Disability is not inability for 23- year- old Nyasha Derera an athlete who is now mixing and mingling with top sports personalities like Didier Drobga, Cafu, Stephen MacMahon and Finn Balor.
A product of Zimbabwe Special Olympics , Derera has 17 gold medals from local,regional and international competitions for the intellectual challenged.
Derera who suffers from being slow in many activities including learning, speaking writing and speaking has made strides as an athlete.
On 20 July this year, he was in America commemorating the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Day (EKD).
Special Olympics was founded by JF Kennedy’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver and she died on 20th July
Derera is a Sargent Shriver International Global Messenger, Africa representative and also the first black person to be elected as the chairman of the Global Athlete Congress.He was elected for the latter position in November 2018 where 14 athletes ran for the position in a tight race held in Santo Domingo, Domican Republic.
Derera started to scale heights since 2015 at the World Sumer Games where he clinched the 400m bronze medal.
He started off from humble beginnings at Mufakose 1 High School as he used to compete in Paralympics for the Intellectual Challenged (IC), as he was in a special class to a world athletic star.
“The Special Olympics organisation came to our school and that is how I became to know about them”, he said.
“This year, I have been to America 3 times, to Washington DC, Boston Massachusetts and at the Kennedy event last week”, said ecstatic Derera.
In all the events he was a public speaker.Besides being an athlete, he is in public speaking and health and fitness programmes.
He was at the Summer Special Olympics World Games in Abu Dhabi this year where he came first in the 5km unified race.He was honoured to be sitting next to Didier Drobga and had pictures with United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nathan.
With all this achievements under his belt, Chirera is bemoaning lack of sponsorship locally.
“Am appealing to the corporate world to help me with funding as am not gainfully employed here in Zimbabwe”, he revealed.
He attends board meetings regionally and internationally and funds he uses during the assignments are pathetic compared to the work he would be doing for the country.
Finn Balor is an Irish professional wrestler whilst Stephen MacMahon is Chief brand officer of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).
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