Zola Budd Pieterse remembers iconic race from LA 1984

On the 40th anniversary of the Los Angeles Olympics 3000m, here is an exclusive extract from the book Collision Course

“The first I saw the barefoot bullet from Bloemfontein in the flesh, I was sitting on a giant rubbish bin. Two months after arriving in England from South Africa during the ill-fated summer of 1984, Zola was running 1500m on a cold, blustery weekend at the UK Championships and the venue, Cwmbran Stadium in South Wales, was packed with spectators. So much so that I improvised by viewing the race from the top of a wheelie bin between the main stand and the home straight in order to see Zola escape an early stumble before cutting loose to win by six seconds in a world junior record of 4:04.39.

More than 30 years later, we meet for an interview at the Picturehouse cinema in London’s West End. The surroundings are rather more salubrious than Cwmbran Stadium and the chairs in the movie theatre’s members’ bar are considerably more comfortable than the temporary seat I took back in 1984 to watch her run. Some things do not change, though, such as Zola’s desire to take her shoes off. “They hurt me a little,” she says, before suggesting she’d feel better if she took them off.

For a moment I wonder if she is mischievously playing up to her reputation by throwing a tiny barefoot white lie into the start of our conversation. Or maybe her feet genuinely do have the urge to breathe. Either way, it is a nice touch of irony and later on, as I look back on the incident, I decide she was probably telling the truth, mainly because if there are three words to describe the way she comes across during our interview, they are: open, honest and natural.

When it comes to her personality, Zola is a complete contrast to the shy, reticent and nervous teenager who arrived in England in 1984. She turned 50 in May 2016 and is now a confident, assured middle-aged woman. Her slightly uncomfortable footwear aside, she wears an attractive black dress with a small yet prominent chain and crucifix around her neck. If she is a little overdressed for a quiet Friday afternoon in August, it is because she is attending a film premiere soon after our meeting.

It is no ordinary premiere either. The Fall, as it is called, is a documentary that looks at the early lives of herself and Mary as they build toward the eponymous moment in Los Angeles and both runners are in the British capital to attend the screening.

Not surprisingly, this is not the first time Zola has been the subject of a documentary. In 1989 the Welsh actor and documentary filmmaker Kenneth Griffith produced a BBC2 programme called Zola Budd: The Girl Who Didn’t Run. During the programme Griffith, who was also a keen Boer War historian, claimed Zola’s career had been undone by liberal hypocrisy.

Then, 15 years later, another BBC documentary was scrapped after they had already conducted interviews with some of the personalities involved in the Budd- Decker story. “Her life story is intriguing in so many ways,” says her friend and manager, Ray de Vries, on the enduring interest in Zola’s life. “From being kicked around like a political football to betrayal both in her personal life and in sport.”

Given this, does Zola think it is strange that there is so much current interest in a story that lay largely dormant for many years before being brought back to life on the screen and in print? “Perhaps people know something that I don’t know,” Zola smiles, as she jokes about her possible imminent demise. “After I turned 50 maybe people were thinking ‘she’s not going to be around for much longer, so we’d better cover her life story now’. Or maybe,” she adds with a shrug, “it’s just time to do it, I guess.”

I find Zola in good spirits as we chat. Back in the 1980s, she would have squirmed and recoiled at the attention from journalists and film producers. Today, though, she seems completely relaxed with the situation and even goes out of her way to compliment her No.1 enemy from 1984 – the British weather. “It’s actually been nice,” she says. “The weather has been great!”

Just as good was meeting up with Mary. Some might find this surprising, given the frosty relationship the pair had during their competitive heyday, but Zola insists she has enjoyed being reunited with her former running rival.

During a mini-publicity tour for the documentary, Zola appeared on various television and radio shows and concludes: “It was nice, as I got to know Mary as a human being because we’ve never had time to get to know each other before. You know what it’s like on the athletics circuit – it’s only after your athletics career that you really get to know people. But not only do we have a bond with our love of running but I discovered she loves animals and nature. So I found we had far more in common than we actually realised. And her husband Richard has a great sense of humour and during the few days we had together she was so easy going.”

The phrase ‘easy going’ is not one that would have been used to describe Mary in the 1980s. But the American has mellowed with age while, similarly, the Zola who was overwhelmed by the events of 1984 is now a worldly-wise woman armed with the kind of confidence that she would have loved to have possessed 30 years ago.

