After picking up his third Trinidad and Tobago Olympic Committee (TTOC) Sportsman of the Year award at the 2025 ceremony held on Monday at Queen’s Hall, St Ann’s, Port-of-Spain, Keshorn Walcott expressed how winning his first ever World Championship medal has brought him relief heading into 2026.
He said, “It’s been a breeze, you know, starting my training (for 2026) knowing that I’ve added this accomplishment after so long. Compared to last year, it’s just a lot easier, and I am a lot more confident and a lot more comfortable. So I believe that 2026 will be a good year.
Over the next 12 months, Walcott will target no fewer than three major competitions.
“We have the Commonwealth Games and the CAC Games, and also the Ultimate Championship, which is a new competition under World Athletics,” he said.
“Those three competitions will be the major ones outside of the Diamond Leagues, of course. So yeah, the main focus is to win those competitions, and I’m really trying to throw over 90 metres again. I think that’s going to be the goal for 2026.”
Walcott, 32, was arguably T&T’s most outstanding athlete in this past calendar year. Having recovered from an Achilles injury just in time to qualify and compete at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, Walcott continued his redemption arc in 2025, returning to the kind of form that saw him rise from the junior ranks to stun the world in his debut Olympic appearance in London in 2012 and follow up with bronze in Brazil four years later.
On each of his previous global medal-winning javelin jaunts, Walcott also walked away with the TTOC nod.
“Nothing, nothing compares to the first one,” he quipped after Monday evening’s ceremony. “It’s the Olympics! 2012 was everything. I don’t think anything, even a medal, even an award, anything that comes close to 2012, I don’t think they will ever match up, you know.”
His search for an elusive World Championship medal took him six attempts in 12 years, but the wait was made well worth it when it ended with a men’s javelin gold medal on September 18 in Tokyo, Japan.
Previously, his World Championship debut in Moscow, Russia, in 2013—just one year after winning the Olympics—yielded his second-worst performance ever at the event, finishing well down the field in 19th with a best throw of 78.78 metres. Two years later, in Beijing, China, he placed 26th. And his barren form continued in 2017 (7th), 2019 (11th), and 2022 (16th) before his deliverance in Tokyo, 2025.
He acknowledged how much he yearned for the moment while chasing the only global medal to escape his grasp repeatedly.
“I went to every world championship believing that it wasn’t for me, you know, because most of the time, every world championship, I would have some sort of injury, some sort of problem. But (this time) I just really believed that it was possible. We just needed to make some small changes. We just needed to actually find something that works, and I believe that I found that. I made a switch with my coaching. I’m now training with Dr Klaus from Germany,” he explained.
“I took a risk, you know; as they say, no risk, no story. I think that in early 2025, I wasn’t sure how the season would go, but things really came together. And I have to put everything down to trusting my coach.”
