“An Unlikely Rivalry”
by Rob Leachman
From the “Great Rivalries of Olympic Track and Field” Series
This Series
- Mary Decker and Zola Budd – Los Angeles 1984 – Part One
- Mary Decker and Zola Budd – Los Angeles 1984 – Part Two
- Mary Decker and Zola Budd – Los Angeles 1984 – Part Three
- Mary Decker and Zola Budd – Los Angeles 1984 – Part Four
- Mary Decker and Zola Budd – Los Angeles 1984 – Part Five
While young Zola Budd was experiencing emotional turmoil as the Los Angeles Games approached, the more seasoned, two-time world champion Mary Decker was experiencing her own challenges. The “Double Decker” naturally increased expectations, with many American fans now hoping for Olympic wins in the 1,500 and 3,000. She was an iconic figure in track and field seeking to promote women’s running at a time when her worldwide popularity offered unique promotional opportunities. As a result, media demands on her time only intensified in the year following her Helsinki triumphs. As she later reflected, “There was pressure like never before, not just from the media, but from myself. I wanted to advance the sport of track and field and the cause of women’s sports.”
Despite the added pressure and increased media scrutiny, Decker was in the middle of a strong season as the Olympic Trials approached. Then the chances for another “Double Decker” seemingly increased with a cryptic announcement on May 8, less than three months before athletes were scheduled to gather in Los Angeles. On that evening, Soviet authorities indicated that, because the Reagan administration “does not intend to ensure the security” of Soviet athletes and because of “hostile anti-Soviet propaganda,” the expected large contingent of Soviet athletes would not be traveling to Los Angeles. In short order, virtually all other Eastern Bloc nations, including East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, followed the Soviet Union in announcing their boycotts. Following the United States boycott of the Moscow Games four years earlier, this corresponding move by the Soviets and satellite nations was not unexpected. Still, overnight the complexion of the upcoming Olympics changed dramatically. And in no events was the impact felt more profoundly than in women’s middle-distance events, as suddenly long-anticipated re-matches between Mary Decker and Kazankina, Zaytseva, and Ulmasova were no longer on the horizon. Most prominent among the Soviet bloc nations that opted to send athletes to Los Angeles was Romania, which boasted a formidable corps of middle-distance runners led by Doina Melinte and Maricica Puica, each of whom would win a gold medal in the upcoming Games.
Decker was dismissive of the impact of the Soviet boycott upon the 1,500 or 3,000. “I don’t think it will affect how I train,” she offered shortly after the boycott was announced. “On the starting line at the Olympics, whether the Soviets are there is not going to matter. It’s going to be tough, especially if I double up. It would be nice to have them there, but if not, it’s not going to affect how I feel.”
With the Soviet runners and their Eastern Bloc counterparts now out of the picture, and in the middle of a characteristically strong season, and with world titles in the 1,500 and 3,000 on her resume and having not lost a race to an American runner since 1980, the path to an attempted Olympic double for Mary Decker seemed clear. A grueling series of qualifying rounds at the Olympic Trials, Ruth Wysocki, and a pesky right Achilles tendon, however, collectively presented an insurmountable barrier to those tentative plans.
Traditionally, the Olympic Trials in the United States have largely followed a schedule that mirrors that of the Games for which athletes are attempting to qualify, including the number of days of competition and the number of qualifying rounds. And when an American city is hosting the Games, the Olympic Stadium is generally utilized for the Trials, helping prospective Olympians become acclimated to the venue in which they will perform. So it was when American track and field athletes gathered for nine days of competition in the Los Angeles Coliseum in mid-June to contend for spots on the team that would compete in the same stadium six weeks later. With beautiful weather, sunny skies, and light winds, conditions were nearly ideal for a stellar track and field competition that would rival the actual Games in quality.
As expected, Mary Decker was entered in both the 1,500 and 3,000, and over six days she would compete in heats, semi-finals, and finals in each of the two events. It was a grueling schedule and one similar to what she would face if she doubled in the actual Games. Still, she won each of the four preliminary races, characteristically controlling each of them and never being particularly pressed. As the first final approached, in the 3,000, all seemed to be going according to plan.
In the 3,000 final, she opened a gap on the rest of the field with an initial 400-meter split of 66.3, leading by almost ten meters at the end of the first lap. As was not atypical in her races against American fields, the other runners seemed to pay little attention to Decker, focusing their efforts on gaining the second or third spots on the Olympic team. Though the race was well in hand, she clocked a quick 63.5 final 400 to finish in 8:34.91, forty meters in front of the second-place runner, Cindy Bremser, with Joan Hansen in third. As a testament to the quality of this Trials victory, though they finished nearly half a straight-away behind Decker, their times made Bremser and Hansen the fastest American women at the 3,000-meter distance. . . except of course for Decker. Though she quickened the pace at the end of the race, Decker’s comments indicated the degree to which she was unpressed in the first of two finals, with the 1,500 scheduled for the following evening. “I decided it would be senseless to try for a faster time tonight,” she offered in post-race comments. “Tomorrow is going to be the deciding factor as to whether I’ll double or not in the Olympics – how I feel during the race and how I react to running again tomorrow after tonight’s race.” Though she and Coach Dick Brown remained undecided regarding an Olympic double, nothing in the 3,000 final at the Trials outwardly suggested anything but her readiness to tackle such a challenge.
Ruth Wysocki’s running career had been characterized by great potential, some success, and injuries that led to a four-year hiatus from the sport. Tall and lanky at 5-9 and 130 pounds and with a distinctively long stride, she had won the national championship in the 800 meters in 1978 before leaving the sport. With an upcoming Olympics on American soil, she was coaxed out of retirement by her husband, distance runner Tom Wysocki. She had demonstrated her fitness earlier in the week as she had lowered her personal best in the 800 to 1:59.34, finishing second to the favored Kim Gallagher. She had earned her spot on the Olympic team, and her entry in the 1,500 had been almost an after-thought. And there was little indication she would pose much of a threat to Mary Decker in the 1,500 final given that her personal best in that event, run two days earlier in the semi-final rounds of the Trials, was over fifteen seconds slower than Decker’s PR. But with an Olympic berth already earned and in an event in which she was not expected to do well, Ruth Wysocki had little to lose.
Mary Decker cut an intimidating swath on the track, her dominating ability placing her in a class by herself, at least among American runners. As a result, as had occurred the previous night in the 3,000 final, other runners allowed Decker to run on her own while they competed for second place. Wysocki reflected on this after the 1,500 final at the Trials, suggesting, “I think Mary has run alone because too many people have let that happen. The gun goes off and they let her go.” After Decker had controlled and easily won her preliminary heat and semi-final, few thought the final would be any different.
At the start, the favorite characteristically shot to the front of the pack with a sixty-five-second initial lap, a modest opening for the typically front-running American record holder in the event. Through much of the early race she led, with 800 champion Diane Gallagher on her outside shoulder; Gallagher would fade in the final lap and finish ninth. Uncharacteristically, this time, much of the remainder of the field, and in particular Wysocki, stayed within striking distance. As the gun lap began, Decker led by two meters and most of the crowd believed she would again win easily. Then, with 250 meters to go, Wysocki rocketed from fourth place into the lead, passing Decker on the outside, who calmly responded by speeding up as she tried to prevent Wysocki from taking the lead. The two ran side-by-side around the last turn and were even heading into the last one hundred meters.
The largest crowd ever to witness a U.S. Olympic Trials track meet, over 31,000 fans, was on its feet and boisterous as this unexpected battle was unfolding. Coming out of the turn, Decker accelerated, and most assumed again, that the race was over.
But Wysocki found another gear, caught Decker with sixty meters to go, and inexplicably pulled away, raising her arms as she passed through the tape. To defeat the heavily favored Decker, Ruth Wysocki had lowered her personal best in the 1,500 by nearly thirteen seconds.
In her post-race comments, Wysocki was deferential to the iconic runner she had just defeated. “I thought Mary would blast off with 600 meters to go,” she reflected. “I had no idea I could do this. I thought maybe I could sneak into third. I’m sure Mary won’t let that happen again.”