Zola’s child-like features, boyish hair-cut and porcelain skin have been replaced by a thicker mop of wavy hair and the kind of weather-beaten features typical of someone who has lived an active, outdoor lifestyle. Her pencil-thin legs are a little meatier these days but she is still slim and her running style has not altered, with elbows and heels that kick out slightly as she covers the ground. “I’m heavier now than when I was a teenager but I am more or less the same weight as it was when I was in my 20s,” she says. “I think it’s because I still train and if you do marathons and similar events then it keeps your weight down.”

More than anything, Zola smiles these days. In the 1980s, she did not do much smiling. Back then she was a forlorn emblem of the acrimony that bedeviled sport during that period. But more than thirty years later, she is a much cheerier character. The former “circus animal” – as she once described herself – has matured into a strong woman in charge of her own life.

Part of the reason for her happier demeanor is due to where she lives. Myrtle Beach in South Carolina is on the hub of the Grand Strand on the eastern coast of the United States and is one of the world’s most idyllic cities. It boasts the kind of warm climate that Zola relishes and has 60 miles of beautiful sandy beaches – an appropriate landscape for the world’s most famous barefoot runner. (Note, since this interview Zola has moved back to live in South Africa).

Ironically, the country that brought her such misery in 1984 has now become her home. After the LA Games she was rushed to the airport under police escort amid death threats, but that turbulent summer of yesteryear is now a distant memory and she is happily bringing up her children – Mikey, Azelle and Lisa – in the same nation.

Myrtle Beach has been described as the golf capital of the world and Zola’s husband, Mike, is able to pursue his hobby on some of its many courses. “When we decided to go to America,” she explains, “my husband googled where the best golf courses were. And in our area alone there are about 105 golf courses.”

Has Mike played on them all yet? “He’s trying to get there!” Zola smiles. Golf courses are also usually great surfaces to run on, too, so I ask her if she is ever able to train on them. “No, the only one we can run on is the one that belongs to the university.”

Zola is referring to Coastal Carolina University. After initially serving as a volunteer athletics coach there when she first moved to the United States, Zola took on the more formal role of assistant coach in September 2015. So far the university’s modest athletics achievements include producing Amber Campbell, an American Olympian in the hammer in recent years, but Zola is helping nurture more middle and long distance runners. Certainly, given her incredible background, she seems ideally suited to advising and inspiring young athletes. You could even argue that her wisdom, knowledge and experience is a little wasted in a modest college role like this.

When it comes to advising her runners, Zola practices what she preaches. The stereotypical image of a coach standing on the sidelines with a stopwatch calling out splits is not for her. Instead, she joins in the training sessions with athletes less than half her age.

“I can’t just stand there watching. I want to run with them,” she says. “I don’t have a lot of knowledge about sports science but I’m not sure you need too much and I think your gut feeling is important.”

On her Coastal Carolina group, she explains: “I have about twenty girls on the team and I coach about nine of them and help out with the rest.”

Do the students struggle to keep up with the former world cross country champion? “No, no, no!” she smiles. “I have to work to keep up with them.”

If she has one main piece of advice she would give to an aspiring young athlete it would be this. “I think to be patient. That’s one thing that you don’t have when you’re young.”

She continues: “You don’t have patience in trusting your development as an athlete and not pushing it too much. I remember myself when I was that age thinking ‘okay, if I train harder and do my long runs harder and do this and that’ and my coach kept reminding me by saying, ‘Zola you don’t need to change all this, be patient and trust yourself’.

“You don’t have to train exceptionally every day,” she adds. “If you have one great session each week, it’s good. If you have two mediocre sessions a week, that’s also good. And if the rest are also bad and some are really shitty, then that’s also fine and it’s part of the game. So that would be my biggest advice.”

News of her burgeoning career as a coach is more likely to pop up in The Sun News in South Carolina these days than the Sunday Times of South Africa or Daily Mail in Great Britain. Her own performances as a runner, however, still make minor headlines internationally. This is largely because her results as a veteran runner have been so impressive.

