Five Athletes Linked by One Race
by Rob Leachman
From the “Great Rivalries of Olympic Track and Field” Series
This Series
In the decades following their meeting on the Olympic track in Los Angeles, the five main characters in that fateful event, Slaney, Budd, and the three medalists, each in her own way lived a successful and fascinating life. And though the public’s fascination with this tale would wane over time, the career of each of these athletes would inevitably be tied back to that one momentous race.
Lynn Williams
Of the three medalists, the unlikeliest was Lynn Williams. It would be reasonable to suggest that she benefited from the fallout of the entanglement of Mary Decker and Zola Budd, though the same could be said about Maricica Puica and Wendy Sly. But already a cagey veteran, Williams had hung back through most of the race, out of trouble but within striking distance of the leaders, and made her move when the opportunity arose, not unlike the other two medal winners.
Though she achieved her most noteworthy accomplishment when she won that bronze medal in Los Angeles, Lynn Williams had a solid running career. Surprisingly, she considers her greatest athletic achievement to be not her Olympic third-place finish, but rather another bronze medal she earned at the 1989 World Cross-Country Championships. Cross-country had been her entry point into running, and her performance in poor conditions at this championship meet in Norway represented the best performance of her career. “I couldn’t believe how easy I felt actually finding myself leading, in front of the Russians and Romanians and with Rosa Mota of Portugal on my heels.”
In addition to her bronze medal performance in Los Angeles, Williams again represented Canada at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, finishing fifth in the 1,500 and eighth in the 3,000. In between those races, fellow Canadian Ben Johnson, who had defeated Carl Lewis in the 100-meter dash, failed a drug test and was stripped of his gold medal. It was a major distraction for the Canadian track and field team and detracted from Williams’ strong performance in the 1,500, in which she was less than a second behind the silver medalist. “I personally had one of my best races in the 1,500, but of course the Ben Johnson scandal happened and that was awful,” she later reflected. “I ran my best time. I finished fifth, but it was a crazy race, too.”
In a noteworthy running career, she set eleven Canadian records at distances from 1,000 meters to 10,000 meters. Her record in the 1,500 stood for over three decades, and as of this writing, her 10K road time still stands as the Canadian best. In 2021, Canadian Running magazine named her “Canada’s Greatest Female Distance Runner.”
Lynn Kanuka, as she is now known after the end of her marriage to Canadian distance runner Paul Williams, retired from international competition following the 1989 World Cross-Country Championships. In the decades since, she has devoted her time to raising her four children and transitioning into coaching. She was an early advocate of alternative training methods, particularly while recovering from injuries, pioneering such modalities as deep water running and elliptical cycling. Both activities largely mirror the running stride while eliminating most of the pounding that likely contributed to the injury. Though at her age she finds it physically challenging to run every day, she typically does so every other day.
But in addition to serving as a television analyst and motivational speaker, it has been in coaching that Kanuka has found the greatest sporting joy since her retirement. The tagline of her website (coachlynn.org) is “Learn to walk and run with an Olympian (in a way that’s right for you).” She has served as the Canadian national cross-country team coach and in 2019 was named “Sport BC’s Female Coach of the Year.” Perhaps the most famous athlete she has coached, Natasha Wodak, was the 2019 Pan-American Games champion in the 10,000-meter run and earned spots on two Canadian Olympic teams, most recently finishing thirteenth in the women’s marathon at the Tokyo Olympics.
As a coach, though, Kanuka welcomes athletes of all backgrounds and ability levels and has derived great satisfaction from working with athletes of more common ability. Believing the notion that “movement is medicine,” she has assisted countless individuals to lead more active lives. “That’s really become my passion. I love helping people take steps to better health and enjoy the sport I love.”
One of the most noteworthy runners in Canadian history, and a pivotal character in the now famous 1984 Olympic 3,000, Lynn Kanuka’s greatest legacy is perhaps the inspiration and guidance she has provided to countless other runners.
Wendy Sly
As she walked off the track of the Los Angeles Coliseum, soon to be awarded a silver medal, Wendy Sly felt great satisfaction and considerable relief. She had overcome injury and then the onslaught of controversy surrounding the inclusion of Zola Budd on the British team to finish second in what would be the most important competition of her storied career. As the first British female middle-distance Olympic medalist in twenty years, that feeling of satisfaction was slightly diminished when, in her first post-race meeting with the always precocious British press, the first question she was asked was, “Did you see what happened?” As she reflected years later, her disappointment was short-lived. “I’m a great believer that if you hang on to negative stuff then the only person you are hurting is yourself. So I put it behind me very quickly.”
Despite her accomplishment being overshadowed by the Decker-Budd turmoil, Sly considers the silver medal performance in 1984 to be her best race, in part because of what had occurred in the leadup to the Games. “I had been very emotionally damaged, I think, by what went on with the Zola Budd episode, not because I had anything against her, but because the press had made me out to be the bad guy, and I felt strongly about what had happened . . . I found it hard to deal with, and it affected my training and my running and my emotional state.”
She was initially disappointed that she had not won the race, believing she had pushed too hard immediately following Decker’s fall. “I tried to run as fast as I could for the last two laps and perhaps I ran a bit too hard for the first part of that.” Her disappointment at not winning the race and then her frustration at having her performance overshadowed dissipated over time. As she reflected decades later, “I’m just grateful that people remember it at all! I’m not Olympic champion, I didn’t win gold, so I feel grateful and privileged that people can still remember the race and me running.”
A major frustration occurred the following summer when injuries prevented Sly from taking part in the much-hyped rematch between Mary Decker and Zola Budd. “I would have loved to have been part of that (1985) season and the Mary Decker and Zola Budd rematch events . . . Where would I have finished in those races? Heaven only knows. I think I would have won some and lost some, but it would have been some great racing.”
Sly’s running career continued through the 1990 Commonwealth Games, in which she did not finish the 10,000 due to a nagging nerve-related condition. She had again competed in the 3,000 at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, finishing seventh in a time almost two seconds faster than she had run in Los Angeles four years earlier. In the leadup to Seoul, she had wanted to run both the 3,000 and 10,000, which was included on the women’s program for the first time. But perhaps as a sign of the ongoing mindset about the frailty of women runners, British team officials forced her to pick between the two events, not believing she could handle a preliminary heat and final in the 3,000 and the 10,000 final. While she firmly believed she could have been very competitive in both events, she considers as her greatest regret in her track career her decision to run the 3,000 rather than the 10,000.
Her running career largely behind her, she found the transition to the next phase of her life to be challenging. As she recalled, “You’re a little bit of a lost soul.” She soon got a job selling advertising for Athletics Today magazine, a periodical attempting to compete with Athletics Weekly, the predominant publication covering British track and field. This first modest foray into the publishing world would launch a decades-long career that ultimately resulted in 2015 in her being named the managing director of the publishing company that produces Athletics Weekly, or AW as it is now primarily known. As a young athlete, she had experienced great joy and pride from having her photo on the cover of this respected periodical, and could not have imagined that years later, she would be in charge of the publication.
Interspersed in her post-competitive life, Wendy Sly raised a son and has served as team manager for the British athletics team. In 2014, for her service over the years to British running and track and field, she was appointed as a “Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire,” or MBE, a tremendous honor for any British citizen.
A lowlight of her illustrious life, but one that demonstrated her spunk and determination, occurred in 2004. At a London train station, she was accosted by a mugger who attempted to abscond with her briefcase. Sly was able to ward off the attacker, but in the altercation, she was knocked to the pavement, hitting her head in the process. A runner through and through, she pegged the assailant as a young man based on his running gait. “I knew he was young,” she said afterward. “He didn’t run like an adult. You know, he was all knees and elbows.”