For her part, Decker was philosophical in her comments after finishing an unexpected second. “The loss to Wysocki isn’t that bad,” she offered. “In fact, it’s good. I’m glad Ruth won. It gives me a chance to see how I react to a loss.” (Her cool demeanor toward Wysocki during the awards ceremony was likely a more accurate representation of how the fiercely competitive Decker really felt about the loss.) She did acknowledge that the intense schedule of qualifying rounds, designed to mirror the Olympic schedule, had impacted her performance. In comments some viewed as whining, she offered, “The schedule is unfair to women distance runners,” intimating that six races in six days was excessive and placed runners competing in both the 1,500 and 3,000 at a competitive disadvantage. (She was the only athlete who competed in the finals of those two distance events.) She further admitted that the loss would likely cause her to forego any plans of doubling at the Games in six weeks. “I may pick just one event at the Games because one gold is better than two silvers.” She indicated she would return to Eugene and decide which event to run.
Three weeks after the 1,500 final at the Trials, Decker announced she would only run the 3,000 at the Olympics in Los Angeles. “I am disappointed and wish I could run in both events,” she admitted. “But I risk losing a gold medal.”
With that decision, though no one could foresee what would unfold, Mary Decker’s collision course with Zola Budd was set.
But first, Decker’s fragile lower body, the cause of years of lost competitive opportunities, threatened to again derail her Olympic aspirations. Dick Brown had always worked with Decker under a legitimate belief that she was largely unbeatable. . . as long as she remained healthy. His meticulous training plans were designed to strike a delicate balance between enough intense work to get her in peak condition but not enough to cause her to break down. At the Olympic Trials, Decker experienced a recurrence of soreness in her right Achilles tendon, a particularly painful and critical condition for a runner. She and her team speculated that the problem had arisen when she ran her 1,500 semi-final without a proper warm-up. Within a couple of weeks, the inflamed tendon was so sore that her doctors feared she might require surgery, which would have precluded running in the Olympics. Her doctors in Eugene opted instead to try a cortisone injection to try to reduce the inflammation, and by extension the severe pain she was experiencing. The injection worked, eventually, but not without first causing excruciating pain. As she reflected just before the Olympics began, “The day after, I couldn’t walk. It was the most painful injection I’ve ever had, and I’ve had plenty. I remember I could feel the adhesions pulling away. It was that sore. But the treatment progressed as the days went on.” Explaining how close she had come to missing the Games, she added, “I think it’s a miracle I’m here; I think it’s a miracle I’m going to compete.”
The cortisone injection greatly reduced the pain she was experiencing, but to avoid further damage to the delicate tendon, Decker was forced to complete running workouts in a swimming pool in a desperate attempt to maintain her fitness levels as the Olympics approached. She was only able to resume actual running workouts five days before the opening ceremony in Los Angeles. To regain racing sharpness, as well as to test her fitness, she ran a 2,000 race in Eugene on August 3, five days before the qualifying rounds in the Olympic 3,000. Zola Budd had set a world best in this rarely run event a few weeks earlier before departing for Los Angeles. Running in Eugene, Decker took a half-second off of Budd’s 2,000 world record set just a few weeks earlier. (To put this record performance in perspective, and perhaps as a statement to the athletes who would soon be assembling in Los Angeles, the Soviet runner Tatyana Kazankina ran the same distance in Moscow the next day, taking a full four seconds off of Decker’s new standard.)
Though she had lost precious training time as she rehabbed her right Achilles, Mary Decker was a uniquely talented athlete. It appeared that, under the circumstances, she was as ready as she could be to gain the Olympic success that had eluded her for so long. As she philosophically offered, “I’m extremely hungry now. I feel fresh with all the rest. I spent a lot of time in the swimming pool, doing things I don’t usually do in training. I’m a competitor and you can bet I won’t run a race like that again.” Still, she recognized that the injury had interrupted her training at a critical time. As she commented after her record-breaking performance in the 2,000, “Obviously, I’m not as prepared as I would have liked to have been, but I think I’m just as promising as anyone else for the gold.”
In many ways, Mary Decker entered the Los Angeles Olympics in a particularly good frame of mind, a juxtaposition given her loss at the Olympic Trials and subsequent injury scare. Her marriage to Ron Tabb behind her (she would refer to him as “the other one”), the diminutive Decker had found love in a man who was in many ways her physical opposite. Richard Slaney was a massive, 6-7, 256-pound athlete from Great Britain who would break the national discus record as well as win multiple titles as Britain’s Strongest Man.
With a degree in aeronautical engineering, Slaney had attended San Diego State University on an athletic scholarship. Despite his size, he demonstrated exceptional speed and quickness, which led him to try American football. “I got beat to hell,” he jokingly offered. “Being fast makes no difference if you’re running in the opposite direction to the ball.” But it was in the discus that he excelled at San Diego State, establishing the school record that would stand for decades. He represented Great Britain in the discus at the Los Angeles Olympics but was eliminated in the preliminary rounds.
The two had met in early 1983, though the inauspicious meeting offered no evidence of a romantic attraction. Each attended a sports dinner in New York and afterward they were asked to take photos together. As Slaney later recounted, “. . . the photographer kept asking us to get closer together, but she (Decker) kept moving further away.” A few weeks later, Decker learned that Slaney and his friend, Olympic decathlon champion Daley Thompson, would be training in Eugene, and she invited them to stay at her house. As Decker recalled, “I had been separated from the other one for a while, and I was really lonely.” From that time together came a friendship that eventually grew into a romantic relationship. Two days before the 3,000 heats in the Olympics, Decker and Slaney announced they would marry in early 1985.
At a time when media scrutiny of Decker and her competitive career threatened to overwhelm her, massive Richard Slaney served as a needed shield and the grounding force she had been lacking for much of her life. As Dick Brown suggested, “Richard is the first to be impressed with Mary not as a runner, but as a person.”
Though with a fifteenth place finish in the Olympic discus in Los Angeles, Richard Slaney gained little international notoriety in his event, he would, somewhat tragically, attain fame in the Coliseum in his role as boyfriend and protector of Mary Decker.
So as Decker checked into her Los Angeles hotel several days before the preliminary rounds of the 3,000, foregoing the frenzied cacophony of the Olympic Village, she seemed mentally ready to finally slay the Olympic demons that had impeded her for so long. She was home, returning to the area around which she had spent her most formative years. She had a coach she trusted to provide guidance that balanced her well-being and competitive success. She had begun a blossoming romance with a man who seemed to understand her and who was devoted to protecting her. And despite her recent injury and period of rehabilitation, particularly with the boycott of the Soviet Bloc nations, she was poised to add Olympic success to the “Double Decker” of the previous summer. As she offered in a press conference before the qualifying rounds, “Life is about wanting something real bad and then setting out to get it. A lot of people are concentrating on seeing negative things happen to me this week. My positive thinking will overcome them.”
Compared to Decker’s relatively rosy outlook as the Games commenced, young Zola Budd’s rollercoaster of emotions and mental anguish continued. In a matter of months, she had been transported from the relative quiet of Bloemfontein to now moving about one of the largest and most hectic cities in the world. Though she savored her visits to Disneyland and Sea World as well as an impromptu audience with Princess Anne of Great Britain, she was still a sheltered teenager who had blossomed while attending to her animals and running through her small city. While she had relished performing in front of intimate and partisan crowds in her native South Africa, in just a few days she would compete in the Los Angeles Coliseum, one of the largest venues to host Olympic track and field events. She still depended on Pieter Labuschagne as a coach and confidante, but their relationship was becoming increasingly strained. Though her father had been a source of support in the developmental years of her running career, she had broken all ties with him and told him she didn’t want him with her in Los Angeles. Though at times excited about the prospects of competing against Mary Decker and some of the world’s other top runners, as she checked into the Olympic Village at the University of California – Los Angeles three days before the 3,000 heats were scheduled to begin, at her core Zola Budd just wanted to get the final over and head back home to Bloemfontein.
With the hype generated by the onslaught of articles from the Daily Mail, interest in the women’s 3,000 was reaching a peak. The public was fascinated by the human-interest story of a waifish, bare-footed, teenage ex-patriot from shunned South Africa attempting to prevent the greatest American woman middle-distance runner of all time from gaining the Olympic glory she so richly deserved. To much of the world, the Olympic 3,000-meter run was a battle between just two runners, Zola Budd and Mary Decker. Despite the absence of Kazankina and the other Soviets, the rest of the field included runners capable of winning the gold medal, as history would prove. Included in the field were numerous other runners capable of medaling, including Maricica Puica, Brigitte Kraus, Wendy Sly, and Lynn Williams.
