Tears of joy at capping ceremony for Olympian matric pupil Walaza

Matric pupil Bayanda Walaza received a new blazer and cap during an emotional ceremony at his Curro Hazeldean school on Monday morning, but the sprinter won’t be able to escape his schoolwork at the Paris Olympics.

The 18-year-old, a member of the 4x100m relay who flies out on Sunday, will have to log in to attend his regular classes for his stay in France, which will last nearly four weeks.

His mother Tholiwe, a merchandiser for a local supermarket, and Thabo “Coach T” Matebedi, were also present on the stage during the capping ceremony in a packed hall attended by fellow Olympian, 400m hurdler Zeney Geldenhuys.

The pupils in the hall cheered loudly, but once Walaza, an only child, and his mother, a single parent, embraced and the tears started flowing, his schoolmates stood up and roared their applause at even greater volume.

Never before has the school produced an Olympian from their classes, so the striped jacket he received was a first for the institution.

Ms Walaza, who rents a back room in Katlehong, said her son may be a star at school and on the track, but away from the limelight he was a regular guy.

“When he’s at home, he’s Bayanda, he washes dishes.”

She recalled how her son had always been active, doing athletics, soccer and karate when he was younger.

“He just likes sports. Even if there is a trip to go to attend something, Bayanda would wake up early in the morning. But when it’s time to go to school, you have to wake Bayanda ... I once got a call that Bayanda bunked the class,” she recalled of his primary school days.

Now a boarder at the Pretoria-based school, Walaza’s on track to study logistics at the University of Pretoria. “It’s not as fun as athletics, athletics comes with fun in it ... but I also like doing schoolwork, but ja, athletics.”

Maths wasn’t his favourite. “I’m doing maths lit,” he said. “I tried doing maths, but it was not going my way. My mother even found me a [tutor], but it didn’t go the way we thought it was going to go. So I told my mother ‘You know what, let’s just save that money, so I just do maths lit.”

Ms Walaza hadn’t expected the ceremony to be as emotional as it was, with both she and her son wiping tears from their eyes.

She recalled that her son used to cry a lot as a child, having witnessed his father getting shot dead in an argument while, at the age of 10, he was visiting him during a school holiday in KwaZulu-Natal.

“It was very traumatic for him. We found someone who advised us to go to counselling, to social workers, and then we got counselling.”

In the past year he’s made his name on the national scene, finishing second in the 100m behind Akani Simbine at the South African championships and then starting off the relay in their qualifying run at World Relays in Bahamas in early May.

A video of that relay was shown in the hall to start the capping ceremony, again to massive applause.

Walaza, who has a 10.13 sec personal best in the 100m, admitted he was more nervous taking on Simbine at the national championships than he was at World Relays.

“I was thinking a lot. When I was training I was ‘I’ll beat Akani, I’ll beat Akani’ and then I don’t know what happened, I was like ‘Akani’s here’ ...

“Bahamas, I was just cool with it,” said Walaza, who has a hectic schedule coming up.

He heads to France where he will spend about the first two weeks at the national athletics team’s training camp in Montpellier before heading to the village in Paris.

When he gets home he has to write his matric prelim exams and then he heads off to his main competition, the world under-20 championships in Peru from August 27-31.

That’s why he’ll be streaming into classes from France — not even the Olympics can get him off. “I think I can escape it [classes] if maybe there’s a class while I’m at the stadium, maybe training.”

Matebedi, a former sprinter who missed out on running the 4x100m relay at the 2009 world championships in Berlin after getting injured, pointed out how the school had played a huge role assisting them.

Relying on public transport, he was initially unable to train Walaza when he arrived at Hazeldean in mid-2023 — so they bought him a car.

And they’re sending him along with the athlete to France to look after him.

Walaza used to be called “Wobble Wobble” because of his flailing arms as he races down the track, but Matebedi said he wasn’t planning to change that.

“If you look at his arms, he always starts doing that after 60 metres, 70m, so I’m not going to change [that] because his arms, his brain and his body, that’s how they’re connected,” said the coach, who has trained three other athletes who went on to the Olympics, including Gift Leotlela and Clarence Munyai.

“That is his survival mechanism ... other guys are coming for him so his brain says: ‘I need to survive this, I’m under pressure’.

“If you change it, you are taking away his survival tool, so we’re not going to change that. He’s running fast in that style, so you can’t fix something that is not broken.”

Walaza isn’t just surviving — he’s thriving.