoes and fingernails as a tribute.

He returns to Budapest as one of the faces of a new competition created to bring together the sport’s best performers.

The Ultimate Championships is a biennial global event designed to crown the best of the best in a track and field season.

The three-day end-of-season competition includes Olympic champions, world champions, Diamond League winners and the year’s other leading performers.

The inaugural edition in Budapest, which runs from 11-13 September, has a $10m (£7.41m) prize pot – the highest in track and field history according to organisers World Athletics – with each gold medallist taking home $150,000 (£111,000).

Tebogo, who helped Botswana to gold in the 4x400m at the World Relays on home soil earlier this year before registering 200m wins at the Diamond League events in Oslo and Lausanne, says the 200m in Budapest will not only be about looking back.

He is one of the team captains for the Kids’ Athletics Ultimate Challenge, where young people from across the city will be invited to participate in activities at the Gyula Zsivotzky National Athletics Centre the day before the Ultimate Championships begin.

That will give him the chance to share some of the lessons he has learned since first stepping onto the global stage.

“I believe firstly you should start with accountability,” he said.

“Think about your preparation, how you want your journey or your season to be, and then also think of unwavering sportsmanship.

“I would love them to have that unwavering sportsmanship, so that they can share lanes, they can cheer for one another.”