The Canadian, Williams, was twenty-four at the time of the 3,000 final, and in her mind, she was an unlikely Olympian. As she would later reflect, “I was small and stocky, and no one would have looked at me and said, ‘You’re going to be an Olympic runner.’” But after beginning her athletic career in her native Regina, Saskatchewan, she began running on her own at the age of sixteen, and by 1983, she was finishing tenth in the inaugural World Championships 3,000, won by Mary Decker. After earning a spot on the Canadian Olympic team, Williams ran the fastest time in the world in an unofficial team time trial, indicating her fitness and readiness to perhaps surprise the many fans focused on the dual between Decker and Budd. As she recalled, “I was nervous. There was so much hype, but I was ready. . . For me, I was a relatively unknown Canadian. Certainly, no one was focusing on me to win a medal.”
Two days shy of her twenty-eighth birthday on the day of the 3,000 final, Brigette Kraus of West Germany had proven her fitness and mettle when she rallied to pass a fading Tatyana Kazankina to win the silver medal at the World Championships the previous year, finishing a close second to Mary Decker in the fastest 3,000 of her career. Though otherwise overshadowed entering the Los Angeles Games, Kraus had won multiple European Championships in the 1,500 and 3,000. She was clearly a threat to win a medal.
With so much attention at home and internationally placed on her new compatriot, Zola Budd, an intriguing talent in the race was Britain’s other middle-distance star, Wendy Sly. Born as Wendy Smith into a largely non-athletic family, Sly was originally drawn to running while watching the 1972 Munich Olympics. By the end of that decade, she was winning British national titles. Not a teenage phenomenon like Decker and Budd, Sly worked diligently, and at times creatively, to milk the greatest performance levels from the talent she possessed. In an age when the practice was not yet common, she traveled regularly to train in the United States, running in the thin air of the Colorado Rockies or the hot and humid conditions of Florida. While in the United States, she regularly participated in the lucrative road-racing circuit, earning money that would help fund her far less lucrative career racing on the track. Even in the weeks before the start of the Games, summer months during which Sly generally trained and competed from her home base in Great Britain, Sly decided to return to the United States for her final training and to avoid the media onslaught that was accompanying the citizenship saga of Zola Budd.
And at a time when women’s distance running in England was not particularly robust but when some of the dominant men’s distance runners in the world hailed from Great Britain, she sought opportunities to train with male runners when possible. As she later reflected, “I was lucky that from an early age I trained with men and treated it as normal and I looked up to British male runners like Dave Bedford, Brendan Foster, and Ian Stewart, in particular. . . They were heroes to me, and I wanted to run as hard as them, train as hard as them, be as hard as them.”
At first a vocal opponent of Budd’s placement on the British Olympic team, Sly later suggested that she was most concerned that the circumstances of Budd’s citizenship attainment made it particularly unfortunate that another British athlete would be staying home as a result. After finishing second in the 1982 Commonwealth Games 3,000 and fifth in both the 1,500 and 3,000 at the inaugural World Championships in 1983, the twenty-four-year-old Sly was seeking a breakout performance. Six weeks before the Olympics, she had not been running well and had considered not competing. Her performances had been hampered all year by what she had thought was an Achilles tendon issue, but which would ultimately be diagnosed as an injury to another tendon below her right ankle. As she later reflected, “I had been treating the wrong thing and wondering why it wasn’t clearing up.” Though not at one hundred percent by the start of the qualifying rounds in Los Angeles, Wendy Sly was sufficiently healed to contend for a medal. And as she said before the opening of the Games, “I’ve spent three years of my life dedicated to one ambition. . . to bring home a medal for my country from Los Angeles. That’s my dream.”
With so much attention placed on Decker and Budd, the most overlooked and imposing runner in the field was the legendary Romanian athlete, Maricica Puica. With her powerful build and flowing blonde hair, Puica had a competitive record worthy of being considered a favorite in any major race. As Zola Budd later reflected on the first time she met the Romanian, in a warmup area before the 3,000 heats, “The first thing that struck me then was the strength and power of Maricica Puica. She seemed so big, not in physical size but in overall stature and presence, almost larger than life in a way. . .”
Growing up in eastern Romania in a large family with several older brothers, Maricica Luca showed her considerable athletic abilities at a young age. She gravitated to running as a teenager, and at fifteen she caught the eye of the director of the local sports center, Ion Puica, who would become her lifelong coach. Twenty years older than the young runner, Ion Puica and young Maricica would later become romantically involved and would eventually marry.
Maricica Puica won the prestigious World Cross Country Championships in 1982 and 1984, and two years before the Los Angeles Games, she had broken Decker’s world record in the mile. In between, in 1983, an injury caused a brief interruption in her intense training. As she explained, “In 1983, I had to pause for a few months to recharge my batteries, focus my energy on the Olympics.” She came back the following March to capture her second World Cross-Country title, and as the Olympics approached, she was well-prepared mentally and physically. Having just turned thirty-four, considered an older age for world-class middle-distance runners, Puica showed no signs of slowing down. With the stamina to handle a fast pace from the start and the speed to kick at the end from any pace, whether Decker, Budd, or the boycotting Soviets were in the race, Maricica Puica had deserved to be considered a favorite.
That eighteen-year-old Zola Budd was young and inexperienced internationally was readily accepted. Far less well-known was the inexperience of her coach, Pieter Labuschagne. The young South African had been a schoolteacher who also coached a group of runners when a generational talent was thrust upon him. Though he had competed on the track and researched best training methods for middle-distance runners, Labuschagne offered little special coaching expertise except to represent what Frank Budd believed to be the best coach available to work with his talented daughter. With his best athlete running in an Olympic race against other runners coached by some of the top coaches in the world, Pieter Labuschagne was in many respects still a coaching work-in-progress.
As an example, when Zola and her coach first saw a list of the entrants in the 3,000, many of the names were new to them. And for those whose names they recognized, like Puica and Sly, they knew little about the racing tactics each would likely utilize. As she reflected in her autobiography about the other athletes in the race, “with hindsight, Pieter and I should have done our homework to find out just who my opposition was. . . The race had been billed as a Decker vs. Budd showdown, yet few people bothered to consider the credentials of some of the other girls in the race.”
Similarly, Zola went into the heats and final without much of a strategy or tactical plan. It was accepted that Decker would likely take the lead from the start and that Budd would try to stay with her. As she related after the race, her coach had told her, “Let her lead for 1,500 meters, let her win the first half, Zola. Then, you go into the lead. Win the second half of the race, that’s the important part.” Beyond that, the young and inexperienced runner would largely react to how the race unfolded, a tall order for a young and inexperienced athlete on the largest stage in track and field.
While Pieter Labuschagne’s tactical plan for Zola was rather simplistic, Dick Brown and Mary Decker had developed a strategy that was a bit more thought out. Neither he nor Decker believed Zola Budd would be a factor late in the race, anticipating that the most strident competition would come from Brigitte Kraus of West Germany, silver medalist to Decker in Helsinki the previous summer, and Maricica Puica. Brown anticipated that the final would unfold at world record pace, which he believed Decker was prepared to handle. And particularly if such a fast pace should evolve, he advised Decker to allow someone else to carry the load of setting that pace and leading the pack, at least for the first half of the race. The key, as the sage coach envisioned it, was to be in the lead and pushing the pace for the last two laps, with Decker reaching top speed with around 300 meters to go. Perhaps the most striking aspect of that tactical plan was the potential to “let someone else lead,” which ran counter to the approach Decker had utilized since her teenage years. But as Dick Brown realized, his athlete had been outkicked by Ruth Wysocki in the 1,500 final at the Olympic Trials and then had been forced to devote precious training time to running in a pool as she rehabbed the injury to her Achilles. Both athlete and coach believed she was ready, but the pressure and intensity of an Olympic final was something Mary Decker had never experienced.
For her part, despite the setbacks she had recently experienced, minor as they might have been, she was excited about her first chance to compete in an Olympics. Regarding the strategy of allowing another runner to control the pace, Decker later suggested, “That turned out to be the biggest mistake of my life, to let someone else lead.” As she continued, “I always ran my own race at my own pace. But we thought maybe with the Olympic pressure, we should play it a little safe.” For someone largely unaccustomed to running in a pack with other runners, those cautious tactics would contribute to one of the most famous collisions in sports history.
