In the afternoon, Praise Olatoke fell asleep in his hotel room listening to Passenger. 

The biggest race of his collegiate career at Trinity Western University was on the docket – the 60m at the 2020 U SPORTS Championship. 

He eats part of a bag of Oreo minis. More on that later. 

The second-year Olatoke, 19, dances up and down the track, warming up to his favourite music. The chill stuff takes a back as the race nears. 

In the preliminaries, he walks across the finish line in a heat-winning time of 6.81 – equaling his personal record and the TWU school record. 

Then comes to the final. The 60m record is going to fall. 

Sure enough.

Olatoke flies across the line in 6.75, crushing his own Spartans record. He's smiling. He didn't win and for the moment, he finished third, but he knows things are just getting going in 2020 and he's already moving faster than ever before. 
 
How was it?

"Ahh…the race felt a little sloppy."

You get the sense (really!) big things are in his very near future.  

After the winner is disqualified due to a late-detected false start, Olatoke's medal is improved to silver. 

Later in the night, he runs a scorching anchor leg of the 4x200m relay, taking the baton and bringing TWU from fourth to third in their heat and nearly tracking down the top two down the home stretch. He still has the 300m to run at the national championships and the 4x200m final. 

Then, the 19-year-old from Lagos, Nigeria via Glasgow, Scotland has a bright sprinting career on the horizon.

Follow along. This is going to be fun. 


Olatoke has always been fast.

Olatoke was born in Nigeria, where he lived for the first five years of his life. It was there, barefooted on the streets of Lagos, where his need for speed began to germinate. 

"I remember it just being fun, running around in the streets," Olatoke says. "I never had shoes on. Maybe that's why I became so athletic. But, yea, I was always the fast kid."

In those days, he and his friends weren't doing sprinting races. The choice competition was skipping races. Olatoke still regularly beat the older kids. 

They also did swimming races. 

We're you a good swimmer too? 

"Not at all."

So, fortunately for Spartan fans and Olatoke himself, he stuck with his land speed. 


When Olatoke woke up after only a couple hours of sleep on a coach that was too short for his 6-foot-3 frame and having eaten far too little the night before, no one would have predicted what was to come in the 200m race at the 2019 Ken Shannon Invitational at the University of Washington. 

Travelling from Langley, B.C. to Seatlte on an early-May morning, Olatoke and Sinclair's two-year-old son, Nicholas (he thinks Praise is the coolest!), both drifted in and out of sleep. Like a long family road trip, the kids were resting while Sinclair navigated to the on-campus outdoor track. 

Upon arrival, Olatoke woke up. He was hungry. 

He went to a nearby corner store and purchased a Red Bull drink, a doughnut and a bag of Oreos minis. 

That is not a typo.

He spilled most of Red Bull – "that annoyed me" – but he finished the doughnut and all but emptied the bag of Oreos. That was all the pre-race food he consumed. Olatoke then took another nap in the infield. 

Sinclair woke him up not long before his race. 

After running around to get his race registration and number sorted just before the race – (He was literlaly running from one end of the track to the other right before his actual race) – he settled into the blocks. 

"I felt okay," Olatoke says. "I didn't feel amazing."

Coming around the corner, he looked relaxed. 

"He came off the bend looking like he's seven feet tall," Sinclair says. "His knees were so high and he looked like he was just in a different class than anyone else in the race."

He pulled away from the field down the stretch. 

"I wasn't tired at all. I just said lift your knees and go."

His performance was next level. 

Looking at his winning time, Olatoke had his hands out wide, his eyes even wider and a big smile. Was this real?

The clock said 21.20. His previous 200m best had been an indoor time 22.08 from a year earlier at the Scottish University Championships. 

"I was waiting for the time to readjust, but it didn't," Olatoke says. "I was so hyped."

The trio returned to the car. Nicholas and Olatoke shared the rest of the Oreos on the way home.

"Praise and Nicholas are pretty good friends," Sinclair says with a laugh. "Nicholas had an awesome day with his big idol." 

For the next two months, Oreos were called Praise Cookies in the Sinclair household. 

The race marked a monster breakout for Olatoke. Not only was it a huge personal best, but it also gave him the 200m qualifying time for the 2019 European Athletics U20 Championships.

In one race, his summer's trajectory and his career's trajectory took off. 

He went on to represent Great Britain in a meet in Germany in late June, where he lowered his personal best to 20.95. That ultimately set the stage for getting the call from Team GB that he'd be representing the Union Jack at the European Athletics U20 Championships.  

