Domingas Mbana Togna represented Guinea-Bissau at the World Athletics Championships in Japan in 2007. But 14 years later, she became a stonemason to survive, AfrikPage learned from local media.
Domingas Togna has had hours of glory in Bissau-Guinean athletics. She was even the representative of her country at the 2007 Worlds in Japan.
Last year, Lusa News Agency reported that the 41 year-old woman was always under the watchful eye of her three children, with whom she shares her tiny house.
Domingas showed to reporters in her bedroom, the trophies she won in a glorious past of athletics events in Bissau, Senegal, Mozambique, Algeria, Macau, China and Japan. .
From the memory of the world championship in the Japanese city of Osaka, Domingas keeps, among others, an article from the Guinean newspaper of the time, in which it can be read that the athlete did not finish the race due to withdrawal.
The athlete, originally from Nkome, on the outskirts of Mansoa, in central Guinea-Bissau, explained that she started running “for pleasure” in 1995, after being selected at school in Bissau, where she was raised by an aunt who didn’t want her in athletics.
Today, she lives in her two-bedroom house. And her daily life boils down to cutting stones to survive, although she was the pride of her country thanks to her points and over the distance of 1500 m.
Meanwhile Domingas remains the most decorated female athlete in Guinea-Bissau.
Source: News Agencies