Despite the impressive credentials she brought to Los Angeles, Puica was largely an overlooked athlete in the 3,000, and she gladly took a backseat to the over-hyped confrontation between Decker and Budd. As she recalled years later, “The journalists were interested in playing out Decker-Budd as a duel. They made an icon out of Decker and kept going on about the fact that Zola was from South Africa. When it came to me, I was a Romanian, our country was very small and there was also the fact that it was behind the Iron Curtain. I’d say seventy to eighty percent of people I met at the Olympic Games did not even know where my country was located on the map.”
Before departing from Romania, Puica and her coach/husband had watched countless films of past races of her anticipated Olympic rivals. Realizing the propensity of Decker and Budd to set the pace from the start, they decided the most effective strategy would be to allow others to lead early, maintain close contact, and make her move in the last lap. She would follow this well-planned strategy to perfection.
For Zola Budd, though her pre-Olympic workouts had demonstrated her fitness, her youth and inexperience, coupled with a slight hamstring strain, only fueled her sense of self-doubt. In her final meeting with reporters before the 3,000 heats, as she struggled with questions posed in the language of her new country, Budd recalled that much of the press conference, “seemed like a pilot for the ‘Mary and Zola Show.’ The other athletes didn’t get a mention in what the press had already decided would be a two-woman race: it was all Mary and me.” Regarding the tremendous pressure she was feeling, she continued, “I was overpowered by all the attention at a time when I was feeling very unsure of myself.” Such was the perilous state of mind Zola Budd took into the biggest race of her career.
Conducted two days before the final, the three heats of the women’s 3,000 were completed without incident or upsets, and with the top contenders advancing unscathed. In the first, Decker ran with apparent ease to set the Olympic record as she easily outdistanced Lynn Williams of Canada. The first time the 3,000 had been contested as an Olympic event, Decker’s time established a new Games record. Commenting on the race afterward, Decker said it had been, “Effortless. . . except for Lynn stepping on my heel four times.” With Decker admittedly inexperienced in running close to other athletes, this comment was eerily prescient of what would occur two days later. In the second heat, Brigitte Kraus ran thirteen seconds slower but also won easily, with the American Joan Hansen and Wendy Sly finishing second and third. Finally, in the third heat, Maricica Puica broke by over a second Decker’s Olympic record, set less than an hour earlier. Cindy Bremser of the United States also dipped under Decker’s short-lived standard to finish second in the heat, just ahead of Zola Budd, who led most of the race until she was passed by Puica and Bremser in the last half-lap. As Zola reflected later, “I didn’t really run hard because I didn’t have to . . . It was, in a way, a lazy run for me.” In the race, she recalled telling herself, “‘Nine minutes, please pass quickly.’”
As further evidence of Budd feeling out-of-place, she had indicated before her heat that she would run in shoes to help prevent injuries from running with runners wearing spiked shoes. Somewhat unexpectedly, she showed up for her heat barefoot. Commenting on the young Zola, Cindy Bremser offered, “This has to be a tough situation for Zola, running with people who are with her all the way. Before, she could just get on the track and run a race. She never had a real kick before and I guess she doesn’t have much of one now because we went by her and I really wasn’t pushing.” This from an American athlete who had just run faster than her teammate, Mary Decker, yet was barely mentioned by the mainstream American press.
Ironic but largely unnoted at the time, the fourth-place finisher in the third heat was Cornelia Burki of Switzerland. Burki was born in South Africa in 1953 and moved to Switzerland twenty years later. In an era in which South Africa was still banned from international track and field competitions, Burki represented her new country in three Olympics and won forty-seven Swiss national titles. Thirteen years older than Zola, she had met and befriended the young South African earlier that year. Commenting years later on her then young friend, Burki offered, “She was such a shy and introverted person. All she wanted was to run, and to run fast.”
There were many similarities between the two athletes. Both were middle-distance runners, both were talented (Burki would finish fifth in the 3,000 final), both had been born in South Africa and had grown up during the apartheid era, and both had moved to different nations at least in part to expand competitive opportunities. But a huge difference was the level of outcry each experienced for the racist practices of her native country and for her emigration from that country. The Swiss press was far less rabid than its counterpart in Great Britain, and Burki’s move to Switzerland had not been orchestrated and hyped incessantly by a British tabloid. Since her clandestine move to England a few months earlier, Zola Budd had been constantly peppered with questions about race relations and apartheid policies, and her every move was reported to the subscribing public. Though she finished ahead of her former compatriot in the 3,000 heat and would do so again in the final, Cornelia Burki was at best considered an afterthought in the coverage of the 1984 Olympics.
The 3,000-meter final was scheduled for 6:40 p.m. Los Angeles time the Friday before the Sunday closing ceremonies, the marquee event on an evening that also included finals in the women’s high jump and 100-meter hurdles and the men’s steeplechase. Though the region had endured stifling heat and choking smog for much of the Games, on this evening the temperature had moderated, and the stadium was starting to transition to shade as the California sun began to set. The crowd of over 85,000 was decidedly pro-American, chanting “Mary, Mary!” as the athletes were introduced. The atmosphere was electric as the huge crowd waited for the anticipated duel between Decker and Zola Budd.
Likely not in a championship frame of mind, the partisan chants of the crowd did not go unnoticed by Budd. As she recalled in her autobiography, “The worst thing before the final was the crowd. They kept chanting ‘Mary, Mary,” and it was horrible. They were so biased, and they made it look as though the final was only between me and Mary.” As she began her warmup, Budd was struck by how tired she felt, her “legs feeling like lead” and hurting from her recent hamstring strain.
As the twelve finalists assembled at the starting line, Puica was lined up on the inside, resplendent in her yellow Romanian singlet and light blue shorts, her platinum blonde hair lightly bouncing as she jogged in place to warm up as she waited for the start. Of all the finalists in the 3,000, she was the only athlete to have competed in the heats of the 1,500 the previous evening. Still, as the runners toed the line for this event, Puica outwardly appeared calm, rested, and ready.
Further outside were Zola Budd and Wendy Sly, both decked out in the British kit of white top and shorts with the Union Jack and a blue and red stripe across the chest. As in the preliminary round, Budd was shoeless, a bit ironic given that she had recently signed a promotional contract with the Brooks Shoe Company. A much smaller player in the endorsement field than Nike or Adidas, a Brooks spokesman indicated the company would not pressure her to wear its shoes, or any shoes, in Los Angeles. “Zola runs barefoot with our blessings,” he suggested. “If it’s the difference between a silver medal with shoes and a gold without, we prefer she go barefoot.” Earlier, as the 3,000-final approached, all the finalists had been asked to show their track shoes to an official who would determine that the spikes met specifications. When her time came to have her “shoes” approved, the barefoot Budd simply picked up her feet to show to the official. “The poor man nearly cracked up laughing,” she recalled, “but what else could I have done. Everybody else had spikes and I had to show him something.”
Further out on the waterfall start line and next to Sly was Mary Decker, decked out in a red top and shorts with “USA” emblazoned in large letters across the chest. The American great appeared calm and mentally prepared as the other runners were introduced, as if she had been preparing for this moment her entire career. After the injuries and boycott that had precluded any experience in previous Games, Mary Decker had the look of an athlete ready to finally meet her Olympic destiny. As she offered before the race, “Finally, it all seems so perfect.” If all went as planned, that destiny would be met after seven-and-a-half laps. In ways no one could have imagined, it did not.
At the start, Decker quickly moved into the lead, with Puica right behind her and Budd slightly boxed in, languishing for a hundred meters or so in eighth place. By the end of the first half lap, Budd had moved up into second, with Puica in third and also within striking distance of the lead. Wendy Sly lagged in the middle of the pack for most of the first lap before working her way up to the fifth-place position. As she did through most of the race, the diminutive and short-haired Lynn Williams maintained her position just behind the leaders. The tall and lanky Kraus struggled to maintain contact with the lead pack and would eventually drop out with an injury.
The savvy Puica allowed Decker and Budd to set the pace, running by herself and staying out of trouble in third place through the middle part of the race. As she recalled afterward, “I felt quite comfortable and was running easily in third place. A very fast race. At 800 meters, she (Decker) was setting a pace close to the world record.”