The day he got his Team GB kit, he laid it all out on his bed. 

"It was crazy," he says. 

His journey rushed through his mind. 

The journey that took him Nigeria to Kinning Park in  Scotland, where he and his mother, Nike Olatoke, joined his father, James Olatoke, who was already in Scotland working on a PhD. His journey that brought him from Scotland to the TWU campus in Langley, B.C. and back across the Atlantic Ocean to represent Great Britain. 

He recalled his childhood in Cardonald – the Glaswegian neighbourhood where his family moved a year after arriving in Scotland. 

"It wasn't rough at all, but it still had a bit of an edgy, street vibe to it," Olatoke says.  "If I looked through my window, I could see gangs on the other side of the river. 

"If I walked a little bit, you could see gangs, drugs and some rough stuff."

Sport was Olatoke's way to avoid the nearby perils. 

"I had a really good group of friends who lived on the same street," he says. "Every day, we'd play football in the streets. That's where I learned to play. I was trash at first. That definitely kept me away from some other stuff.

"Basically, we'd play football and watch movies." 

Amidst the street games, an eight-year-old Olatoke was also already being influenced by a high-flying speedster from Jamaica. Watching Usain Bolt win both the 100m and 200m in the Olympics in Beijing in 2008, Olatoke was enamoured. Four year later, with the Olympics in London, Bolt was about to run in the 100m final and Olatoke was even more dialed in to the television in his family's living room. 

His dad asked Praise to grab the laundry that was drying in the backyard. Olatoke's protest didn't work. 

Perhaps Olatoke's never moved faster. 

"I ran to the garden and got the clothes and ran back in, but I made the race," he recalls. 

Bolt won again in an Olympic record time of 9.63.

"I always think about that race," Olatoke says. 

While Bolt was the hero of the day, Olatoke was still using his speed in long jump.  

When he was still 14 years old, in June of 2015, he jumped a personal best 6.41m – a mark that would have had him seventh at this year's Canada West championships. 

However, after his 2015, he took a year off away from track and field. 

Following his year-long hiatus from the sport, his journey to TWU began, as he returned to track and field, in 2017, with Jamie Sinclair's father, Colin Sinclair, as his new coach. 

He switched to short sprints and his career as a speedster – one that began many years ago in Lagos – started to flourish. 

Two years later, he walked onto the campus of TWU and started a record-setting career as a Spartan. 

The competitive fun soon began between Olatoke and fellow sprinting star and close friend Kenny Blackman Jr. 

"Who's faster – Praise or Kenny?"

"That was sick," Olatoke says. "I enjoy that stuff."

The much taller Praise was constantly pushed by the quick-out-of-the-blocks Blackman Jr. 
 
"He helped me with my start a lot," Olatoke says. "It's still nowhere near as good as it should be, but because he's such a prolific starter and his acceleration is really good, that pushed me a lot."

But you're faster than Kenny, right? (says an inquisitive mind with a wry smile) 

"Yea for sure," Olatoke says with a smile and a chuckle.

The duo have pushed each other to success, with Blackman Jr. winning Canada West gold in 2019 and Olatoke equaling the performance in 2020. Then, when they teamed up with the 4x200m team this year, the Spartans won their first-ever Canada West gold medal. 


Having tasted international competition, Olatoke came back to TWU this past fall with an even greater level of drive and desire to succeed.

"Now, in training, he is at the front of the pack and he's setting the pace," Jamie Sinclair says. "He has a new hunger for the sport and he understood what he can achieve. Now, he's really come on."

For Olatoke, the 2020 indoor season has been all about breaking records. 

In his first meet of the year in Edmonton at the Golden Bear Open, he set TWU's then-60m record at 6.82 and also ran a personal best 34.61 to win the 300m. Two weeks later, he set the Spartans 200m record at 21.35 at the University of Washington Invitational (Jan. 31), which was also an indoor personal record for Olatoke. A week after that, at the New Mexico Collegiate Classic (Feb. 7), he lowered the TWU 200m record to 21.25, before equaling his 60m record (6.82) the following day.

Then, at the Canada West championships, he won 60m gold while once again shaving time off the TWU record, setting it at 6.81. He also won silver in with a personal best time in the 300m (34.16) and, of course, that first-ever 4x200m gold for TWU.

That set the table for his return to Edmonton for this national championships, which will put out the place settings for the next chapter in his track and field career.

"I want to be that success story," Olatoke says. "I want to be the guy who made it and I want to help look after my parents because they looked after me.

"I just want to be the best."

Keep following along, It's going to be fun.