In the run-up to the Comrades Marathon in 2016, for instance, there was so much interest in her native country that she appeared on SABC television in South Africa to talk about it. Zola was keen to run the event to mark her fiftieth birthday and she also has unfinished business in the famous ultra-distance race. But she was forced to withdraw after her preparations did not go well.

Juggling training

Juggling training, coaching, travelling and motherhood proved too demanding in the run-up and she pulled out midway through the Boston Marathon in April 2016. The 26.2-mile race was meant to act as a warm-up for Comrades but she was not in good shape and decided not to tackle the tougher South African event a few weeks later. “Maybe in another two years I might do Comrades again,” she says, although she will doubtless target other, shorter events in the meantime. The Stirling Scottish Marathon in May 2017 is one event she has already signed up to, for example.

Running is still important to her. It defines her as a person and she will forever be a runner. Races like Comrades, though, are nice but not necessary these days. No longer is she a professional athlete but a busy mother who runs for fun and fitness, not to mention health and peace of mind. “Even now running is my Prozac,” she told Marathon Talk in a podcast interview in 2012.

We joke about the niggles that runners increasingly get as they grow older. Zola says she is relatively lucky with injuries but her knees are beginning to creak a little. “I’m in quite good shape apart from my knees,” she says.

One area she does have a problem with, however, is her blood sugar levels. “I have hypoglycaemia and when I was younger I never ran further than 10 miles at a time, but as I got older and ran up to two hours, I began to notice it,” she explains. “So I really have to watch what I eat and drink. From the start of a long run or race I need to make sure that my blood sugar levels do not drop.”

As we chat, Zola is so relaxed that I wonder if she has just been for a run, with the endorphins still kicking around her body. Despite the imminent film premiere, which involves her being part of a daunting question and answer session on the stage at the end, she is the polar opposite of the taut, tense teenager who graced the same shores several decades earlier. Given this, I take my chances with a few more pointed questions.

Caster Semenya is an obvious athlete to ask her about, but I soon discover that the 2016 version of Zola is too streetwise and sensible to talk to a journalist about an athlete who has created a stir for winning world and Olympic 800m titles despite her elevated levels of testosterone due to hyperandrogenism. “She is close to beating my South African 1500m record and I actually know her coach pretty well,” says Zola, declining to offer much more on the record. “The record has got to go sometime. I have a view, but it (the topic) is so controversial and in South Africa everything turns into politics.”

Pushing my luck, I ask about another South African athlete, Oscar Pistorius, the Paralympic sprinter who was imprisoned after killing his girlfriend with a gun. Again, Zola politely and almost apologetically rebuffs my question and only says: “It’s a sad story.”

Moving away from the controversial topics, I veer back to asking Zola about herself and blurt out: “What’s it like being Zola Budd?” She looks a little bemused, so I expand by using the example of her fiftieth birthday, which led to hundreds of friends and fans posting their best wishes on their Facebook page. Most people, I add, might be lucky to get a few dozen messages.

Zola smiles, but plays it down. “I think it’s just the era of social media. Some people use Facebook to promote themselves but the only reason I got the page was to promote Newton shoes when I got involved with them. So I’ll probably close it down soon.”

Is she recognised much when out in public? “In America, no, which is good,” she says. “Back in South Africa, I do get noticed, especially after running Comrades.

“The funny thing in South Africa is that you’re never really accepted as an athlete until you’ve run Comrades. It’s such a high profile race and I eventually got to run it.”

I suggest that she seems far more confident these days. “I hadn’t even turned 18 when I first came to England,” she explains. “I was still 17 and had only just finished high school. I was one year too early for my high school as well so I should have been in my final year of high school (in 1984). I graduated from high school at the age of 17, which usually happens when you are 18. So I was very young.”

Her English is perfect nowadays whereas in 1984 she had some problems with the language. “I could understand it as my dad was English,” she recalls, “but we spoke Afrikaans at home and even now we speak Afrikaans at home in the US.

“I think it’s good for my kids to learn Afrikaans because if you can speak a second language then it makes it so much easier to learn a third. In America you have to learn a foreign language and so it makes it easier for them to do this. For example, my son is learning German and my daughter learned French.”

Zola herself does not speak any of popular languages such as French, German or Spanish, but she adds: “I can speak a little of a local (South African) black language.”