Regarding Decker’s strategy, Dick Brown had suggested, “She was looking for about an 8:29 pace in the final. With a kilometer to go, she would begin picking it up.” (A time of 8:29 would have been just over two seconds slower than Syvetlana Ulmasova’s world record at the time). After opening lap times of 66.9 and 68.6, Decker completed the first kilometer in 2:50.43, on pace for a final time of 8:30. Such a pace would have been slightly slower than Decker’s personal best, but seven seconds faster than Budd had run previously. At that point in the race, though, no runners had been dropped and the last runner in the pack was within ten meters of the leaders.
Just past the finish line with four laps to go, the American Joan Hansen, running at the back of the pack, got her legs tangled with Aurora Cunha of Portugal and fell to the track. She quickly got up and resumed running, soon worked her way to the back of the pack, and would finish in eighth place.
Through the middle laps, Budd maintained her position on Decker’s outside shoulder as the pace slowed, and the pack remained largely bunched behind the leaders. As she wrote about this stage of the race in her autobiography, “The stage was set for disaster when Mary, who was in the lead with me outside her and Puica behind, slowed down. But the most important figure, one who was virtually ignored in the endless postmortems afterward, was Wendy (Sly), looming up on my outside and starting to box me in.”
Decker was setting the pace on the inside and Budd had run for several laps on her outside shoulder. Running barefoot and with her well-documented lack of experience competing in a tight pack, Budd felt out of harm’s way running on the outside of lane one. But when Sly moved up to Budd’s outside shoulder, the young runner suddenly had a fast-moving runner on each side of her, something she had seldom if ever experienced. To gain some space, Budd accelerated into a slight lead, still running on the outside of the inside lane but now slightly ahead of the world champion. As the leaders entered the home straight, just over three laps remained.
As Wendy Sly later recalled that point in the race, “The pace had slowed quite considerably, and I had the feeling Mary was getting tired. That’s all speculation, of course. But when Zola Budd went to the front, Mary wasn’t quite sure how to react. She wasn’t used to it, having run so fast early . . . and there were still so many runners with her.”
The younger Mary Decker had treated workouts on the track as a competition, fighting to never cede the lead and to always finish first. In Los Angeles that day, those competitive instincts were still present, and in the biggest race of her career, she wasn’t going to readily give up the lead. As Zola Budd eased ahead as the leaders came out of the turn onto the homestretch, Decker tried to fight her off, maintaining her position on the inside with Budd ahead and still on the outside of the first lane. The combination of two talented athletes, each relatively inexperienced in running in a pack in a major race and each fighting for the lead, led to a disastrous result for both athletes.
First, Decker’s right knee brushed the back of Budd’s left leg, causing both runners to slightly stumble. Neither athlete slowed or changed position on the track, and five strides later there was similar contact. As Budd struggled to remain upright, her left leg shot out into the Decker’s path, the American lost her balance, and fell to the track writhing in pain. Budd instinctively looked back, but later indicated that while she sensed that someone had gone down, it wasn’t until later that she realized that her idol had fallen. As Decker later recalled those pivotal few seconds, “Psychologically, I was just gearing up to make my move, and all of a sudden I was on the ground.”
As Budd glanced back to try to see what had occurred, the cagey Puica shot into the lead, with Sly right behind her. Within the next half-lap, Budd had recovered and regained the lead. She would lead the pack of three until 600 meters remained, when Wendy Sly eased into the lead, with Puica right behind her. Shortly thereafter, Budd began to noticeably slow, with Sly and Puica now the two contenders for the gold medal.
Shortly after Decker went down, from the largely American crowd of 85,000 came widespread booing of Budd, almost immediately considered the culprit who had taken the American champion out of the race. On British television, the commentators surmised that Budd had been too close to Decker, had not given the American enough room as she passed her, and had been at fault. On American television, ABC Sports analyst Marty Liquori offered similar comments regarding Zola Budd causing the accident. In the Coliseum, the crowd had quickly reached the same conclusion.
As Budd continued to slow, with 250 meters to go, Puica started her kick, with her smooth powerful stride allowing her to quickly pass Sly and extend her lead until she won by twenty meters, finishing in a new Olympic record of 8:35.96. As Sly recalled this last lap of the most important race of her career, she believed at the bell that she could win a gold medal. “Then Puica went by me with 250 to go, and she was so strong. With 100 meters left, I started thinking, ‘I’m 100 meters from a silver medal’ and I couldn’t believe it. Those last 100 meters were difficult. They were very slow.” A runner who had battled injuries to the point that she considered not running in the Olympics, and then was overshadowed on the British team by a young phenom whose spot on the team she openly questioned, Wendy Sly had won an Olympic silver medal, finishing in 8:39.47.
Regarding the controversy for which the race would forever be known, Sly later recalled, “I heard the crowd booing, but only after the race, when everyone was asking me about everyone else except me and my performance, did I realize it was such a huge issue. My goal was to win a medal and nobody cared about it except me.” Despite the lack of attention, Wendy Sly was the first middle-distance woman from Great Britain to win an Olympic medal since Ann Packer had won the 800 in Tokyo in 1964.
Lynn Williams’ strategy had been to find a place in the middle of the pack, try to stay in contact with the leaders, and then react to how the race developed in the final laps. Staying out of trouble, she had been in fifth or sixth place through the first half of the race and was just a few meters behind the leaders when the fateful collision between Decker and Budd occurred. “It was so bumpy and jostly and it was very fast. It was a world record pace the first few laps. We were working really hard and I was getting bumped around.” Then she saw what happened between the two leaders. “I saw they bumped and then boom, Mary goes down. We all had to do a dipsy-doodle and avoid the collision,” she recalled.
According to Williams, after Decker went down, the tenor of the race changed dramatically. “We all lost focus,” she recalled. “It went from being in a pack to everyone being spread out around the track. There were literally a couple of laps where I remember nothing. I just remember running in this weird vacuum and hearing all this booing. Then I woke up. I heard the bell and it was ‘holy crap, it’s the last lap, wake up!’”
Wake up, she did. Running the entire race within striking distance of the leaders, in the last lap, she was in fourth place and saw Zola Budd slowing and coming back to her. She realized that if she could pass Budd, she would be in medal contention. Williams began her final kick and caught and passed Budd with just over 200 meters remaining. Finishing in 8:42.14, Lynn Williams was the bronze medalist, something few had anticipated when the race began.
As Zola Budd continued to fade, finishing seventh in 8:48.80, commentators in the stadium and fans around the world assumed that she had been physically unable to maintain the strong pace that had characterized the entire race. In the days and weeks that followed, it became apparent that the reasoning behind her fading out of medal contention was a bit more complex, with issues of the crowd, and Mary Decker, and booing all interacting with her young and delicate psyche. As she reflected in a column written for the Daily Mail two days after the final, “my world was shattered.” As she explained her thoughts and emotions after the incident, “I couldn’t believe it. It was terrible. I wanted to stop. I wanted it all to end. And, in truth, the race for me was really over.”
In time, Budd would further clarify the reason for her slowing down in the last lap. As she explained in her autobiography, Pieter Labuschagne had instilled in her the notion that you never stop running in a race, so she didn’t feel she could simply step off the track, though she wanted to do so. With the cascade of boos coming from the largely American crowd, the young and, at least at the time, emotionally fragile athlete couldn’t envision standing on the podium and absorbing more crowd displeasure. “. . . I knew once the race had started that I was good enough to win a silver or bronze medal. Deep inside me, though, was now a dread of standing on a (podium) and I began running slower and slower. People passed me and I didn’t care – everything had collapsed and I just wanted out – I almost walked across the finish line.” From her perspective, given the choice of receiving an Olympic medal and being subjected to more of the jeers of the partisan crowd or being able to quickly and quietly leave the stadium after the race, albeit with no Olympic medal, she chose the latter. As she would later characterize the moment, once she heard the boos and realized they were directed toward her, she “gave up.”
As the other runners completed the final three laps, Mary Decker lay sprawled on the infield, in her mind the victim of a foul by Zola Budd. Her right foot had scraped Budd’s left calf, just above the Achilles tendon, piercing the skin enough to draw blood. As the young runner’s left leg shot out to help her maintain balance, Decker tripped over that leg and went down, hard. She had instinctively reached out as she lost her balance, accidentally ripping the competition number off the back of Budd’s jersey. As she later offered, “To keep from pushing her, I fell.”