Released from the hospital with stitches and painkillers but no restrictions on travel, she returned to work the next day to prepare for a business trip to New York. Dedicated to her work, she flew to the United States, though she questioned whether she was as well as the doctors had suggested. “I was up to my eyes in Advil and had ringing in my ears and no peripheral vision in my left eye, which was the only one I could see out of,” she later offered. “I knew it just wasn’t right.”
It wasn’t. Partway through her meeting in New York, she decided she needed additional medical attention and was taken to a local hospital. A CT scan indicated a blood clot and a brain hemorrhage, and a day and a half later she had major brain surgery. Given the effect of changing air pressure on the brain, the flight from London to New York could have killed her.
She was soon back at her desk, demonstrating the work ethic that characterized her athletic and professional careers. Often overshadowed, sometimes underestimated, Wendy Sly has carved out a legacy that transcends that most famous race in Los Angeles in 1984. As her friend Sebastian Coe explains, “Sly, one of the best middle and long-distance runners to have represented Great Britain, has always been one for understatement.”
Maricica Puica
As Maricica Puica left the track after her barefooted victory lap, unlike any of the other runners in the 3,000 final, she had further business to take care of in the 1984 Olympics. The following evening, she lined up with eleven other runners for the final of the women’s 1,500. Despite being the only athlete in the race to have run two heats and two finals in four days, Puica was able to add a bronze medal to her 3,000 gold, finishing less than a second behind the winner, Gabriella Dorio of Italy.
Looking back on her gold medal performance, the highlight of any athlete’s career, Puica is circumspect about how her win was overshadowed by the Decker/Budd incident. “I don’t mind that more people remember the accident than that I won,” she offered in 1988. “Every athlete dreams of winning an Olympic medal. I was very sad about the accident. . . But history will record who won and eventually remember the rest of it.”
The stoic persona she presented on the podium as she was awarded her Olympic medals belied the joy she could barely contain. She was representing a communist nation, and athletes from those countries were simply not allowed to express themselves in that manner. As she stated decades after receiving those medals, “Now, if you go up the podium you get relieved, it’s a joy, but back then we couldn’t let our joy show because they wouldn’t let us, to jump with happiness. It was hard, but at the same time it was very, very beautiful.”
Though she would a few years later take a stand against the communist regime in Romania, she praised the courage of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in sending a team to the Los Angeles Olympics and going against the Soviet-sponsored boycott. That the Romanian delegation was the only team representing a communist bloc nation likely contributed to the enthusiastic welcome American fans gave Puica and her teammates at the opening ceremony. As she reflected, “If anyone wants to see, let them watch the opening from 1984. With what applause and joy the Americans welcomed us when we entered (the opening ceremony).”
Puica’s career continued through 1989 and included a third-place finish in the 3,000 at the 1987 World Indoor Championships and a second in the 3,000 that same year in the outdoor World Championships. For her last Olympic appearance in Seoul in 1988, her coach and husband Ion placed her on a “brutal” training schedule, believing that at her advanced age (37), she needed to train harder and with more intensity than her younger rivals. This was just another example of how the dual roles of coach and husband could create particularly challenging conflicts. As Ion Puica suggested, such a relationship could be “sometimes difficult. As a coach, you have to be extremely severe, and as a husband, you have to be gentle. It’s two different things. The coach can’t give in at all. He knows how to pace the athlete and what’s best for her. In Seoul, however, she attempted to defend her title in the 3,000 but failed to complete her preliminary heat.
Near the conclusion of her competitive career, she waxed nostalgically about what she had experienced in an international career that spanned well more than two decades. “I’m glad to have seen as much of the world as I have,” she reflected. “I understand a lot of people don’t have that many opportunities. It hasn’t been all fun. It’s a lot of work. But there’s still the thrill of winning, especially when you’re competing against runners ten or fifteen years younger and seeing they can barely catch up.”
After her running career had concluded, she turned to coaching. Her most successful protégé was another Romanian runner, Violeta Szekely, who won the silver medal in the 1,500 at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. It was the stress of this coaching experience, however, that led Puica to ultimately leave the sport. “When I was watching Violeta run in Sydney, I thought I would die with a heart attack at the side of the track,” she offered. “As an athlete and as a coach, I was very emotional. It was then that I decided to quit, thinking I’d better stay healthy and calm, instead of falling ill because of all this tension.”
To the world, Maricica Puica was known as one of the all-time great women’s middle-distance runners. In her native Romania, she was known as a national hero, a status that would be strengthened by her post-athletic career activities. In 1989, as the Berlin Wall was falling and communist governments were under pressure across Europe, the Romanian Revolution occurred in Puica’s native country. As revolutionary forces battled with the regime of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the same leader that Puica had praised for defying the Soviet boycott of the 1984 Olympics, and as that conflict became increasingly bloody and deadly, the Romanian people looked to its cultural icons for direction and encouragement. Maricica Puica was such an icon, and in a show of courage that took her far outside her comfort zone, she went on Romanian television to express her support of the revolutionaries. “If we have to die, let us die together,” she boldly proclaimed.It was a courageous gesture that led to death threats against the recently retired athlete, but the revolution was ultimately successful and Ceausescu was overthrown, tried, and executed.
For her athletic accomplishments as well as her other contributions to Romanian society, Puica has served as the Romanian ambassador for sport, tolerance, and fair play with the Council of Europe. More recently, an avid animal lover, she has been deeply involved in various charities supportive of animal welfare, resulting in her being known in some circles as “the Brigitte Bardot of Romania.”
Now past seventy, as she looks back on her life and more than two decades of international competition, Maricica Puica has very few regrets. Not her decision to marry Ion Puica, her coach who was twenty years her senior. Reflecting on her now-deceased partner in life and sports, she says, “He was everything to me.”
She doesn’t regret remaining in Romania despite opportunities to defect to the United States. Puica tells of an offer from Fred Lebow, founder of the New York City Marathon and long-time president of the New York Road Runners, that would have paid her $2,000,000 to remain in the United States following one of her trips to compete in New York City. In addition to being a consummate supporter of elite runners, Lebow had been born Fischel Lebowitz in Romania, so his enhanced interest in Puica’s career is understandable. Romania was still under the iron rule of Ceausescu at the time, and as a result, she didn’t seriously consider accepting Lebow’s offer. Most importantly, she feared government reprisals against the family members she would have left behind, including her twelve brothers still living in her native country.
The one great overriding regret of her life was that she and her husband never had children. As she explains, “I would have loved to have had a child, but it was impossible during (her running career) . . . Deciding to have a child would have meant taking a career break for over a year and, back then, you couldn’t come back from such a break.” As she continued, “I love children very much and I would have loved to have had five, but we were not meant to have it all.”
As she reflects on her athletic career, Maricica Puica considers with great satisfaction the success she experienced. “I loved running, but I liked it even more when I beat them all and won. It was a matter of self-pride, of pleasure, of joy.”
To track and field fans fortunate to watch her compete, the vision of her strong stride and flowing blonde hair was a striking sight the likes of which may not be seen again.
Mary Decker Slaney
After her much-hyped Crystal Palace clash with Zola Budd, Mary Slaney had three more races with the young runner as well as Olympic champion Maricica Puica, a mile in Zurich, a 1,500 in Brussels, and finally a 3,000 in Rome. In a very satisfying fashion for Slaney, each race followed a similar pattern. In each instance, Slaney took the lead from the start, maintained that lead through the middle of the race, and sprinted to a win, with Puica a close second and Budd not far behind in third. The Zurich race brought Slaney a world record in the 1,500, and she broke her American record in the 3,000 in Rome. Puica broke the Romanian record in two of the three races, and Budd set new Commonwealth records in all three. These results suggested that even with the Romanian and Brit running faster than ever, they were still unable to touch the American. Describing her form at the end of the 1985 season, Mel Watman of Athletics Weekly proclaimed Slaney to be “simply unbeatable.”
