A week or so ago, on May Day, the sports section of The New York Times featured a short feature of a sports development program from Zimbabwe that successfully placed “about 150 athletes in American universities in sports like track, tennis, soccer and field hockey.” The program was founded by a former college sprinter and football player, also from Zimbabwe. The main focus of the article was a group of these athletes, mostly black and male and including one sentenced to a jail sentence for tax fraud.

The star of the piece, however, is Gabriel Mvumvure, a sprinter from Louisiana State University, who won the open 100-meter race in 9.97 seconds at the recent Penn Relays in Philadelphia, “the third-fastest time in the world this year.” You can read the story here. The story is unremarkable, except I think it was probably the first time in a long time that I had seen a story about a black Zimbabwean in The New York Times or another Western media outlet that was not about a musician or politician, especially the country’s autocratic leader, Robert Mugabe.

When it comes to sports, only the national cricket team gets some attention, but even that’s from a while ago. And the swimmer Kirsty Coventry received some attention for winning a total of seven medals at the 2004 Athens and 2008 Beijing Olympics. So I asked Wendy Willems, who teaches media studies at the University of Witswatersrand in Johannesburg and writes about how Zimbabwe gets portrayed in British media, whether I’m missing something. Here’s a quick email from her:

The New York Times story might break with [stereotyped] images of black Zimbabweans [in Western media] but I suppose it still goes along with the stereotype that all black men are good athletes. I recall another sensational, ‘Caster Semenya’ story about a Zimbabwean athlete from the BBC. This time a story about a male athlete who competed as a woman.

Then if we’re talking about sports, Flemish television had a reality television show called ‘Allez Allez Zimbabwe‘ which followed a team of Zimbabwean cyclists who were trained by a Belgian coach. I recall a terrible article from the right-wing Dutch tabloid, De Telegraaf, which seemed to accuse the cyclists of all sorts of things, ranging from impregnating girls and stealing money.