Putting God first

Christian shot putter Yemisi Ogunleye has credited her silver medal at the World Athletics Championship 2024 to her faith in God. She achieved a personal best of 20.19 metres, within three centimetres of becoming world champion.

Ogunleye’s victory comes at a good time, with preparations underway ahead of competing at the upcoming European Championships and Paris Olympic Games this summer.

However, despite winning silver in Glasgow, adding to her first-placed finish at the National Indoor Championships in February and two silver medals won last year, she spoke about why her faith in God helps her more than winning any medal ever could.

Ogunleye told en that without the Lord’s transformational power in her heart, her sporting career would probably have ended with a long-term knee injury during the early stages of her career.

The injury caused her to seriously consider ending her career, but her newly found faith in God gave her renewed hope, and entirely changed her outlook on the importance of sport in her life.

'Without my faith in Jesus and knowing that with God everything is possible, at that point I would have stopped...'

She said: ‘I think without my faith in Jesus and knowing that with God everything is possible, at that point I would have stopped if I didn’t have a prayerful mother, so I wouldn’t be where I am today simply because I wouldn’t have the faith that things would turn out well, because at that time I was still in the stage of bad and negative thoughts. So [my career] wouldn’t have continued at that point.’

Ogunleye, who competes for Germany, was brought up by a Christian mother and attended church in her youth with her family, but ‘really didn’t have a close relationship with Jesus at that time’.

Her brother decided to stop attending church during his teens, and she had to overcome significant doubts, negative thoughts and an identity crisis before a personal encounter with God changed everything.

Ogunleye’s knee injury ‘shook’ her identity, but she praises God for bringing her back to church during this time, and she now regards faith as the ‘foundation’ for her life, and from where she derives true happiness and worth. 

She said: ‘I attended church a lot [during that time] and I started attending the choir, and started my service in church and gave this whole God thing a chance again, and for the first time opened up my heart, and it was then that I had an encounter with God at a really dark moment in my life where he spoke to me and he said, ‘My daughter, I love you and I have a plan for you.’

‘I knew that that could only be God speaking to me, and that encounter just turned everything upside down… God really changed my heart towards sports, that the result and what I gain from it is not who I am, but what he says about me is real and he loves me.’