An undefeated season against the top competition in the world, and with #1 rankings in both the 1,500/mile and 3,000 in the prestigious Track and Field News annual rankings, 1985 was an incredibly gratifying bounce-back season for Mary Slaney. As she later reflected, “That was a satisfying feeling to run the entire season being undefeated, run against everybody from the Olympics, essentially run all my fastest times except the 1,500, and break the world record in the mile. . .”
Mary Slaney would never again approach this level of dominant performance. And after meeting and defeating Zola Budd on four occasions in 1985, Slaney would again compete against her much-hyped rival only one more time, in a road race in Australia that the American won with little difficulty.
Her wedding to Richard Slaney on the first day of 1985 had been the harbinger of one of the best years of her running career. Her new husband brought stability and needed perspective to her life, and their marriage has lasted for decades. It also brought an addition to their family the following year.
After Mary’s last race of the 1985 season, the Slaney’s traveled to Hawaii for a ten-day vacation. Within three days of their arrival in such a romantic paradise, she knew she was pregnant. Though she tried to run through a challenging pregnancy, abdominal cramps prevented her from completing much distance after her fourth month. On May 30, 1986, Mary Slaney gave birth to a 7 lb., 5 oz. baby girl. Recalling with his wry sense of humor how their daughter got her name, Richard Slaney said, “We made a list of names. I picked the one I liked best, then Mary named her Ashley.” Characteristically, she was back running a week after giving birth, though the 1986 season was largely lost. And though she would later suggest that she and Richard had an interest in having more children, Ashley would remain their only child.
Parenthood inevitably changes the lives of new parents, but being a mother didn’t alter Slaney’s vision of competition or of her quest for Olympic success. “Motherhood hasn’t changed my perspective on running at all or slowed me down,” she reflected at the time. “I think I can compete for another seven years at the highest level.”
Though many viewed her as a beautiful and glamorous athlete who traveled the world to compete against the best runners on the planet, in many respects Mary Slaney’s life was characterized by simple domestication, daily routines with which she was most comfortable. As she related three years after her daughter’s birth, “Most women probably think they have nothing in common with someone like me, a world-class athlete. But I make the argument that I’m just like any other woman—I am a wife and a mother, I have a house to run and I have a career. The only difference is that my career isn’t a nine-to-five job, it’s my running.”
With a quality season in 1986 largely missed following childbirth, Slaney hoped to rebound with strong performances in 1987 as a prelude to the Seoul Olympics the following year. But the oft-injured athlete again succumbed to a series of maladies that kept her off the track for eighteen months. She had oddly sustained a fracture to her tailbone during childbirth. Then in November of 1986, issues with her Achilles arose again, and she was forced to endure another surgery. After some road races early in 1987, similar symptoms surfaced and she had more Achilles surgery. As a result, another year was lost, in this case, the season in which she had hoped to defend the “Double Decker,” her wins in the inaugural World Championships four years earlier.
Now rehabbing rather than training approaching thirty years of age, the athlete whose career had begun with the potential for countless Olympic medals now began to realize that a finite number of medal opportunities lay ahead of her.
Yet characteristically, Mary Slaney remained positive as she planned out her training for the Olympic year. “The Olympics are extremely important,” she reflected as the year began. “Everything I do between now and then is with the Olympics in mind. If it means risking injury, I am not going to do it. The Olympics mean too much to me.”
Mary Slaney never blamed her coach, Dick Brown, for what had happened in the 3,000-final in Los Angeles, but she was not shy in suggesting that she strongly regretted following Brown’s strategy of allowing Zola Budd or others to lead the race if they chose to do so. “I am thinking the Olympics are so important, maybe I should listen to the coach,” she offered many years after the race. As she continued, “If I had to go back and say: ‘Oh, are there any regrets?’ Well, the big regret is that I didn’t run the way I normally would have run,” which would have entailed following her instincts and pushing the pace from the start.
During the 1985 season, Slaney and Dick Brown parted ways. As she explained, “It was nothing personal but at this point, I have to do what I believe will help my running career the most. Dick was great and I needed someone who could keep me healthy. But he was too protective and to improve I have to do better training.” After her split with Brown, Slaney was coached by Luiz Alberto de Oliveira, a young Brazilian who had mentored Joaquim Cruz to the 800-meter gold medal at the Los Angeles Games. She would later turn to Bill Dellinger, an Olympic distance medalist himself who had assisted and then succeeded Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon.
Working under the guidance of Dick Brown, Mary Decker had reached levels of success no other American distance runner, had ever achieved. The predominant factor contributing to this success was the avoidance of injury, with Brown’s cautious direction considered by many to be what the iconic athlete had been missing. Coincidence or not, a rash of injuries that again sidelined Slaney followed her split from the one coach who had been able to keep her healthy.
But with the Olympics on the horizon, Slaney in May of 1988 ran her first track race in almost two years, and the first since giving birth. Racing minimally, she entered the Olympic Trials in mid-July in hot and humid Indianapolis with some of the swagger that had characterized her running before her long layoff. For her first race of the Trials, the 3,000, Slaney easily won her preliminary heat and entered the final as the favorite. Expected to provide her with the stiffest competition was Vicki Huber, the collegiate great from Villanova, PattiSue Plumer, who had been a standout at Stanford, and Ruth Wysocki, who had upset Mary Decker in the 1,500 at the Trials four years earlier. Demonstrating her return to form, Slaney shot out to the front and led by twenty meters at the 1,000-meter mark. Huber made contact with Slaney with two laps to go, but the cagey veteran pushed hard with 200 to go to win by four seconds, a relatively easy win.
After easily winning her preliminary heat and semi-final, Slaney lined up six days later for the final of the 1,500. Also in the field were another Stanford alum, Regina Jacobs, who would go on to win silver medals in the 1,500 at the next two world championships, and Kim Gallagher, a distance standout who had won a silver medal in the 800 at the 1984 Olympics. Gallagher had already qualified for that event in these Trials and would go on to win a bronze in the 800 in Seoul. Also qualifying in this event was Ruth Wysocki.
The final followed a pattern similar to the 3,000 with Slaney taking an early lead, with a fifteen-meter advantage at 800-meters. Jacobs, however, was an exceptional 1,500 runner in her own right, and she closed the gap on the leader in the last lap. But Slaney was not to be denied, and she kicked hard on the homestretch to win by ten meters. After a challenging four years since her one fateful Olympic final, Mary Slaney was returning to the Games in two events.
Though Slaney entered the Seoul Olympics with growing confidence, she brought with her a great deal of pent-up frustration from her 1984 experience in Los Angeles, from the injuries of the past few years, and from the notion that her Olympic window was narrowing. Regarding her infamous encounter with Zola Budd, Slaney offered before the Games, “As far as 1984 is concerned, it doesn’t exist anymore. I’m thinking only about 1988.” Then with two laps to go in her 3,000 preliminary heat in Seoul, a sense of déjà vu settled over the Olympic track. With both runners moving at a quick pace on the straightaway, Annette Sergent of France clipped Slaney’s heel, startling the American runner and causing her to break stride. Slaney quickened her pace, perhaps to stay clear of further danger, and ended up finishing a safe fourth in her heat. As she shared afterward, “It just made me think of LA. for a second there. It was a little scary.”
A few weeks before traveling to Seoul, Slaney had started feeling the effects of an infection of a “fairly personal” nature, the source of which was difficult to diagnose. “I felt really strong at the Trials. But then I went downhill because of the infection.” And then she came out of the 3,000 preliminary heat with soreness in her calf, no small issue for an athlete with ongoing Achilles issues.
