Bendere Oboya: The Run Back to Self
- Ann Odong
- Jun 19
- 9 min read
Season One of [un]written focuses on the rise of sportswomen with African ancestry who are Kuangazia Kesho "Illuminating tomorrow". They are the first generation of African Australians trailblazing in their fields and showing many from their communities what is possible.
It didn’t feel dramatic at the time. There was no press release. No final bow. No sobbing on the track.
Bendere Oboya just stopped.
She folded her spikes into a bag, stepped away from the lane lines, and let the silence take over.
“I hung up the spikes because I just wasn’t happy,” she says now, voice and eyes full of clarity. “There were things I was doing where I was like, ‘okay, cool. I don’t have anything else I want to achieve.’”
“I didn’t enjoy running as much anymore. I hadn’t braced myself when I was younger for that moment. I didn't have fun as much in my teens and so it all caught up to me when I was older.
“I felt like I’d done it all and then the fire was gone. I kept trying to light it up for years and years, but it just wasn’t working.”
She was 21. An Olympian. A Commonwealth Games finalist. One of the brightest young prospects in Australian athletics. And then she was done. It was all over.
At least she thought so. At least for a while.
What followed wasn’t a scandal or a spiral, but something more invisible and more radical: self-care. Real self-care.
The kind that doesn’t live in buzzwords or public prostration, but in the hard reckoning of learning what you need, when you need it, and who you are without the roar of a crowd. It was a quiet retreat from expectation. From ambition. From a sport that had once saved her but in the end she felt lost in.
In that absence, Bendere met herself again.
Not the fast girl from Pendle Hill. Not the 400m prodigy with effortless gliding stride and a signature beaming smile, but the woman who had learned to listen.
“I have tried not to connect running to my sense of self because when you leave the sport eventually, you don't want to be left depressed. You don't want to be left with nothing, so I now try to connect myself with my own real life.”
“Running has made me realise those things, but also realise I need a life outside of when I do stop being an athlete for good. I don't want to hold on to the sport for so long that I lose all sense of myself and my true worth.”
Having learned the lessons with the pause, she returned. Not because of unfinished business. But because, after everything, she finally wanted to run again.
You can trace the arc of Bendere Oboya’s story in medals and milestones, but it’s really better felt in the memories and moments of freedom and family.
The first time she ran with her brothers on the streets of Pendle Hill, racing the dark to avoid being last up the hill. The first time a coach noticed her stride. The first time she left school not to hang out with boys, but to train.
“At the beginning I didn’t know why I started running. Eventually running found me,” Bendere reflected. “I feel like I was in a position where I just reached the point where I realised “oh, I just like to run.”
“For me, it just made me feel normal. When I used to run at school and it would make me happy.”
“I used to say this all the time that my friends were leaving school to see boys. I was leaving to get my reps in,” she laughed. “That’s when I found my purpose. I wanted to see where I could go.”
“I still have that mentality right now. To see how far I can go with the sport and the places and cultures I can experience.”
In Australia, the sports system is a well-oiled machine. For many athletes, particularly young women of colour, it can become all-consuming. Especially when you’re one of the only ones.
Representation is about more than optics. It’s about mirrors. Like others in this series, for Bendere the lack of mirrors meant building her own reflection from scratch.
She became her own blueprint. Where others saw Cathy, she saw the need to be something else. Something new.
That identity was forged not just on the track, but in the home she shared with her family.
“My dad was smart. He made it easy for us,” she says. “He got a job teaching here. My mum had to figure out how to take the train, how to drop me at preschool, how to speak English. But she did it. We spoke Anuak at home. We kept the culture alive.”
Culture wasn’t just something preserved. It’s living and breathing and evolving in a home full of warmth and noise, loud aunties and long dinners. It’s where her dual identity stopped being a conflict and started becoming a gift.
“I love that I can shift,” she says. “I can be in the athlete space and then go home and be in full family mode, laughing and eating and yelling over each other in Anuak. It’s the balance that saves me.”
She talks with affection about childhood language lessons held in her cousin’s house, about the way her mother still reminds her to speak Anuak properly, about cultural decorations that never left the living room. All of it, an invisible platform that was the base she would return to on the hardest times.
“That part of me never left. Even when I felt lost, I could still walk in the door and hear mum calling my name in Anuak, and I knew who I was again. That’s what culture does. It anchors you.”
Before there was Gout Gout, there was Bendere. The spotlight came early and bright and with it the comparisons to greatness. Not Usain but an even greater spectre in our Australian sporting recollection – Cathy.
The spotlight brought with it the glare of expectations that cling like shadows to young prodigies.
At 17, she was at the Commonwealth Games. At 18, she was fielding interviews. At 21, she was walking into the Olympic Village in Tokyo, every camera picking her out of the team photo.
“I blinked, and I was one of the fastest in the world,” she says. “Then I blinked again, and I was at the Olympics.”
“I just go back to when I was younger and sitting on the couch watching Rio Olympics with my Dad when I was 16, and I said, I want to make that Australian team. I made sure I did everything to make the next Australian team, and that was Tokyo, but it was so incredibly fast.”
Catapulted into the national consciousness, everything became a kaleidoscope of expectations, emotions and opinions. All shifting faster than Bendere could make sense of as a teenager learning how to exist in public while still figuring out who she was in private.