When runners fall in a race, they typically get up and continue running, and the highly competitive Decker tried to do the same. “My first thought was, ‘I have to get up,’” she suggested afterward. “But when I made the slightest move, I felt the tear in my hip, and it felt like I was tied to the ground and all I could do was watch them run off.” Writhing on the infield just inside the track, Decker lay on her back grasping her upper outer leg before turning onto her side as she watched the rest of the field continue racing. It would be determined that she had pulled her left hip stabilizer muscle, an injury more severe than Decker thought at the time.
With her writhing in pain on the infield, medical personnel got to Decker almost immediately, making for an odd juxtaposition with multiple doctors, paramedics, Olympic officials, and cameramen surrounding her as the race continued, each runner passing this unfortunate grouping three times as the race concluded. Also quickly reaching her side was her fiancé, Richard Slaney. Shortly after Puica crossed the finish line, Decker was helped to her feet and assisted across the track to a nearby tunnel, tears still streaming down her face. Once they reached the tunnel, Slaney picked up his fiancé and carried her to the medical area.
As Mary Decker left the track, she stated tearfully, “They better make a protest.” Only in the rarest and most unlikely outcome, IAAF officials could order a rerunning of the race, a do-over that Decker would have been too injured to run in any way. The most substantial outcome of American officials filing a protest would be the disqualification of Zola Budd from her seventh-place finish, a result that would likely have been resisted by British officials, but which would otherwise have had minimal impact. Regardless, no official protest from American officials was forthcoming.
Though still stunned by what they had witnessed, the crowd politely cheered as Maricica Puica took off her spikes and, with a beaming smile, ran a lap around the track. Regardless of how the race had transpired or who was on the track at the end, she was the Olympic champion. Years later, Puica reflected on her gold medal performance, offering, “Every athlete dreams of winning an Olympic medal. I was very sad about the accident. I’d have been a lot happier if no one had fallen because the victory would have been more convincing. But history will record who won and eventually remember the rest of it.”
Saddened at the loss of yet another Olympic opportunity, perhaps angry about allegedly being wronged by Zola Budd, and in some pain from the injury, Decker continued to be emotional after being carried off the track and into a nearby tunnel. Don Steffens, a media aide for the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee and later a long-time correspondent for Track and Field News, was in that tunnel and witnessed an exchange between Decker and Budd. He reported that several runners stopped to tell Decker how sorry they were that she had fallen and had been unable to complete the race. As Zola Budd approached her, according to Steffens, Decker said, “Leave me alone, get out of here, I don’t want to talk to you.” Several other runners suggested to Decker that Budd hadn’t been at fault, that the fall was not the result of a foul, the American emphatically responded, “Yes it was, I know it was.”
Immediately after the race, Budd had walked around the finish line area in a sort of daze, offering congratulations to different runners. She later suggested that the only athlete she looked for was Cornelia Burki, the Swiss runner and former South African who Budd had recently befriended. The two runners walked into the tunnel together, and Burki witnessed the confrontation with Mary Decker. As she later recalled, “Mary was sitting there crying. Zola was walking in front of me, apologizing. Mary was screaming at her, I’ll never forget that. Zola being such a shy person, her shoulders dropped.” As she continued, “. . .the blame was on her (Budd). For any young girl to cope with that, that was very difficult.”
Already devastated and fragile, and now not allowed to offer her condolences to her idol for what had transpired in the just-completed race, Budd was protectively escorted from the area by Mary Peters, the 1972 Olympic pentathlon champion who was serving as the manager of the British women’s team. Peters accompanied Budd to the medical area to have the gash in her leg treated.
Zola Budd had largely dreaded running in the Olympic final. With Mary Decker falling, Budd getting blamed for the incident, the massive crowd showering her with boos and jeers, slowing to a seventh-place finish as a result, and now being repulsed by her idol, she was devastated. It would soon get worse.
An hour or so after the 3,000-final had concluded, Decker reappeared for a post-race press conference. As she had left the track, she was carried into the large, tented area by Richard Slaney; “What a way to make an entrance,” Decker commented to the assembled reporters with a smile that was betrayed by her disheveled hair and eyes that were red from crying. She had just come from having her left hip x-rayed. “I have a muscle tear, a strain or a pull, but that’s all,” she shared.
Asked about her reaction to Budd’s attempt at an apology, Decker did not deny that she had shunned her young rival. “I said, ‘Don’t bother.’ It’s been a long time to get here. Obviously, the Olympics and I don’t have a very good relationship. Something always seems to go wrong.”
(Describing this encounter years later, Decker offered, “I believe I handled the situation with dignity. I didn’t call her a name or anything. I just said, ‘Don’t bother apologizing. It won’t help.’ It’s too bad neither of us had the race we wanted. At least she stayed on her feet.”
Through most of the press conference, Decker shared her belief that Zola Budd had been at fault and had caused her to fall. “Zola Budd tried to cut in without being basically ahead. I think her foot caught me, and to avoid pushing her, I fell.” As she continued, thinking about how the rivalry between the two athletes had been hyped in the media, “When I think about it now, I should have pushed her. But if I had pushed her, tomorrow the headlines would have read, ‘Decker shoves Zola.’”
“I don’t think there’s any question that she was in the wrong,” she offered. “. . . it was inexperience on her part, but she was not in front. You have to be at least a full stride ahead before you cut in on someone. And she was cutting in around the turn, and she wasn’t anywhere near passing.” In addressing any role she might have played in the incident, she offered, “I don’t feel I did anything wrong. . . Hopefully, the injury will heal in time so I can go over to Europe and race.” At that point, Decker started crying and was carried out of the tent by Slaney.
The following day, Mary Decker and Dr. Leroy Perry, a chiropractor who gained fame in the 1980s for treating many track and field athletes, were interviewed by Kathleen Sullivan as part of ABC Sports’ Olympic coverage. Perry described the injury Decker had sustained, and, countering comments of some observers who questioned why she didn’t get up and continue after falling, suggested that Decker was physically unable to continue. “She strained her gluteal muscle and also aggravated her lower back,” he explained. After she fell, she tried to get back up, but, “she was in spasms, so she couldn’t carry any weight on her hip at all, so she fell back down.” Through most of the interview, Decker reiterated the themes of her press conference in stressing her belief that Zola Budd had been in the wrong, that she had cut in without giving Decker sufficient room, and that she would have pushed the younger runner but that doing so would have resulted in condemnation from the world press.
When asked by Sullivan, “Was this a confrontation just waiting to happen?”, in a calm voice Decker pointedly responded, “It was a confrontation only made by people like you and the other media.” Then in further explaining why the incident had occurred, she continued, “But I understand it was inexperience on her part. She probably didn’t know what to do, and she probably didn’t know what she was doing.”
The predominantly American crowd on hand to witness the 3,000 final had been vocally sympathetic of Decker following her confrontation with Budd, and that level of support would continue with many fans of the world champion. But with her continued emotional and occasionally tearful pronouncements that she had been wronged or fouled by the British teenager, popular opinion about Mary Decker began to slowly but perceptively evolve. In time, she would be viewed in some circles very negatively for her response to the incident. USA Today would declare her the “whiner of the year” and Esquire magazine would name her “the year’s sorest loser.”
Ruth Wysocki, who had famously sprinted to an upset win in the 1,500 at the Olympic Trials, early in the 1985 season would offer pointed remarks regarding Mary Decker’s ongoing comments about Zola Budd’s alleged fault in the now infamous 3,000 Olympic final. “The attitude she portrayed after that fall is an attitude that we, as competitors, have seen all along,” Wysocki offered. “In a way, some of us are relieved that the public knows the Mary we all know.” In response to the inevitable media buzz those comments generated, Wysocki later added, “I wasn’t trying to be vicious. I respect Mary immensely for all she’s achieved. I was just upset at the way she treated Zola.”
It wasn’t that Decker was without support in the weeks and months after she had fallen in Los Angeles. Dick Brown estimated that in the six months or so after the Olympics, Decker received around 4,000 letters, “and of those, I’d say maybe fifteen have been negative—and all of them unsigned.” Fulfilling not just the role of coach but also protector of his athlete, Brown continued, describing how children had sent Decker ribbons and medals they had won. One medal was accompanied by a letter that suggested, “We think you should have won a gold medal. Here’s a medal that I won. Please keep it until you win yours.” Another letter accompanied a Purple Heart medal a veteran from Portland, Oregon had courageously won. “You have earned it and very much more,” he wrote. “I am giving (this) to you for the way you subconsciously dove out of the way toward the infield in that collision. . . (Yours was) the most honorable type of injury.”
