Toby Makoyawo

Why organisations work with Toby Makoyawo

• A current elite athlete competing at the front edge of NCAA Division I sprinting, not a retired professional reflecting on a finished career. The pressure he describes is the pressure he is still operating inside.
• A European U20 100m title and a Boston University school record at 10.12 seconds give him a specific credibility on the question of preparation, execution, and recovery in events decided by hundredths of a second.
• Combines elite competition with a full undergraduate degree at Boston University, which lets him speak credibly to early-career and graduate audiences about workload, discipline, and time as a finite resource.
• A diaspora background, born in Florida to Nigerian parents and raised in West London, that lets him speak naturally on inclusion and identity without the topic feeling bolted on.

Biography highlights

• European U20 Champion, 100m, 2021, in a personal-best 10.25 seconds
• Boston University 100m and 60m school record holder, fastest sprinter in BU programme history
• NCAA Division I Second Team All-American
• British Olympic Trials 200m finalist at age 19
• UK National Champion, U20 age category, 2021
• Reading for an undergraduate degree at Boston University while competing at NCAA Division I level

Biography

Most sprint finals are decided in the first thirty metres and a leader’s first thirty seconds of a hard meeting are not that different. The capacity to be composed under public scrutiny is a trained capacity, and Toby Makoyawo trains it for a living. He is the fastest sprinter in Boston University’s history and a European U20 100m champion who is still in the middle of the work, not at the end of it.

The substance of his story is preparation rather than highlights. A 10.25 second European junior title in 2021, a 10.12 second school record at the Texas Relays in 2022, and an All-American placing in NCAA Division I sit on top of a daily routine that includes coursework, training cycles, and the management of expectation that any 23-year-old at the front of a sport has to learn quickly.

The route through is also distinctive. Born in Florida to Nigerian parents, raised in West London, and recruited into the American collegiate athletics system, he has had to learn how to perform inside three different cultural contexts. The relevance to a corporate audience is direct: graduate intake, early-career talent, and inclusion programmes all benefit from a speaker who can describe identity and high performance as the same conversation, not two separate ones.

What he offers a room is not a finished career narrative. It is a current account of how an elite competitor manages the gap between training intent and competition reality, week after week, in a discipline where the margin of error is measured in hundredths of a second.

Key speaking topics

• Performance under public pressure
• Goal-setting and long-horizon planning
• Identity, inclusion, and elite performance
• Discipline and time management
• Mental health in competitive environments
• Resilience after setback

Ideal for

• Graduate intake and early-career talent programmes
• Diversity, inclusion, and belonging audiences inside large employers
• Sales and high-performance teams operating to public targets
• Sports, education, and youth-facing organisations

Audience outcomes

• A working sense of how elite athletes prepare for moments measured in hundredths of a second
• Practical language for goal-setting, time discipline, and recovery from setback
• A first-person account of identity and high performance as a single conversation, not a parallel one
• Renewed engagement from younger and early-career audiences who recognise the speaker’s age, register, and trajectory