“I feel like I didn't get to a chance to breathe,” she said taking a deep breath now. “Everything just kept going faster and faster. I couldn't control it, but now I wonder if I had paced myself a bit more, I feel like things would have been different.”
“We don’t talk about how much pressure we put on teenagers in sport. At that age, you don’t even know how to cook for yourself or understand your emotions.
“Suddenly you’re being told you're the next big thing, the next Cathy Freeman, the next hope. I didn’t even know what kind of music I liked but people were already assigning me a legacy.”
Sports psychology will tell you that the spotlight has weight. That achievement, if not accompanied by emotional support and identity grounding, can become disorienting.
For Bendere the speed of her rise didn’t allow space to pause and reflect. Every step forward on the track came with a subtle erosion of self. Although she wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, that erosion would lead to the collapse of the foundations of her self identity.
“I was always compared to someone. And I get it, people want to draw a line,” she says. “I mean, there was Cathy Freeman, and I respect her so much, but I wanted to be Bendere. I hadn’t even figured out who I was outside of the uniform.”
“I was still learning how to be a person. Still trying to make friends. Still dealing with ADHD and figuring out how to manage that. But all anyone wanted to know was how fast I could run.”
The performance highs were there. The victories, the headlines, the affirmations. However, the emotional scaffolding to hold it all up hadn’t been properly constructed.
She had run herself into a version of success, but not necessarily a version of herself. And deep down, Bendere knew that wasn’t sustainable.
“There were days I’d go home after a race and feel empty. I’d won, but I felt nothing. That’s when I started to worry.”
Sport, at its best, is a container for identity but it can also threaten to take over.
That’s where the psychology becomes personal.
Athletes like Bendere are taught to push through pain, override the voice of doubt, show up even when exhausted. That conditioning, while necessary at times, can also mute the deeper signals of fatigue, emotional overwhelm, burnout.
“You don’t want to be left with nothing when you stop running,” she says. “I had to make sure I had a life outside of it. That’s why I’m studying. That’s why I rest. That’s why I see my friends. You need to remember who you are without the spikes.”
It’s not just emotional self-care. It’s strategic resilience.
Psychologists now talk about dual identity in athletes. An ability to exist as both athlete and human. Those with strong dual identities are more likely to adapt post-retirement. They’re also more likely to perform better under pressure, because they aren’t relying solely on sport for self-worth.
Bendere figured that out before it completely broke her. It wasn’t without pain and hard-won self-actualisation.
“It's just that I'm only athlete from 9am to about 12pm sometimes. I do know I have to obviously keep hydrated and stretch and do all these things at night, but I do know when to switch off from an athlete.
“I feel it's also just important that you don't lose track of yourself. I think so many athletes lose themselves, but you can't let the sport lose you.
“Making sure you have something else you fall back to, whether it's something that you do for 10 minutes a day, or something that you enjoy, like going out and hanging out with your friends. I feel like that just makes you not kind of lose yourself in the sport.”
The return to the sport came with new spikes, a new coach, and a new distance.
“I switched to the 800 because I wanted to grow. The 400 was home, but I needed something else. I still haven’t made the Olympic team in the 800 yet. That’s the next goal. But I want a medal. I want to be the best in the world. That doesn’t change.”
But the fuel has.
This time, she wasn’t returning to pick up where she left off. She was stepping into something unfamiliar, unburdened by comparison. A new distance. A new training environment. A new city. A new standard that she writes for herself.
“Going to the 800 gave me room to breathe,” she says. “No one had expectations of me there. I wasn’t ‘that 400m girl’ anymore. I could just explore what I could be without carrying the story that had already been written about me.”
In some ways, the switch in events was symbolic. The 800 isn’t just double the distance. It demands a re-think of approach. A different kind of pacing, patience, and pain tolerance. You can’t go out hard and hold on. You have to learn your rhythm. You have to trust your own clock.
And that’s exactly what Bendere was doing with her life.
““Before I was running for validation. For people who put me on lists but now I’m running for me.
I train because I want to see how far I can go and not to meet an expectation someone else sets. I’m doing it on my terms.”
She’s not dismissive of the ambition. If anything, she’s hungrier than ever. Although now it’s an internal hunger driven by a redefined sense of purpose, grounded in wholeness.
The change of scenery, moving to Melbourne and finding a coach who saw her, not her résumé, helped reset her frame of mind.
“He believed in me when I didn’t. He gave me space to figure it out without pressure. I wasn’t just another name on a high-performance list. I was a person. That changed everything.”
She leans into visualisation now, not for control, but for connection. A ritual that grounds her before each race.
“Before every race, I visualise. I actually plan out my whole race plan. It's so weird because in the last couple years, and I've kept this on to myself, but every time when I'm coming the last 100 metres of the race, there actually is a little girl at the end, on the side of the 100 and she actually is watching me.”
She pauses, maybe for the first time in the conversation.
“There is a song that plays, and the lyrics say, “chase your crazy dreams”. That’s what I am doing now and hopefully that little girl watching is going to as well.”
Written by Ann Odong
Ann is a Ugandan-Australian storyteller, strategist, and advocate who has spent the past 20 years championing the voices of women in football and culturally diverse communities across the world.
The [female] athlete project is Australia's fastest growing women's sports platform, spotlighting the stories and achievements of women in sport. Listen to the weekly podcast the wrap on apple or spotify, or sign up to our weekly newsletter here.
Comments