Is it true, I ask, that she never watches or even owns a television? It turns out this is a myth. She enjoys the odd show, but barely watched television as a child as her family did not get their first TV until 1976 and she has never had any interest watching athletics on TV. “I don’t watch the Olympics, for example,” she reveals.

I am beginning to realise that Zola simply enjoys a good chat and despite me firing the odd awkward question at her, she invites me to drop her an email whenever I like if I have more to ask. All of which makes me wonder if stories of her being something of an anti-celebrity are actually true. Certainly, speaking to a few ex-athletes who knew her, they paint a similar picture of a warm, loyal and kind-hearted personality that remained buried to the majority behind her taciturn and reticent public face.

One of her admirers is Liz McColgan. The 1991 world 10,000m champion and marathon legend is just two years older than Zola and says, “I knew Zola really well as I shared a room on a few trips and spent bit of time with her at some after-events parties. To me she was hugely misguided by the British athletics managers.

“She was very shy but very pleasant and funny. They tried to protect her by pretty much keeping her separate from everyone else, but I was pleased she came over to Britain as she lifted the standard of the girls running 1500m and 3km. I always found her chatty and good to spend time with but the general public never got the chance to know her.”

Kirsty Wade, another of Zola’s former room-mates and three-time Commonwealth gold medallist during the 1980s, agrees, “It felt like the situation was handled badly and Zola was just caught up in it all. She was probably pretty miserable.”

Others were simply in awe, such as the world marathon record-holder Paula Radcliffe, who remembers, “Hers were inspirational performances that made tough targets as British records and I loved watching her run free in her best races.”

Radcliffe, who was only ten years old when the Los Angeles Olympics took place, later raced as an up-and-coming athlete against a Zola who was in the twilight of her career. “One abiding memory,” Radcliffe recalls, “is of Zola stopping to remove her spikes while she was running for South Africa in the World Cross Country Championships in Spain in 1993 – and then coming flying past me barefoot! She was ahead of me early in the race, then stopped at the end of the first lap or the beginning of the second, untied and removed her shoes and then flew past me to finish fourth.”

A number of British athletes agree with McColgan that Zola helped inspire a generation of runners. Jill Boltz (née Hunter) won silver behind McColgan in the 1990 Commonwealth Games 10,000m and set a world best for 10 miles on the roads. Now based in Australia, she still exchanges occasional messages with Zola on Facebook and says, “I had a photo of Zola on my fridge door for motivation. I thought she was amazing – running so fast so young and often in no shoes! Then one year I got to race and meet her so of course was absolutely in awe. Although there was no need for me to be as she was so down to earth and encouraging.”

READ MORE: History and heartbreak in LA Olympics 3000m

Journalists do not always manage to get so close, which is understandable after the way they helped made her life a nightmare in 1984. Securing the interview for this book was far from straightforward, while Steve Friedman managed to track her down for a Runner’s World feature in 2009 and described her as being “pleasant without being effusive, charming without being gushy”. Amusingly, he added, she was not wearing shoes when she answered the door.

Some runners keep their old racing shoes as a memento from their career. Not surprisingly, Zola draws a blank in that area, but I am interested to know what she regards as her absolute high and low points from her eventful career.

For her No.1 memory, I expect her to talk about her world cross country titles. Instead she says, “It was my first South African junior title at 800m. I was only 15 years old and it was a breakthrough for me. I came second in the 1500m the previous evening and all the winners got a red bag. So in the 800m, which was the last event, I came into the home straight with three other girls and I managed to outsprint them and the only thing that went through my mind was that ‘I’m going to get my red bag today’.”

READ MORE: Mary Decker ‘runs’ again

Zola endured plenty of bad experiences but Los Angeles 1984 is not the first one that springs to mind. “The cross country race when I was run off the course,” she says, referring to the English Cross Country Championships in 1985 where protesters leapt in front of her at Birkenhead, causing her to veer into bushes. “That was bad and pretty scary.”

She does not appear upset as she remembers the incident, though. Time heals and the memories of dozens of races gradually become more blurred as the years pass.

Yet the public has not forgotten her. She is one of the enduring athletics icons of the 1980s and still in the spotlight today.

Her races with Mary are the stuff of legend. Especially ‘that race’. “It all seems a long time ago now,” she smiles, as she waves goodbye and heads off to her premiere.

Smooth running from British sprint relay teams in Paris