Still, despite those maladies, Slaney was excited as she toed the starting line for the 3,000 final. Perhaps too excited. The preliminary heat at the Olympic Trials just a month earlier had been the first 3,000 race she had run since her stellar 1985 season, and she lacked the sharpness and fitness to maintain a hard pace from start to finish. Still, it was of little surprise when in the 3,000-final in Seoul, she shot into the lead at the start, forcing a pace she was in no condition to maintain. At the 1,000-meter mark, she was on world record pace. She was still in the lead at the halfway point, but she would soon slow and watch as eventual winner Tetyana Samolenko of the Soviet Union, silver medalist Paula Ivan of Romania, and bronze medalist Yvonne Murray of Great Britain, and even U.S. teammate Vicki Huber, who finished sixth, passed her. Slaney finished a disappointing tenth.
“A textbook case of what happens when you go out too fast,” she lamented after the race. As she expanded her comments, “I ran a good race, for the first half. It wasn’t a good plan . . . I was a little too ambitious. I just thought I was going to do my best and see what happens.”
Sometime later, she shared the deep disappointment she had felt about finishing tenth after leading for most of the race. “After the 3,000, my initial response was to go home. I didn’t feel good,” she said. “But then I thought about all the trouble I had gone through of making the team, and I’m here, and I’m not injured and I had felt good putting in the effort, although it wasn’t a good effort.” She then turned more philosophical, stating, “I felt so bad those last few laps. I thought about not finishing. But I said, ‘I have to.’ If I didn’t, I’d be back where I was in 1984.”
When Mary Slaney lined up for the 1,500 final a week later, she was thirty years old, certainly still young but an age when, in the 1980s, most distance runners were beginning to approach the end of their careers. But by now, it had been seventeen years since this legendary runner first faced international competition. So many races, so many records, so many injuries, and so many seasons lost to those injuries. But despite illness, injury, and disappointment, Slaney fought on.
At the gun, Romanian Paula Ivan shot into the lead and began pushing the pace, with Slaney and Ivan’s teammate Doina Melinte maintaining contact for most of the first two laps. Olympic 1,500 races are most often slower, tactical events, but Ivan was on world record pace from the start and slowed only minimally, just missing the world record but breaking the Olympic record. Slaney gamely tried to stay with Ivan but began to fade in the third lap and finished eighth, nearly nine seconds behind the leader.
Disappointed, again, with her overall Olympic performance, Slaney was still willing to meet with the press after the race. In her responses, she offered the perspective of a still resolute athlete. “I’ve tried so long and hard to be successful at the Olympics. It’s almost like it’s just not there for me. At the same time, I’m not ready to give up on it . . . Being here means a lot, it still does. But my entire running career has been built on things other than the Olympics.”
When asked what was next for the holder of virtually every American middle-distance record, Slaney smiled and said simply, “I’m looking forward to the next Olympics.”
Mary Slaney made it to the 1992 Olympic Trials, though her journey to the sweltering qualifying meet in New Orleans that year was characterized by a familiar cycle of injuries and rehabilitation. Of greatest significance, she had more Achilles surgery in 1989, similar issues the following year, and surgery to relieve plantar fasciitis as well as problems with iron deficiency in 1992. As she lined up for the 3,000-final, she had simply not been able to log enough quality training miles to compete as she had hoped. At the start, she characteristically took the lead but was unable to maintain such a quick pace, and faded to a sixth-place finish, over twenty seconds behind the winner, PattiSue Plumer. As she simplistically summarized her race afterward, Slaney said, “I felt fine for the first few laps, when I led. But then, I didn’t feel all that good.”
She came back four days later in the 1,500-final, was more competitive in the shorter race, but was passed in the final one-hundred meters by Suzy Hamilton for the third and final spot on the team traveling to Barcelona. Mary Slaney would not be going to her third Olympic Games.
The 1,500 was won by Regina Jacobs, with PattiSue Plumer in second to qualify in both the 1,500 and 3,000, always a tough double. Paying homage to the American legend, Plumer offered after the race, “I had respect for Mary coming into the race, and now having doubled here, my respect is even greater for her.”
With the 1996 Games scheduled to again take place on American soil in Atlanta, despite her advancing age and past frustrations, Mary Slaney was still committed to working toward winning an Olympic medal. She would be thirty-eight by the time athletes assembled in Atlanta, and she recognized that many questioned why she continued her twenty-year quest for Olympic success. “Sometimes I think people think of me: ‘You’ll get hurt; why are you trying this?’ It’s because I enjoy it. The draw is much stronger because the Games are here. Someone with my history, if for no other reason, it’s the personal satisfaction of being there again.”
But for Slaney, the years leading up to the Atlanta Games were eerily similar to the years before 1992: injuries, surgeries, rehabilitation, no running, mostly the result of ongoing Achilles issues. By the beginning of the 1996 season, she had not raced seriously since the last Olympic season, four years earlier.
Yet she continued on, her training now guided by Oregon Duck coach, Bill Dellinger, with assistance from another former Oregon great and Slaney’s friend, Alberto Salazar. Perhaps taking a page from the approach Dick Brown had utilized during Slaney’s most successful years, her training and mileage were pulled back, her workouts more controlled. And as the 1996 Olympic Trials approached, Slaney had gone over a year without more surgery and had been running pain-free for over six months. This led Salazar to suggest, “I honestly believe she is better poised than ever to win an Olympic gold medal this summer.”
But first, she needed to qualify at the hot and humid Olympic Trials in what would a month later become the Olympic Stadium in Atlanta. First up was the 5,000, which was for the first time replacing the 3,000 on the women’s Olympic schedule. The favorites to make the team included Lynn Jennings, who had finished third in Seoul in the 10,000, Amy Rudolph, and Annette Peters. The crowd, though, was sentimentally pulling for Mary Slaney. Jennings and Slaney had each won her respective preliminary heat, lending credence to the notion that perhaps after years of injury, Slaney was back in form. She reinforced that belief by leading the final for several laps in the middle of the race. She faded slightly, falling back to fifth place with eight hundred to go. She gradually regained contact, and then started her drive to the finish with three hundred to go. Then, in yet another déjà vu moment, with two hundred meters to go, her heel was clipped by Amy Rudolph, causing Slaney to nearly fall. But she didn’t, regaining her composure and finishing in second, just behind Jennings and slightly ahead of Rudolph. Slaney had qualified for her third Olympic team.
Asked after the race what this Olympic qualification meant to her, Slaney said, “It’s a relief, just because I wanted it a lot. A year ago, I didn’t think it would happen.” Slaney had also entered the 1,500, won her preliminary heat two days after the 5,000 final, but was then eliminated in the semi-final two days after that, finishing seventh.
Back in Atlanta a month later, Slaney finished seventh in her heat and failed to qualify for the final. It was a disappointing end to what had been an incredibly disappointing Olympic career for one of the greatest athletes to ever wear an American uniform. As she lamented after the race, “How can you come to this stadium and not run well? I tried, but it was just not there.” Not long after returning home to Eugene after the Games, Slaney was diagnosed with exercise-induced asthma.
In a dramatic change of fortune, seven months later, Mary Slaney was on the starting line for the final of the 1,500 at the 1997 IAAF World Indoor Championships in Paris. A week earlier, she had run the best 1,500 indoor time of the year to win the U.S. indoor title and was considered by many to be the favorite to win the world indoor title. In a tight race in which she led most of the way, the thirty-eight-year-old Slaney finished second to a Russian runner who, ironically, was six years older.
Yekaterina Podkopayeva had won two bronze medals in the initial outdoor World Championships in 1983, including a third-place finish behind Mary Decker in the 1,500. This win made the Russian the oldest World Indoor champion ever.
In her post-race comments, Slaney was philosophical. “I’m surprised there is anyone older than me out there,” she offered. “I had kind of gotten used to being the senior citizen.” As she continued, “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like getting second, but I think it’s neat that we’re both older and still doing this successfully.” For her part, Podkopayeva said, “Mary was too strong that day in Helsinki and I got third. But I’m very happy that at age 44, I finally got my revenge.”
