The eyes of the world were on Paris last summer for the 2024 Olympic Games, where the best athletes around the globe gathered to represent their homelands. While nations of the world were showing off their best, The Salvation Army was also represented.

Meet 24-year-old Tapiwanashe Makarawu (Tapiwa for short) from Zimbabwe. He’s an officer’s kid, a lifelong Salvationist and an Olympic finalist. 

“I was fortunate enough to be born into a family of prayerful people,” says Tapiwa. He’s had the full Salvationist experience since he was young: Sunday school, brass banding, the works. He credits his family’s involvement with the Army for his relationship with Jesus. “I grew up in church. Everything I did was only about church … and that’s how I got to know God.”

Tapiwa discovered his passion for running when he joined the track team in high school. From that moment, his primary goal has been to compete at the Olympic level, inspired by runners and fellow 2024 competitors such as Letsile Tobogo from Botswana and Muzala Samukonga from Zambia. Usain Bolt, Tapiwa’s role model, was also a primary motivation for his running. Tapiwa originally tried to qualify for the 2020 Tokyo Games but didn’t quite make it. 

He’s since spent time training and studying in his early years of college and competing around the world. Tapiwa was competing at a meet at Texas Tech when he set his then personal best in the 200-meter sprint. He also beat the Zimbabwean national record. Finally, with a time of 19.93 seconds, Tapiwa qualified for the 200-meter sprint event at the Paris Olympics. “It was quite a journey,” Tapiwa said. “It was hard training and dedication, prayer and commitment.”

Despite his athletic accomplishments, Tapiwa works hard to ensure God is always glorified. “My relationship with God has to be the first thing in my career because He is the one who gave me this talent,” Tapiwa says. “So, I have to give back everything that He gave me. He’s the owner of everything.”

It can be easy to lose sight of Jesus as the top priority in athletic careers, which are almost entirely built on the glorification of one’s ability. But Tapiwa doesn’t let that stop him from connecting with God by “reading the Word of God [and] praying daily.” It seems simple but can often be easier said than done. Tapiwa says that the well-known passage from Psalm 23:1 is his life verse, which starts with a humbling message that keeps him grounded: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” (KJV). 

For many people, it’s difficult enough to live out the Christian faith in their professional lives—and that’s without billions of eyes watching their every move. Even with the pressures of elite sports, Tapiwa is a strong advocate for practicing faith in every aspect of one’s life. “In the Bible, God says, ‘If anyone is ashamed of me and my message, the Son of Man will be ashamed of that person when he returns in his glory and in the glory of the Father and the holy angels’ (Luke 9:26). At the end of the day, whatever we do, whatever we have, He can take it away and He can give it to us anytime. It’s best to put God in everything you do rather than being shy or ashamed to spread His word.”

Tapiwa finds motivation to run for God, but when things get challenging, both mentally and physically, he looks back on his past to remember his other reasons for running. “We had to struggle to get some things,” Tapiwa said. “Sometimes you can see, even as a child, that things are tough for you. Knowing that I have family back home that I need to take care of, I have something that I have to give back to my community and my church for everything that they did to get me where I am today. Those are the things that motivate me every day to wake up and go to training, to wake up and go to class.” 

The dream-come-true experience of competing at the Olympic Games is something few will ever know and isn’t likely to be easily forgotten. But for Tapiwa, he didn’t just have the chance to show the world how hard he’d worked to get there; he also had the opportunity to live out his faith in front of an audience of billions. “It was a tremendous honor,” Tapiwa said. “I realized that God gave me this talent not to make a good living, but to spread the Word. Whatever I do and whatever I’m trying to do in track is mainly focused on spreading the Word of God out there, telling everyone that God exists and God loves us.”

In the Men’s 200-meter Final, Tapiwa placed sixth with a time of 20.10 seconds, a remarkable feat. “I could see my dreams coming true right in front of me,” Tapiwa says of the experience. But his least favorite part of the 2024 Paris Olympics? “I must say, [it] was the food. It wasn’t that bad, but it was just too healthy. But I’m not complaining. I had fun in Paris.” 

Tapiwa was joined in representing the Army at the Olympics by fellow Salvationist Wiseman Were Mukhobe, who was a semifinalist in the Men’s 400-meter Hurdles. There’s no reason there can’t be more Salvationist representation at the future Olympic Games, but Tapiwa warns his fellow athletes against putting their goals ahead of God’s will. 

“I used to pray … ‘Ah, God, I want this, God, I want that, God, I want this.’ So, when I read the book of Exodus, I was comparing myself to the Israelites who were demanding things from God, saying, ‘God, we want this, can you do this for us, can you do this for us?’

“And God could do some things for them and some things He wouldn’t do, but [it was] always on His time. ‘You can ask this now, but I can give you this after 10 years,’ you know. I learned from the book of Exodus that I have to put God first instead of demanding things from God. He knows the plans that He has for me and those plans are not to hurt me, but they are there to prosper me. I have to trust the process and trust Him in everything that I do.”

Today, Tapiwa’s at the University of Kentucky, working on his degree in sports psychology while still pursuing his running career. He’s already begun training with the hopes of competing and earning a medal at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, and he hopes to go pro and get signed by a sportswear brand in the meantime. And maybe by the time we’re watching him run in 2028, he’ll be competing alongside even more Salvationist brothers and sisters.