How Luvo Manyonga overcame drug addiction to become an Olympic medallist and role model

Luvo Manyonga reckons he should have been dead. His voice doesn’t flinch as he says this. It doesn’t quiver with fear or gets weighed down by emotion. He says it with the deadpan conviction of a man who has seen the worse coming for him and survived by the sheer force of his will. Manyonga is 26 years of age. He is a Rio Olympics silver medal-winning long-jumper. A 2017 World Championships gold medallist. An icon for South African youngsters. Back in another life, Manyonga used to be a drug abuser, addicted to ‘tik’, a local variant of crystal meth in South Africa. Back in another life, Manyonga had been banned from competitive sport for 18 months after testing positive for meth. Back in another life, Manyonga should have been, as he puts it, dead. [caption id=“attachment_4234051” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Luvo Manyonga competes in the final of the men’s long jump event at the 2017 IAAF World Championships. AFP[/caption] “During the days when I was addicted, there were two nights when I was sleeping under a bridge. I was staying under the bridge and struggling to sleep at night because of the drugs. I was just trying to get through the night. I kept thinking that my life is gone. I had run away from my family just to go sleep under the bridge. And I almost died at one stage under that bridge, because there were people there who were taking everything away from me,” Manyonga recollects during a conference call with select journalists on Tuesday. Just this month, he was nominated for the Laureus Best Sporting Moment for the month of November. “But even during my darkest days I always thought of long jump. I’ve always been active in sports, not only long jump. Like just jumping in general. If you go to my Instagram account, there’s a video of me jumping over a car. In that video, I was on some stuff, you know, like high, and the video shows that even when I was using, I was jumping all the time. I used to jump over people. Or I just used cars as an obstacle to jump over,” he adds. The nights under the bridge were when Manyonga knew he would have to break the hold the addiction had on him. Rather unconventionally, he chose to seek help publicly, on national TV. “I thank God I came to my senses. I was always asking for support even if I was high or not. I decided I need help and I went to ETV, a national TV station in South Africa and asked for an interview to share my weakness. So, I went for that interview and I spread the word that I need help and asked if there is anyone out there who wanted to help me. This was in 2014 and that’s when people stepped up and said ‘we’re going to help this young man.’” But more than anyone else, Manyonga needed to help himself out. Soon, he found himself in Pretoria at South Africa’s High Performance Centre, one of the best sports academies in the country, a move which he says changed his life and focus. His talent was never in doubt — Manyonga had won the long jump event at the 2010 World Junior Championships in Canada and was fifth at the senior World Championships a year later. But now, with distractions out of his life, he was poised for bigger glories. Flight of faith Manyonga vividly remembers the time he was boarding the plane from South Africa to Rio de Janeiro last year — a 6,000-odd kilometre journey traversing the South Atlantic Ocean. For him the journey was indelible because it represented how far he had come as a person and as an athlete, not how far the airplane was taking him from his home. If the nights under the bridge were a metaphor for the time when he almost went under, the plane journey to Rio was a metaphor for how his life and career were on their way up — he was after all headed to the Rio Olympics to compete under the South African flag.

For Manyonga, what was to come in Rio — he won a silver medal at the long jump event with a jump of 8.37m, just a centimetre behind American gold medallist Jeff Hederson — was secondary. Making it to the flight in itself was redemption.

“To qualify for the Olympics and to be on that flight to Rio is my proudest moment. That’s because it brings back memories of 2012 when I felt like I was stranded, that was like a bad moment of my life. Just to be on the plane to Rio was an amazing feeling,” Manyonga recounts. You would normally expect an athlete to balk at even the idea of discussing sordid topics such as drugs and addiction in these times when sportspersons cultivate their image as meticulously as they work on their bodies. But Manyonga talks at length about the time he was in the grip of addiction, like the person he is talking about is not him, but someone else he knew well many years ago. In a way, Manyonga is not the same person. While the Rio silver medal propelled him and his story under the harsh arclights, he was still known internationally as the former drug addict who had achieved athletic success. [caption id=“attachment_4234053” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] South Africa’s Luvo Manyonga jumps in the final of the men’s long jump event at the 2017 IAAF World Championships. AFP[/caption] That narrative changed earlier this year when he won gold at the World Championships in London with a leap of 8.48m. “It was a great competition in London but I had mixed emotions. I was in tears (when I won gold), not because of winning, but because of looking back on my life, how hard I went and how hard I fought to become the world champion,” Manyonga says three months on. “Even though I was not under pressure, getting up on that podium, it felt like all the weight on my shoulders just disappeared. It was like I had been carrying the whole world on my shoulders, being known as an addict. Many people don’t respect an addict, you know, and always want to push them down. But that moment showed how great the power of change and the Almighty God are. “Now, I don’t owe anyone an explanation, as long as I’m focusing on my career and focusing on what I can do in this world. We need people who are positive in life and who are going to change the world.” The gold medal was also an indicator that life had come full circle. The South African has become a role model not just in his home country, but the world. Luvo is now a symbol for those who are haunted by demons of their own — the region where he comes from, after all, still has a high drug addiction rate — that redemption is possible. “Yes, absolutely,” he says on being asked if he now inspires those fighting against addiction to lead a different life. “Because they have seen the things that I’ve been through, and some of those kids out there are struggling with exactly what I was struggling with. So, wherever I go, I see kids smiling, giving me like a warm welcome. It’s a great thing that wherever I walk, I change lives. I want to help them not only to live, I want to give what I have now to a new generation so it can pass to another generation and so on.”