These supportive gestures notwithstanding, and though at the time she did little to show it publicly, the criticism stung Decker. As Richard Slaney said years later of this time in her life, “It was very difficult for her. . . This was her hometown, this was something she had been dreaming about for years and she was being (criticized). . . The media had nothing else to talk about and now all of a sudden, they had this soap opera. It hurt her.”
To many pundits and fans, Decker could have stemmed the rising tide of criticism simply by publicly apologizing for the blunt and at times harsh statements she had made that firmly laid all blame on Zola Budd. But a person of principle, she refused to apologize because she simply didn’t believe she had done anything that warranted an apology. “I don’t feel that I have any reason to apologize,” she offered early in 1985. “I was wronged, like anyone else in that situation.”
As the 1985 indoor season began, Decker made comments suggesting she was tiring of media depictions of how her image was being damaged in the aftermath of her collision with Budd. “I think it’s time the press started telling the truth and not make up stories about me,” she candidly offered. “What really bothers me is that they portray me as being bitter. I’m not bitter at all. I know what Zola did was unintentional. You can tell. We tried to set up breakfast, lunch, or dinner with her the next day—and nobody wrote about this—but they never responded.”
While in the aftermath of the Los Angeles Games, Mary Decker’s image took a hit, there is evidence that her pocketbook was impacted as well. Going into the Olympics, she had major endorsement deals with Nike, Timex, and Kodak, and those remained in place after the Games. But with her not completing the 3,000-final, and not winning a medal as predicted, and particularly given her comments about Zola Budd afterward, additional endorsement deals, which had been anticipated, simply did not materialize, potentially costing her enormous sums over the next few years. Though she would set new records and win countless races as her career continued, Mary Decker’s marketability never bounced back to what it had been before her fateful encounter with Zola Budd.
As Budd described this impact almost two decades after her Olympic encounter with Decker, “Mary was their golden girl who was supposed to win the gold. She was under a lot of pressure and I think it was about dollar signs at the end of the day. If Mary had won, she’d have been made for life.”
Privately, though, and to her credit, Decker had made efforts to reach out to Budd. The night of the race, there were efforts to contact Budd asking to meet for breakfast or lunch the next day, but such a meeting never materialized. Then, in early December of that year, Budd received a conciliatory letter from Decker. In part, Decker wrote to Budd, “I simply want to apologize to you for hurting your feelings at the Olympics. There are many reasons that people react the way they do at certain times in their lives and I’m sure you understand that that was a very difficult time for me.” As she continued, “I’m sorry I turned away after the race, it was a very hard moment for me emotionally and I reacted in an emotional manner.” Finally, she offered, “. . . the next time we meet I would like to shake your hand and let everything that has happened be put behind us.”
As she explains in her autobiography, this letter was very impactful to Zola Budd. “What a sporting gesture! It helped make up for the agony of the moment when all I wanted to do after Mary’s rebuff in Los Angeles was get as far away from the stadium as possible.”
Before the race had even concluded, speculation had already begun regarding two questions, one impossible to answer and the other controversial but ultimately answerable. First, would the race results have been different had what would become known as “the fall” not occurred? And second, who, if anyone, had been at fault and the cause of Decker falling?
Regarding the first question, both Mary Decker and her coach Dick Brown believed she had been in a good position to win the race. As she commented in her post-race news conference, “I was running a good race, a good pace, and I felt really good, and I am fit.”
But to some of the other competitors in the race, the encounter between Decker and Budd had little impact on who won the gold medal. Wendy Sly, with a silver medal that was somewhat forgotten in the chaos that followed the race, later suggested that she believed neither Zola Budd nor Mary Decker would have won the race. Though she lamented the lack of attention her runner-up finish had generated back in her native country, “Puica is the one I really feel sorry for,” she said. “She’s the Olympic champion. And I think she probably would’ve won the race anyway.”
Bronze medalist Lynn Williams had a similarly unique perspective on how the race might have transpired had Decker not gotten tangled with Budd just a few meters ahead. Williams was surprised that Decker did not continue after tumbling to the infield. “I thought she’d be up and would rejoin the pack, but apparently she fell down hard on that railing,” she offered before speculating how the race might have ended differently. “I don’t think she (Decker) was going to win that day, but we will never know.”
But among the finalists, the most pointed comments came from Maricica Puica, the athlete most impacted by speculation about how the race might have ended differently had Decker not fallen. Like Williams, Puica expressed surprise that Decker had not gotten up and continued the race. “It’s unfortunate that she fell. All of us wanted to give their best in this race. If I had fallen, I would have continued to run, but for Mary, it was beyond her strength.” Continuing, she boldly asserted, “I’m convinced that she did not rise up to continue because she understood that she couldn’t do anything about the outcome. I was in such good shape that I was ready for a 3,000-meter world record.” Finally, she said, “Even if Mary had continued the race, she wouldn’t have won it either way. Mary wasn’t in good shape. She wasn’t prepared.” Echoing countless track fans who lamented Decker’s exit from the race, she said, “But I’m sorry, because with Mary Decker in the race at the end it might have been even more spectacular.” More spectacular, indeed.
Though no less controversial, the answer to the second question regarding who, if anyone, had been at fault, was more clear-cut. As soon as her post-race press conference, Mary Decker made it clear that she believed Zola Budd had caused her to fall, an assertion she would repeatedly offer over the next few days. As the basis for this stance, in that same meeting with the media, she suggested, “You have to be at least a full stride ahead before you cut in on someone. And she was cutting in around the turn, and she wasn’t anywhere near passing.” Dick Brown seemed to echo this sentiment when he said, “I felt it was Zola’s responsibility not to move laterally until she was clear.”
As evidenced by the widespread booing of Budd after the collision occurred, many of the 85,000 spectators in the Coliseum agreed with Decker and her coach. And as the race unfolded, many in the media also quickly deemed Budd to have been at fault. On British television, the broadcasters immediately suggested that Budd had been too close when she supposedly cut in front of Decker. On American television, Marty Liquori also quickly suggested that Budd had cut in inappropriately and caused Decker to fall. These quick assessments were reinforced when, shortly after the race ended and based on the signaling of a foul by a race official positioned less than five meters from where the incident occurred, Budd was disqualified by the referee for “obstruction.” That official, from the United States, later stated, “It happened right past me. I felt Budd initiated the contact. All I could see were feet, and it seemed pretty evident to me that she cut into Decker and even stepped on Decker.”
Much of the blame placed on Zola Budd was based on agreement with Decker’s assertion about runners being required to be at least a stride ahead before they can legally move back in front of the runner they had just passed. As an example, Irish mile legend Eamonn Coghlan, who was not competing in Los Angeles due to injury, commented, “You’re supposed to be one stride ahead before you can cut in.” Of significance, though, he added, “But this happens all the time. You have to protect yourself out there.”
Over time, certain “rules” and “requirements” come to be assumed to be official, when in reality they are no more than practical guidelines. The notion of needing to be a stride ahead before cutting in is an example of one of these assumed rules. In 1984, IAAF Rule 141 stipulated, “Any competitor jostling, running across, or obstructing another competitor so as to impede his or her progress shall be liable to disqualification.” Missing from that rule is mention of the distance a runner must be ahead before she can legally cut in front of the runner she has just passed. The notion that a runner must be “a full stride ahead” might have had practical applications but was not codified in the IAAF rule book.
In applying Rule 141 to this incident, had Budd cut in without impeding Decker, she would not have committed a foul. If she had done so and impeded Decker, for example causing her to break stride, then she would have committed a foul, as the race referee had ruled based on the judgment of one of the judges.
But there was a third possibility, that no one was at fault. Because in track races beyond 400 meters, events in which competitors are not confined to lanes for the entire race, running can be a contact sport, with athletes in high-pressure situations running in bunched-up packs. Runners get elbowed, sometimes elbow back, and occasionally legs get tangled and athletes fall. Like Joan Hansen earlier in the 3,000 final. And then more famously, Mary Decker. And often those incidents, frustrating as they can be, are simple by-products of tight racing circumstances.
After viewing videotapes of the incident from multiple camera angles, the seven-member international jury of appeals voted unanimously to reinstate Zola Budd to her seventh-place finish, overruling the earlier disqualification in deciding that there had been no foul. And American team officials filed no protest.
