Tennis star Angela Okutoyi has made history by becoming the first ever Kenyan to win the Wimbledon Grand slam tennis tournament Championships.
Okutoyi and her partner Rose Marie Nijkamp, who hails from Netherlands, won the tournament double finals after playing against Canadians Kayla Cross and Victoria Mboko. The finals were played on Saturday July 9 in Wimbledon, London.
The youngster first made history by becoming the first Kenyan to qualify for the finals after knocking out Lucija Ciric Bagaric (Croatia) and Nikola Daubnerova(Slovakia) together with her Netherlands partner.
Okutoyi’s exemplary performance in the sport did not just begin recently. She became famous in 2018 after winning 6 major titles. She also became the first Kenyan girl to win an Australian Open juniors match and the first to go past the second round.
Her journey to excellence has however not been easy especially after losing her mother right after she was born alongside her twin, Roselida Asumwa at Pumwani Maternity Hospital.
Nevertheless, being an orphan at such a tender age and coming from a very poor background did not deter her ambitions of getting into the hall of fame. The sisters were raised by their grandmother who served as a cook at Loreto convent.
Their guardian was however forced to take them to an orphanage while still young but took them back after 7 months over fear that Angela would be taken out of the country.
They later enrolled at Mbagathi primary school and got a chance to get trained in tennis at Loreto convent when Joe Karanja was hired as a coach. Players would be given food before and after practice and that is what inspired Okutoyi and her sister to train oftenly.
Their grandmother was forced to secure four jobs that would even sustain their training as well as cater for their basic needs.
“I come from a humble background. Growing up, I was heavily into sports like cricket and tennis and my grandmother and coach were very supportive, but I knew deep down the expenses were a lot for them to manage,” Okutoyi said in a previous interview with the Standard.
With persistence and commitment, she outshined her seniors in the game despite the fact that fellow students laughed at them because of being poor.
“For a family with no money, we may have looked and sounded crazy. Children would laugh at us, call us names, we became the joke,but we kept our heads down. We did our fighting with actions on track,” said Okutoyi.
Her great performance made her to be pitted against older competitors forcing her to develop attacking instincts.
In 2014, when she was 10 years old, she was able to join the International Tennis Federation East Africa Regional Training Centre in Burundi with the help of Karanja and her star continued to shine. Tennis however saw her drop out of school. She returned to the country in 2016 due to unavoidable circumstances and joined ITF center in Nairobi
She later enrolled for an online programme in the US as she continues to build her name in the Tennis world. Her sister is also one of the best tennis players in the country.
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