Mary Slaney was happy to be back on a world championship podium, particularly given the challenges she had faced the previous decade. Little did she know at the time that just a few months later, she would be stripped of that world championship medal.
By 1996, the subject of “performance-enhancing drugs” had become a key issue facing the sport of track and field. Most commonly associated with weight events like the shot put and discus, in which greater strength and bulk were correlated with enhanced performance, the use of steroids and other PED’s had become prevalent in virtually every event, including the middle distances. And as testing protocols designed to identify athletes using such banned substances became more accurate and widespread, more and more athletes were implicated by the testing program, either for testing positive for a banned substance or for refusing to submit to a drug test.
As just two examples, in 1984, Tatyana Kazankina, the three-time gold medalist from the Soviet Union who had famously tangled with Mary Decker in the 3,000 half of the “Double Decker,” was suspended for eighteen months for refusing to take a drug test, effectively ending her career. Regina Jacobs, considered by many to be the successor to Mary Slaney as the top American middle-distance runner, late in her career was suspended for four years for testing positive for a form of steroid.
Like most sports, track and field had a significant problem with performance-enhancing drugs, U.S. and world athletics officials knew they had a big problem, but those officials struggled to get the problem under control.
There was an ever-present sense among “clean” athletes of the injustice of drugged athletes unfairly winning medals. Some were particularly vehement in their denouncements of steroids and the athletes who used them. Though not necessarily considered a zealous crusader against performance-enhancing drugs, Mary Slaney had a clear anti-drug message. “There is a serious drug problem in track and field, and also in women’s middle-distance running. I really don’t know the solution to this drug problem (mainly drug use), but I’d like to help prevent it, or solve it, or change it in some way,” she offered. Slaney then turned her message toward herself, stating, “I think one of the things that need to be stressed to younger athletes, male or female, is that you can achieve high levels of performance without drugs. I’m proof that you don’t have to take drugs.” It was an anti-drug message Slaney had promoted through much of her career.
As such, it was startling to many, and disappointing to many more, when news leaked of a failed drug test that suggested that Slaney had in her body excessive levels of testosterone, the primary sex hormone and anabolic steroid in males and a primary contributor to the development of increased muscle mass. While testosterone is also found in females, it is believed that artificially high levels of the hormone in both males and females contribute to enhanced athletic performance. In testing protocols in the 1990s, excessively high levels of testosterone were determined by comparing the level of the hormone in tested urine to the level of epitestosterone, known as the T/E ratio.
A urinalysis conducted at the 1996 Olympic Trials found that Mary Slaney’s T/E ratio exceeded the allowable maximum of six to one. In other words, the test suggested that her testosterone levels were exceedingly high, which was and still is considered evidence of illegal doping. She received a letter from USA Track & Field, the sport’s governing body in the United States, informing her of the test result, but she was allowed to continue competing as the matter continued through various appeals processes. She competed in the Atlanta Olympics as well as the World Indoor Championships, at which she won a silver medal, though she had failed a drug test.
Two months after Slaney won that silver medal and almost a year after the Olympic Trials, news of the positive test was leaked and became public. One of her attorneys, former middle-distance runner Dorianne Lambelet Coleman, offered an impassioned defense of her client. “There is no question Mary is innocent,” Coleman stated. “She’s been tested probably more than any other athlete. She’s never tested positive. She’s never taken testosterone or any other steroid. We feel the evidence is clear and will be proven.” Though she spoke primarily through her attorneys and her husband, Mary Slaney did express her exasperation with the test result and with the potential she could be suspended from competition. “I’ve made Olympic teams in the past, I’ve broken world and American records, I’ve been drug tested hundreds of times,” she stated. “At my age, you don’t start taking performance-enhancing substances to see what you can get out of the sport.”
In an appeal process that would unfold over many months, Slaney and her lawyers provided evidence that a T/E ratio of six to one did not mean the individual had ingested banned substances, that the T/E ratio could fluctuate based on a variety of factors, including menstrual cycles and the use of birth control pills, both of which were pertinent to Slaney’s drug test at the Olympic Trials, and that her urine sample could not be accurately analyzed because it had been greatly diluted by her consumption of copious amounts of post-race liquids. Additionally, in the year following the Olympic Trials, at which the failed drug test was administered, Slaney was tested six times, and each time the results were negative.
In essence, the argument centered on the notion that not only had Mary Slaney not taken illegal substances that increased the amount of testosterone in her system, but that the test protocol itself was flawed.
Subsequent research supported at least some of the defense Mary Slaney and her supporters were presenting. The late Manfred Donike, a chemist and former cyclist who became a pioneer in and staunch supporter of the use of testing to detect the use of performance-enhancing drugs, early on had warned that certain times in the menstrual cycle could cause great fluctuations in a woman’s T/E ratio. He further offered that the consumption of alcohol could increase those fluctuations. (Slaney suggested that she had consumed a couple of glasses of wine the night before the urine sample was taken.) More recently, in 2020, a group of researchers published a peer-reviewed study that included this conclusion: “E (epitestosterone) and ratios with E as denominator are problematic biomarkers for doping in female athletes. The timing of the sample collection in the menstrual cycle will have a large influence on the steroid profile. The results of this study highlight the need to find additional biomarkers for T (testosterone) doping in females.” It is common for athletes who fail drug tests to simply proclaim loudly that they are innocent, with their defense never going past such pronouncements. And though the explanation and defense presented by Mary Slaney do not definitively prove that she had not consumed substances designed to increase levels of testosterone in her body, there clearly was research and logic supporting that defense.
Though at thirty-eight she was approaching the end of her career, Mary Slaney was not ready to retire from competition, particularly not to have retirement thrust upon her. But on a more basic level, she was fighting for her athletic reputation, trying to protect the legitimacy of a largely stellar, twenty-five-year competitive record. As she stated a few years later, “As an American, this is where I live, and people know and understand I’m not a cheater. And that’s important to me, all by itself.”
What followed was a ponderous series of suspensions, hearings, and appeals. Though it was considered the primary responsibility of national federations, in this case, USA Track & Field, to discipline its athletes for drug-related offenses, in late May of 1997, the IAAF suspended Slaney from all competition pending USA Track & Field’s resolution of her case. The matter had not been settled nearly a year after the original suspicious drug test had been administered, and IAAF officials suggested that the international body had grown impatient with the slow progress of the case. As IAAF president Primo Nebiolo explained, “The IAAF has rules and when a federation does not follow them, we have to do something.” The suspension was imposed without a hearing or any other sort of due process and was the result of a vote of the IAAF Council, the elected board responsible for governing the sport of track and field. Regarding this decision, Nebiolo further stated, “If their federation is reluctant to act immediately in accordance with IAAF rules, then the IAAF Council will from now on suspend the athlete from competition until the national federation decides to ban or not.”
Placed in a precarious position by the actions of the IAAF, and with the national championship track meet on the horizon, with Mary Slaney entered, USA Track and Field conducted a preliminary hearing in early June and suspended Slaney as well, acting in support of the international body. Slaney had blamed the national federation for the leaking of her test results, leading her in an interview with the Eugene Register-Guard, her hometown newspaper, to state, “If someone were to ask me how I feel about USA Track & Field right now, I would say I hope it burns in hell.” Slaney was an athlete known for her candor, honesty, and competitiveness, but this uncharacteristically harsh statement showed the frustration and sense of injustice she was feeling at the time.
Then, three months later, a three-member USA Track & Field hearing panel lifted the suspension, vindicating Slaney and concluding that, “Mary Slaney committed no doping violation last year.” It was a stunning reversal. Mary Slaney declined to comment about the decision, but her husband, Richard, her most vocal and loyal supporter, was demonstrative in his comments. “It’s tough to be vindicated for something you feel you never did,” he said in defense of his wife. “I appreciate what the panel did. This part is over. But it’s not over because this process has to change. Nobody should have to go through this.”
