It was good to be an African last week. It is not every day that we get to forgot all our troubles (and throw all worries to the four winds) for the length of all 7 days! It was good news after good news: We hauled 25 medals from the IAAF World Championships. Not terribly shabby considering the perennial table leader, the United States, had 29. To make a show of it, the Ugandan competitors thumbed down their noses at the tables bearing silver and bronze; they went home with only gold! Two golds, in the same week the country was celebrating its 57th independence anniversary that aptly came with the delivery of two additional new planes to the Pearl of Africa’s bombardier fleet. But that, like they say, was just the beginning.

We had a record breaking performance by Brigid Kosgei at the Chicago Marathon, a little more than 24 hours after Eluid Kipchoge’s historic win. This one week, It really didn’t matter who was President, except of course in Ethiopia where the evangelical Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, was deservingly awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

It was a good week!

But how do we go beyond the present euphoria to making winning part of our collective DNA? Indulge me as I drift off to a world of what-ifs and what-abouts.

Am an avid runner, and as a track and field enthusiast, I have, over the decades followed with keen interest the professional lives of the track and field luminaries in the montaged picture, with the exception of Jesse Owens.(Yeah. Am not that old; to not know what happened before you were born is to forever remain a child!)

At the height of his career, 23 year-old Carl Lewis won 4 gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics (am ashamed to mention the total number of medals Africa walked away with). A short (Leroy) Burrell and (Asafa) Powell years later, Usain Bolt made Lewis’ performance look every bit pedestrian.

Jesse Owens, the son of a sharecropper and a grandson of former slaves, is credited for single-handedly crushing Adolf Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Totally vexed by the colored American’s series of triumphs, Hitler walked out of the stadium after shaking hands with the German victors. I suppose the very thought of handing Jesse Owens his haul of 4 gold medals in his (Hitler’s) own backyard was, to say the least, revolting. And yet, for all his glory, if Owens was running today, you would be excused for thinking the man was only running for exercise. Not to win. His running style and technique would roundly be considered so old.edu today. Yes, he would tail the pack of today’s elite runners.

Forget the fact that he was recognized in his lifetime as “perhaps the greatest and most famous athlete in track and field history.” Forget the fact that, in 1935, he set 3 world records and tied another, all in less than an hour – a feat that has never been equaled and has been called “the greatest 45 minutes ever in sport.”

Point of my story? Someone will come along and break Eliud Kipchoge’s sub 2-hour marathon record, and that in a non-controlled environment. And we will have many more Nobel Prizes. Africans are more than just peace makers and pace-setters at marathons!

What was good about last week is that not only are precedents being set but barriers are being broken. Africa’s children are being shown, first hand by their very own, that what has been declared impossible is actually possible. That change of narrative and paradigm is most potent. Am a mountaineer. Before Hillary Edmund and Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay summited Mount Everest in the late Spring of 1953, this “peak of heaven” was only to be looked at from a safe distance. A short 66 years later? In excess of 9800 climbs have been recorded. What changed? Your guess is as good as mine. PS. My target is to get up there before the 10,000th climber. If only my wife and daughters would let a man be!