Sosanya is a sprinter in the 100m, 200m and 400m distances and recently travelled to Sheffield with UEL for the BUCS Indoor Athletics Championships. Sosanya helped his team to win a bronze medal in the 4x200m relay, despite some controversy surrounding the heats and the final of the race.
Athletics is often a sport that is overlooked compared to the likes of football, rugby, volleyball or basketball. However, Sosanya gave some insight in to how he began to take his sport seriously and who got him in to the sport.
Sosanya told Rising East: “I probably started athletics seriously when I was 14 or 15, I was doing it since primary school, but I didn’t take it seriously until quite later.”
Humble Beginnings
Sosanya comes from humble beginnings and admits to struggling to find an athletics club close to where he lived, making it difficult for him to start taking the sport seriously.
The sprinter said: “I just never had a club near where I lived to be fair. In primary school I used to win everything at sports day and all the competitions, but I didn’t have any club. I didn’t know any clubs other than my school.
“When I got to secondary school and I heard about a club my cousin told me and she was at an athletics club and the moment she told me I said to her: ‘can I come with you the next time you’re going?’ and I think we went the following day or two days later.
“It was something that I always wanted to do seriously I just never had the opportunity because I didn’t know how to find it.”
Borough Challenges
School didn’t prove to be an issue for the athletics scholar, as he won all the races he was entered in to. However, it was when he stepped up a level in the borough competitions that Sosanya started to get challenged by his competitors.
Sosanya said: “In school I was very good, in school I was always winning, always the main guy, then secondary school it was the same.
“When I reached out I went to the borough competitions and I was still good, but that’s when I saw there was some good people and then when I started athletics seriously, if I’m honest I wasn’t very good I used to see a lot of quick people, people beat me, in the ranking I wasn’t very high.
“It took me a while to get in to it on a serious level, but once I got in to it and started growing, getting stronger and believing in myself a lot more, that’s when I started to see the progress.