But the ordeal was not over. When Slaney was reinstated by USA Track & Field, the IAAF accepted that decision and allowed her to return to competition. The IAAF, however, reserved the legal prerogative of seeking reinstatement of her suspension by taking the case to arbitration. The international body pursued the case, and in 1999, a three-member arbitration panel ruled that Slaney had provided insufficient evidence to justify overturning the suspension originally imposed by the IAAF. In its ruling, the panel cited Slaney’s “failure to establish by clear evidence that an abnormal T/E ratio was attributable to pathological or physiological conditions.” The panel imposed a retroactive two-year ban from competition commencing on June 17, 1996, the date of the drug test in question at the U.S. Olympic Trials, and rendered null and void all performances completed during the two-year period. The most significant implication of this retroactive ban was the requirement that Slaney forfeit the silver medal she had won at the World Indoor Championships in 1997. In its decision, the panel stressed that the ruling was “final and binding.”
Shortly before this ruling was handed down, Slaney had filed suit in U.S. District Court in Indianapolis against the IAAF and the U.S. Olympic Committee, which had administered the drug test at the Olympic Trials in 1996. In a ruling issued after the IAAF arbitration panel rendered its decision, the court ruled that it had no jurisdiction in the case, a finding that was upheld on appeal. Years after the 1996 urine test found an abnormal T/E ratio, the matter had reached a muddled conclusion.
Not concluded was the anger of Mary and Richard Slaney regarding what they considered to be a travesty of justice. “The fight stopped being about Mary,” Richard Slaney said in an interview almost two decades later. “The fight became about the (T/E ratio) test . . . it was just ridiculous. I spent a year of my life learning something that was totally useless in anything else I ever did. All it did was make me angry, because they knew they were doing it wrong.”
Ironically, because it was administered retroactively, the two-year suspension did not end Mary Slaney’s running career, though it would soon come to a close. Perhaps true to form, it was her lower body, and possibly a surgical procedure, that ended her time as a world-class runner. She had hoped to compete for a spot on the 2000 Olympic team, and then eventually transition to road races and marathons. But she continued to experience stress fractures, Achilles issues, and other related problems with her lower legs. To address these ongoing issues and to allow her to continue competing, her doctors advised her to have an extensive and complicated procedure on both of her feet and lower legs at the same time. As she laments, “I haven’t run a race since.” This procedure involved rerouting tendons in her toes and lengthening her gastrocnemius muscles to take pressure off her lower legs. As Slaney describes the effect of the surgery, “. . . now I have absolutely no calf muscle and I never got it back after surgery, ever, despite going to physical therapy for years and years.” One of the world’s greatest athletes who cherished competing and the joy that came from running, at the age of forty, Mary Slaney suddenly found herself unable to do either.
Despite her suspension and the legal wrangling that accompanied it, an IAAF action that was considered by many to have been based on a shaky rationale, Mary Slaney could have been an ambassador for the sport of track and field. But to do so would have been counter to her personality. As she described herself, “I am actually a very shy person. People years and years ago thought I was just stuck up because I was not out there talking. . . I have always had trouble talking myself up.”
So, in the two decades since her retirement from racing, Mary Slaney has led a largely secluded life, living on a fifty-five-acre tract of forested land just outside of Eugene that she and Richard purchased. “I have a nice life,” she says. “I love my life; I love my family.” As she continues, “We live out in the country and there are days I don’t care if I ever leave the property. I’m out there with my dogs and cats and doing my gardening, sewing, and I am perfectly happy.” Considered by many of her fans to be a glamorous athlete who competed all over the world, Mary Slaney in her sixties is living a relatively simple life centered on a plot of land in Oregon . . . and from all indications is terribly content.
Though she lives in one of the most track and field-focused communities in the world, Mary Slaney doesn’t closely follow the sport. “Yeah, I live in Tracktown and I don’t go to track meets.” Richard Slaney, an Olympian in his own right, shares his wife’s disdain for track and field, though he is more vocal in his reasoning. “I don’t follow the sport now,” he suggests. “It didn’t treat Mary very well,” referring to the struggle to clear her name following the doping allegation.
The sport didn’t treat her very well in other ways. She rarely grants interviews, but some writers and journalists who visited with her note the patchwork of scars that cover the lower portion of each leg, the result of a myriad of surgical procedures. Additionally, though not necessarily linked to her running, her hands are noticeably riddled with arthritis. Otherwise, though, she looks much as she did when she was one of the country’s favorite athletes and weighs only slightly more than she did when she was winning world titles.
But the countless miles at rapid paces, and especially the many surgeries, have taken from Mary Slaney the joy of running. Admirably, she shows little evidence of bitterness about losing the ability to run, though later in life she has offered a different perspective on the many surgeries she endured.
It had been largely assumed that her never-ending cycle of injuries had resulted from the overtraining that began as a young teenager and that continued through the end of her career. But Slaney disagreed. As she commented long after her running days had ended, “Over all the years, I was always accused of overtraining, and I don’t believe I overtrained. I was not a high-mileage athlete.” As she continued her explanation, “My high mileage weeks were 70 to 80 weeks, but I couldn’t do a lot of those because if I did do them then I would be hurt the following week. So, when I performed at my best . . . I was training right around fifty to sixty miles a week.”
Rather, she came to believe many, if not most, of her injuries were a by-product of an inherited genetic condition. “I have this gene, which I only found out about when I was diagnosed with arthritis in my hands. It is HLA-B27L and it makes you predisposed to inflammation in all parts of the body. I’ve had an unusual form of colitis. I have arthritis, I’ve had sinusitis. I’ve had all the ‘itises’ you can imagine.”
Slaney estimated that she had undergone at least thirty surgical procedures, the first shortly after graduating from high school. One surgery endangered her life when a severe infection resulted, and another procedure left her permanently unable to run. In retrospect, she now questions whether many of these procedures were even needed. As she explains, “I feel like I had a lot of surgeries that may not have been necessary if I’d been diagnosed earlier with this predisposition and treated for it with preventative medicine.”
Unable to run more than infrequently and only for short distances and at frustratingly slow paces, all of which she found unsatisfying, Slaney sought other avenues to satiate her hunger for competition and physical conditioning. Several years ago, around 2012, she discovered the sport of elliptical cycling, and she has trained voraciously in a quest for a world title in the sport ever since. An elliptical cycle is a rather odd-looking device that is a cross between a bicycle and an elliptical machine that can be found in most fitness gyms. The device is propelled by a movement that mimics the running motion but greatly reduces impact and stress on the body. Slaney spends one to two hours daily training on her elliptical cycle, causing her husband Richard to comment, “It has been a godsend to her.”
For many years, she pointed her training toward the Elliptical Cycling World Championships held annually near San Diego. It takes place on a grueling course that ends with an almost eight-mile climb rising more than 4,000 feet up Palomar Mountain, known to some as “the Alpe d’Huez of elliptical cycling,” referring to the iconic mountain often included on the route of the Tour de France. Her goal in this race has been to win a world title, which has eluded her, though she has finished as high as second. After years of performing in front of thousands of adoring fans, and at times millions watching on television, Mary Slaney’s competitions are now completed in virtual anonymity. And it seems to bother her not in the least.
Echoing her husband’s comment about her new sport being a “godsend,” Slaney comments, “It makes the rest of my life whole, because when you start running and competing from the age of eleven and all of a sudden it stops, there is a big void. And I was left thinking, ‘how do I fill it?’ And this has done it.”
