Julius Yego – World champ Kenya’s self-taught javelin on YouTube
Julius Yego won the gold medal with a throw of 92.72m, becoming the first Kenyan to win a World Championships gold medal in a field event. The amazing thing about him is that is a self-taught athlete who learned it on YouTube. That is why he is also known as “YouTube Man” or “Mr. YouTube”.
Some of the key observations as he shared in his interview with CNN
- “What I love about the javelin, when you throw and you hit it right, when it’s flying in the sky, you feel so nice”
- “I do not have a coach, my motivation comes from within. Training without a coach is not an easy thing”
- “I watched YouTube and it really paid off for me, to see the training techniques and skills they are using”
- “I was born with the talent, but the skills I have had to work on.”
Yego, specifically, found inspiration in Andreas Thorkildsen ..
- “Andreas is a unique guy, he’s very skillful”
- “He does some gymnastics (in training) you cannot do.”
- “When I watch his squats he’s doing almost 200 kg and I was doing 90, so you can see it’s a very big range, but now I’m doing 150”
- “When I read his biography, he started training when he was just 11, so you can see he’s far ahead of everybody”
Vikas Jain:
Though self-taught people sometimes rise out of adversity, this self-taught ability is itself a great way of teaching and mentoring a large number of learners in any field.
