The Electronic Telegraph Sunday 24 June 2001 Telford Vice She won not hearts, but records. She ran with grim Afrikaner determination in her eyes and Free State sunshine in her bare feet. She was Zola Budd and for a while she was British. Now she is Zola Pieterse and she's back where it always seemed she should have been, in her native Bloemfontein caring for her husband and three children. But next month Britons will again look into that earnest face as it leads her onward through the field, though this time the Free State sunshine will be laced out of sight. Yes, Pieterse is on her way back to the country of her grandfather's birth, the country that thought it a fine idea that she should try and win it Olympic honours and then vilified her for accepting the offer. Pieterse will lead the women's Countryside team in a 10-kilometre event in London on July 22, an initiative geared to help British farmers to recover from the foot-and-mouth epidemic. An honourable cause this time, but in 1984 her waif-like frame embodied all that apartheid-ridden South Africa sought to hide from the world. Every British politician to the left of the Far Right seemed to think she had no business here, much less being made British with unseemly haste to enable her to run under the Union flag at the Los Angeles Olympics. Worse was to come. Halfway into the 3,000 metres final in LA came a moment sealed in athletics history like some stricken insect in amber. The race was billed as a duel between Budd and Mary Decker, and Decker duly swooped behind Budd. Somehow, Decker's spiked foot collided with Budd's taped toes and the American sprawled on to the infield. A shocked Budd soldiered on to finish seventh in the race, won by Romania's Maricica Puica. Thus the legend was cast in stone: whatever else she achieved, Zola Budd would forever be the woman who cost Mary Decker gold in LA. She endured four years in Britain, though "I never once had anyone come up to me where I lived in Guildford and say anything nasty, only supportive things. It was mostly the politicians. All the bad things are in one corner of your mind, and you never go there." Had she ever felt remotely British? "I don't know. I don't think you change your roots in four years." Her own political views are mainstream white but pragmatic: "It's time to move on from apartheid. There are things in our country that are more serious than apartheid ever was, like Aids." By 1988 Budd had returned to South Africa, where she entered the 3,000m at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, but unbeknown to her she had tickbite fever and was eliminated in qualifying. Along the winding path of her career, she set world records in the 3,000m and 5,000m and was twice the world cross-country champion. She still holds the junior world record in the mile and the 2,000m. "The biggest mistake I made was to run in the '84 Games," Pieterse said. "It was so different in '92 - no fuss, no politics. Looking back on '84 now you just think, `Why?' It was so stupid!" Did she have nightmares about the Mary moment? "No. When it comes true in real life, you don't need nightmares." A mellowing 35, Pieterse spoke easily and openly yesterday in her comfortable Bloemfontein home. Husband Mike pottered about as her young children blithely ruled the roost. A smile flitted behind her eyes and she often laughed out loud, genuinely, even mischievously. All very different to the tight-lipped, emotionally anaemic visage she presented to the world all those years ago. "I did become obsessional about running. Sometimes my well-being depended on how well I ran, and that's not healthy. But it's the best thing to have kids - they take you away from all that so quickly." Her children and husband, whom she met shortly after returning home and married a year later, have given Pieterse a life to live beyond athletics. Perhaps even given her herself. Asked what her life consisted of now, she replied disarmingly, "It's the three kids - that's about it." Not in the great Out There, where she still has a presence. A Bloemfontein street is named after her, as is a rose, and in township slang a `Zola Budd' is a particular type of taxi. It's nippy, but not as fast as a `Mary Decker'. Eamonn Condon www.RunnersGoal.com