To some casual fans of running and track and field, those whose following of the sport is largely focused on a week of Olympic competition every four years, Mary Decker Slaney’s athletic career could be encapsulated in one race in 1984. But such a narrow perspective on the contributions and accomplishments of the athlete no less of an authority on the sport than Amby Burfoot called “the greatest distance runner, male or female, in American history,” would be unrealistic. She was an incomparable athlete who set seventeen official and unofficial world records, and for some time held every American record from 800 to 10,000 meters. With her glamour, beauty, and hard-nosed competitiveness, she promoted a struggling sport to new generations of American fans. And she served as a role model to athletes, young and old, and likely caused more girls and young women than we will ever know to pursue the sport of running. Regarding her legacy, Slaney offers, “I just seemed to have an Olympic jinx. But I feel good about all the other contributions I made. I didn’t have women to emulate when I started. People who saw me out running in the early 1970s reacted like I had three heads or something.” As she continues, “Today’s high school and college girls have a lot of opportunities. A lot of us who came before them made these a reality.”
But with Olympic opportunities lost to injuries, boycotts, and legal wrangling, and seasons of training and competition lost due to the breakdown of her body, there is a sense in Mary Slaney of lament about “what might have been.” As she explains, “. . . at the same time, I felt there was so much more . . .with all the injuries, all the surgeries and everything else. I feel like I would have liked more chances.”
Serious track fans can study such a glorious career and also lament that it could have been so much more.
Zola Budd
If Zola Budd’s life before the 1984 Olympics and the much-hyped rematch with Mary Slaney the following year was marked by episodes of tragedy and resulting sadness, the decade following those events in many ways brought more of the same. But she matured and persevered, and in the process took charge of building for herself a happy life.
Her 1985 season had been highlighted by several races with Slaney and Puica, a world record in the 5,000, and the title in the World Cross-Country Championships. The following March, Budd was back on the starting line in Switzerland hoping to defend her world cross-country title. She had not competed in the British national cross-country championships when officials could not guarantee her safety from protesters who had forced her off the course the previous year. Still, as the defending world champion, she was preselected as part of the national team.
When she toured the course the day before the meet, the weather was sunny and warm, an atypical early spring day in Switzerland. With her coach, she decided she would run the race barefooted, her preference in cross-country when conditions allowed. She woke up the next morning, looked out the window, and saw that it was sleeting. The weather worsened as the start time approached, cold winds and an icy rain making the course treacherous and presenting conditions Budd never experienced as she ran along the South African countryside. By the time she and Pieter Labuschagne realized she needed to wear spikes, it was too late, and she was forced to run barefoot. As she described later, “It was dreadful and my feet were frozen. Barefoot on firm ground is one thing, running without shoes in mud quite another and it was a big mistake.”
Though her traction was at times very tenuous, it otherwise didn’t make much difference as she successfully defended her title, winning by eighteen seconds over the American great Lynn Jennings. Still only nineteen and already a two-time world champion, the win should have been one of the most joyous days of Zola Budd’s life, but anti-apartheid politics intervened. Lamine Diack, a businessman, sports administrator, and former athlete from Senegal, was in 1986 a vice president of the IAAF. He also represented, in some respects, the embodiment in the track and field community of African opposition to South African segregation laws. Track and field representatives from African nations had long been skeptical of Zola Budd’s British citizenship, and there was overt pressure placed on the IAAF to take action to prevent an athlete many considered to still be a South African citizen from circumventing the ban on athletes from that nation competing in international competitions. Diack was in Switzerland that day to present medals to the winners. But when it came time to present the gold medal to Zola Budd, Diack refused. As he explained, “As far as I am concerned, she is a South African. I have nothing against Miss Budd, but I cannot give a prize which will be seen as propaganda for South Africa.”
Whether it was fair and appropriate to make Zola Budd the symbol of South African apartheid can be debated. But clearly, Lamine Diack’s snub of the young runner had taken much of the luster from her second world cross-country title. Diack would attempt to make amends two decades later. By 2006, he had ascended to president of the IAAF, and for the organization’s annual gala in Monte Carlo that year he invited Budd to attend as his “special guest.” As he invited Budd on stage, he explained her presence, “I refused to give her a medal and I fought to keep her out of the Olympics. She was not responsible for what was going on, but we could not make any kind of compromise. But I always had admiration for this young girl because she demonstrated that, even barefoot, people from Africa can win world competitions.” Stunned and surprised, Budd reflected, “He didn’t apologize, but he explained why. It made it worth coming.”
Lamine Diack served as president of the IAAF for sixteen years, finally stepping down in 2015. Soon thereafter, he and several other IAAF officials, including his son, became subjects of a criminal investigation related to corruption and money laundering. Diack was specifically charged with accepting bribes from athletes suspected of taking performance-enhancing drugs and effectively covering up the results. In 2020 at the age of eighty-seven, he was found guilty and sentenced to four years in prison.
Zola Budd’s strong 1985 and 1986 seasons in many respects represented the apex of her running career, with politics and injuries eventually turning her away from the sport, at least temporarily. After resuming her training upon returning from Switzerland, she suffered a hamstring injury while completing a circuit training workout. The injury was more severe than she and her coach originally realized, and she would come to characterize this incident as “the turning point in my career.” As she continued, “I still had a few good performances left in me, but the injury was to remain a nagging pain, a throbbing reminder that all was not well in the Budd camp, physically, emotionally, or politically.” Budd struggled for the remainder of 1986 and then largely missed the 1987 season with a stress fracture in her right hip.
A major change in 1986, though, was a change in coaches. When Zola Budd was a raw and gangly teenager with loads of untapped potential, her father Frank had approached a local high school teacher and coach about helping his daughter with her running. Pieter Labuschagne and the still young athlete had been inseparable ever since, through good times and challenges, and Budd always considered the coach to be one of the few individuals who fully understood and supported her. But it was Labuschagne who suggested it was time for the athlete and coach to part ways, and his departure led to a series of coaching arrangements where Budd had British coaches, often for the sake of appearances, while clandestinely receiving the bulk of her training guidance from individuals in South Africa.
Still, throughout the remainder of 1986 and much of 1987, Budd could simply not train without pain, her hamstring issues not responding to the traditional treatment provided by a series of doctors and physiotherapists. While back in South Africa, it was suggested that she consult with Dr. Ron Holder, an applied kinesiologist in Johannesburg. Dr. Holder’s approach to treating chronic athletic injuries like the one that had plagued Budd for well over a year was to identify the muscular imbalance that caused it, and then work to correct that imbalance. When he met with Zola, he identified the imbalance and placed in her shoe a thick wedge designed to correct it. That evening she ran a few kilometers, and for the first time in months experienced minimal pain. In her eyes, the change was almost miraculous. Over the next months, she continued to see Dr. Holder, who retested her, corrected the thickness of the shoe wedge, and prescribed an exact series of exercises and intensely painful massages. But as she turned twenty-one, Zola now had a glimmer of hope she could return to the level of performance that had led to world records, the Olympics, and two world cross-country titles.
Regarding the political issues facing her, Budd would find no miracle cures. The issues she faced were two-fold. First, there were ongoing concerns about the amount of time she was spending in South Africa. As an example, the Commonwealth Games (formerly known as the British Empire Games) is an Olympic-type competition open to citizens of Great Britain and nations that were formerly British territories. An eligibility rule of the Commonwealth Games, which could potentially be easily applied to all sporting events in which athletes represented Great Britain, included in 1986 the following passage: “If an eligible competitor wishes to represent a Commonwealth country other than that of his birth, he must have resided therein for a minimum period of six months during the twelve months prior to the . . . Commonwealth Games.” Applying this standard to Zola Budd meant she needed to physically reside in Great Britain at least half the time. She originally believed she would have no difficulty meeting this standard of being in Great Britain at least six months of every year. In time, though, she found that she missed her family, she missed her coach, who was residing in South Africa, and she missed the warm sunny South African weather in which she athletically thrived. As a result, she began to spend more and more time in Bloemfontein, resulting in warnings that her eligibility to represent Great Britain was in peril. Still dealing at the time with her hamstring issues, and “beaten down by the immense pressure,” she ultimately decided to withdraw from the 1986 Commonwealth Games.