Brooks Johnson was the head coach of the 1984 Women’s Track and Field Team, and in the aftermath of the momentous 3,000-meter final, he refused to assess any blame or responsibility for what had occurred. As he explained, “There are bound to be awkward moments in this sport. This was an awkward moment. It’s hard to say who was at fault. Obviously, there was contact, and contact prior to that. To assess blame and fault is to escape the reality of athletics. . . The world won’t end because someone fell down.”
Others were less diplomatic in suggesting that neither athlete was at fault or, in some instances, that both Decker and Budd shared blame for the incident. It was reported that John Holt, the general secretary of the IAAF, had stated, “Decker was her own victim. The videotapes showed that Budd did nothing wrong. In fact, Decker tried to get at her three or four times in the race.” Mort Tenner, the Olympic track and field competition director, similarly stated, “There was no foul. In some races, things happen that are nobody’s fault. In this case, the jury has ruled that Zola Budd was not responsible.”
One of the most insightful comments regarding the lack of fault came from Marty Liquori, the ABC Sports analyst who the previous evening had bluntly stated that Budd had caused Decker to fall. “I felt uneasy with my call when I left last night, and I . . . watched a lot of videotape, watched it in slow motion, and I really have to say that my initial call was wrong.” On the broadcast, the incident was shown from multiple angles at full speed and in slow motion. The video compilation showed Budd edging into the lead entering the curve, maintaining her position in the middle of the inside lane. At no point did Budd make a move to the inside of the lane, where Decker had maintained her position, not ceding the lead to her British rival. As Liquori summarized, “I think it was a close race, they were both very close to each other. But both runners could have done things to avoid it. Both runners are not blameless, but neither of them is guilty.” To a large American television audience, a respected athlete and analyst admitted he had been wrong, and of more importance stated that Zola Budd had not caused Mary Decker to fall.
Finally, some of the sharpest criticism of Decker came from fellow athletes, including some who had been in the race. In one of her diary columns written for the Daily Mail shortly after the race, Zola Budd made it clear she did not accept responsibility for what had occurred. “I feel very, very sorry for (Mary) that she did not finish the race or win a medal. There’s no point in trying to apportion blame. She says it’s my fault. I’m not saying it’s her fault. All I want to say about the whole thing is that I am convinced I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Cornelia Burki, the South African-born Swiss runner who finished fifth in the race, had a unique perspective of what transpired directly ahead of her. “When you’re behind, you’re the one to have to watch out. It was Mary’s fault.” Silver medalist Wendy Sly, who was to the right of both runners when Decker fell, expressed similar sentiments. “I’m convinced the fall was Mary’s fault. In the previous lap she just wasn’t concentrating, and I deliberately ran wide of her and Zola because I was sure there was going to be some bumping.”
Some of the most pointed criticism came from Steve Scott, Decker’s counterpart as the top American men’s miler of the time. Not typically prone to hyperbole or undue criticism, in the days following the 3,000-final, Scott referred to Mary Decker as a “baby” and “spoiled.” “Mary blamed Zola for the fall, but that’s ridiculous. It was one of those things that happens in racing. Mary wanted Zola to apologize, but if anything, Mary should apologize to Zola. We saw the real Mary Decker after that.”
It was as if overnight, public opinion turned against Mary Decker. So strong was the criticism that Dick Brown responded for his athlete, offering, “Mary has voiced concern over a consensus opinion that she was trying to go up the inside and pass Zola,” Brown said. “That was not the case. She was trying to maintain pace. Nobody associated with all this feels that anything was done intentionally. It was just unfortunate.”
Regarding the question of whether the outcome of the race would have been different had Decker not fallen, in the days following the race, the consensus opinion seemed to coalesce around the notion that Maricica Puica would have been difficult to beat, given her strength, closing speed, and cagey tactics. But utilizing an adjective offered by Puica, it would have been “spectacular” to have the eventual winner and Decker, Budd, Sly, and Williams battle one another to the end.
Regarding the question of who, if anyone, had been at fault in causing Decker to fall, after immediate blame, as well as a disqualification, was heaped on Zola Budd, the consensus soon began to change, particularly after that disqualification was overturned. In high-level racing, contact often occurs, incidents happen, and runners sometimes fall. And despite the desire to assign responsibility to someone, often no athlete is to blame. Consensus fairly quickly coalesced around the belief that Decker becoming entangled with Budd was a tragic accident and one that permanently impacted the lives and images of the two athletes.
Up next:
Part Four: Mary Decker and Zola Budd – Los Angeles 1984
Read the full Mary Decker and Zola Budd – Los Angeles 1984 series:
References
ABC Sports, “Mary Decker Post-Race Press Conference,” broadcast on August 11, 1984, downloaded from YouTube
ABC Sports, 1984, “Broadcast of Marty Liquori and Al Michaels Discussing Decker-Budd Incident,” August 12, 1984, downloaded from YouTube)
ABC Sports, “Mary Decker and Dr. Leroy Perry Interview,” broadcast on August 12, 1984, downloaded from YouTube
Anderson, Dave, 1984, “Sports of the Times,” The New York Times, August 11, 1984
Anderson, Dave, 1984, “Was Decker Afraid to Push Zola?” The New York Times, August 12, 1984
Associated Press, 1988, “Zola Budd Chronology,” May 10, 1988, downloaded from apnews.com
BBC Sport, 1984, “Broadcast of Women’s 3,000-meter Final,” August 11, 1984, downloaded from YouTube
Budd, Zola, 1984, “Budd: ‘My World Was Shattered,” The Daily Mail, published in The New York Times, August 13, 1984)
Budd, Zola and Eley, Hugh, 1989, Zola, London: Partridge Press
Burfoot, Amby, 2016, First Ladies of Running, Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Rodale Books
Doder, Dusko, 1984, “Soviets Withdraw from Los Angeles Olympics,” Washington Post, May 9, 1984
Donahue, Deidre and Reed, Susan, 1984, “Barefoot Girl Zola Budd Runs Heart and Sole for Her New Country, England,”, People, August 13, 1984
Friedman, Steve, 2009, “Zola Budd: After the Fall,” Runner’s World, October 2009
Gourlie, Matthew, 2020, “Saskatchewan Sports Stories: Lynn Kanuka (Williams),” Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame, downloaded from saskatchewansportshalloffame.com
Henderson, Jason, 2016, Collision Course, Edinburgh: Arena Sport Books
Justice, Richard, 1988, “Puica’s Olympic Success More Than Accidental,” Washington Post, February 9, 1988
Katz, Michael, 1984, “A Mile to Go for Wendy Sly,” The New York Times, September 20, 1984
Litsky, Frank, 1984, “Miss Decker Triumphs at 3,000 Meters,” The New York Times, June 24, 1984
Litsky, Frank, 1984, “Miss Decker Upset in 1,500,” The New York Times, June 25, 1984
Litsky, Frank, 1984, “Coach Says Decker Didn’t Seek Lead at Point of Collision” The New York Times, August 12, 1984
Lewis, Richard, 2006, “Zola Budd and Mary Decker Collide in L.A., 1984,” Sunday Times of London, October 15, 2006
Moore, Kenny, 1984, “Triumph and Tragedy in Los Angeles,” Sports Illustrated, August 20, 1984
Neff, Craig, 1985, “Mary, Mary, Still Contrary,” Sports Illustrated, January 28, 1985
The New York Times, 1984, “Mary Decker’s Decision,” July 13, 1984
The New York Times, 1984, “A Turnaround for Decker,” August 6, 1984
Plunkett, John, 2016, “Zola Budd Says She Gave Up in Olympic Final after Tangle with Mary Decker,” The Guardian, July 18, 2016
Reid, Scott, 2009, “Slaney Still Remembers ‘The Fall,’” Orange County Register, August 3, 2009
16 Days of Glory, 1985, Directed by Bud Greenspan, Cappy Productions
Taylor, Susan Champlin, 1986, “Mary Decker Takes a Run at Happiness with Husband Richard Slaney,” People, September 29, 1986
Vecsey, George, 1988, “A Woman for All Seasons,” The New York Times, February 4, 1988
Wilkinson, Carl, 2002, “What Happened Next? Zola Budd,” The Observer of London, November 24, 2002
Copyright 2021 by Rob Leachman – All Rights Reserved