The second political issue she faced during this phase of her career was the continuing scrutiny of her obvious ties to South Africa, and efforts to make her a symbol of the apartheid laws that still characterized her native country. As she had commented after first arriving in England in 1984, “I am just a runner. I am not a politician.”
Budd recognized that she likely could have eliminated much of the scrutiny and strife she would experience if she had simply, upon initially arriving in Great Britain in 1984, made a statement denouncing apartheid. As she explains in her autobiography, “I would, I suppose, have saved myself a great deal of trouble and torment had I taken the easy way out and denounced apartheid from the moment I qualified to run for Britain.” Yet she remained silent, causing her many detractors to equate her silence with support for her native nation’s racist policies.
In that same autobiography, she explained her rationale for not commenting on racial issues, at least initially. “Call me naïve, but at that stage, I didn’t believe that politics should play a role in the life of an athlete,” she offered. As she expanded on that thought, she wrote, “My attitude is that, as a sportswoman, I should have the right to pursue my chosen discipline in peace. Wendy Sly isn’t asked if she voted Labour or Conservative; Seb Coe does not get asked to denounce Soviet expansionism; and Carl Lewis is not required to express his view on the Contra arms scandal.” Furthermore, particularly when she was initially bombarded with questions about South African racial issues when she first moved to Great Britain, Budd suggested she was not well-versed in those matters. This seems plausible given how she had been shielded as she was growing up in Bloemfontein. As she writes, “Only a fool speaks publicly on a subject they know very little about, and in my late teens I was certainly no expert on political systems.”
With her silence on the subject only adding to the pressure that continued to build against Budd, pressure was simultaneously building against the IAAF to take action against a runner representing Britain who many felt was still South African. Particularly among African nations, the notion of Zola Budd competing in the 1988 Olympics was untenable. As a result, the scrutiny on Budd regarding where she resided, where she trained, and where she competed intensified to the point that it seemed that world governing bodies like the IAAF and the International Olympic Committee would use virtually any pretense to ban her from the Seoul Olympics. Such an action would have the broader effect of preventing an African boycott of those Games, something that would be potentially very damaging to those same governing bodies.
The catalyst for IAAF action against the athlete came from two seemingly innocuous events that occurred in South Africa. The first occurred in June of 1987 at a cross-country meet in the South African city of Brakpan. Budd was staying with Fanie van Zijl, a former South African middle-distance star who was coaching her, while she was being treated by Dr. Ron Holder. She attended the meet with van Zijl to watch his son compete, and she neither entered nor ran in any of the races. After watching van Zijl’s son’s race, Budd went for a short training run, running mainly on the outside of the course but also for a short distance on the course itself. Even though she had emigrated to England, Zola Budd was still arguably South Africa’s most famous athlete, and her appearance at this cross-country meet created considerable buzz. As a local Brakpan newspaper described the scene, “One of the high points of the day was when Zola Budd came and ran a couple of laps. She really made people’s heads turn and soon had the crowd in a buzz.”
The second seemingly innocent event occurred the following New Year’s Eve in Randfontein in which she was talked into handing out flowers to the winners of a ten-kilometer road race. Each of these two events was on the surface quite harmless, but to leaders of the IAAF seeking a means of placating African nations and avoiding an Olympic boycott, these two events represented both evidence and a rationale for taking action. Many of those who had been closely watching Budd believed she had violated IAAF Rule 53, which at the time stated that an athlete should be suspended if they have “taken part in any athletics meeting or event in which any of the competitors were, to his or her knowledge, ineligible to compete under IAAF rules.” Undeniably, the runners at both the cross-country meet in Brakpan and the 10K race in Randfontein, as South African citizens, were “ineligible to compete under IAAF rules.” What is also clear, only with the broadest application of the rule could completing a training run at the same time as the cross-country meet and handing out flowers after a road race constitute having “taken part in any athletics meeting or event.”
When faced with these allegations, Zola Budd retorted, “The idea that I would jeopardize my career by racing in South Africa is ridiculous.”
With the Olympics on the horizon, these issues came to a head in early 1988 as Budd sought a third world cross-country title, with the championships scheduled to take place in Auckland, New Zealand. Amid anti-apartheid demonstrations, she finished fourth in the British trials for the meet and was named to the team. Before the meet, the New Zealand Sports Minister proclaimed that Budd “would not be welcome” to compete in Auckland, and the pressure on the IAAF to take action only intensified. Fearing that her continued plans to run in the World Cross-Country Championships might jeopardize her British teammates’ opportunity to compete in the meet, and increasingly emotionally distressed by the controversy, despite denying all charges, Budd ultimately decided to withdraw.
Though the IAAF had been concerned about an African boycott of the World Cross-Country Championships, the ultimate fear involved a similar action regarding the upcoming Olympics. The IAAF ultimately ruled that Budd had violated “the spirit of the rules” in the two incidents in South Africa. With this ruling, the governing board warned the British Amateur Athletic Board (BAAB) that unless Budd was suspended for a year (which would extend past the upcoming Olympics), the IAAF would consider barring all British athletes from all upcoming competitions, which would include those same Olympics.
This ultimatum placed the BAAB in a “can’t win” position, one in which its continued support of one of its athletes could jeopardize the eligibility of all its track and field athletes to compete internationally. Still, many British politicians strongly supported Budd and urged the Board to resist IAAF pressure to suspend her. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher voiced these opinions when she said, “A number of us find it repugnant that so much effort is being expended in stopping a young woman from competing in international athletics.” The BAAB initially refused to suspend Budd, but under intense pressure, scheduled a hearing for May, just a few months before the start of the Seoul Olympics.
The emotional toll on this twenty-one-year-old athlete was real and profound. A physician was brought in to examine her, and in a later interview, he described his findings. He suggested that Zola was “a pitiful sight, prone to bouts of crying and deep depressions . . . all the clinical signs of anxiety. . . She could not be allowed to continue like this. She needs her family and her friends; people who will not ask questions, demand decisions.” After a tumultuous four years, Zola Budd was heartbroken and emotionally devastated.
Realizing she had officially become a pariah in the world of international track and field, feeling increasing emotional distress over the conflict, and not wanting to jeopardize the competitive opportunities of other British athletes, Zola Budd ultimately decided to remove herself from the controversy. As she explained in a statement, “Despite having reassurances that I have broken no rules, I am not well enough to continue the fight to prove my innocence. I am, therefore, on medical advice, withdrawing from international competition during this period of recovery.” When she arrived back in South Africa, she provided a more personal reason for her return. “I have been made to feel like a criminal,” she explained. “I have been continuously hounded, and I can’t take it anymore.”
Having lost her love for the sport because of injuries and political pressure, she packed up her home in England and returned to South Africa. For all intents and purposes, her career as an international runner seemed to be over.
In early 1989, Zola Budd released a statement through the South African Press Association that explicitly stated her personal opinion regarding apartheid. It read, in part, “I do not support any political system that entrenches the superiority of one race over another.” As she continued, “I cannot reconcile segregation along racial lines with the teaching of the Bible, and as a Christian, I find apartheid intolerable.”
Ironically, Budd’s statement, the most overtly political declaration of her career, brought minimal reaction from the anti-apartheid forces that had villainized her for the past four years. As she explained this muted reaction, she wrote, “It suited them when I kept quiet, but my personal politics were of no use to them if I agreed with their point of view. . . It had to be said, though, because I couldn’t bear the thought of being seen as endorsing apartheid.” Also ironic was the fact that when Budd made this statement expressing her anti-apartheid views, forces were already working to dismantle the abhorrent system of racial segregation that had led to South Africa becoming an international outcast. By 1992, South Africa would be welcomed back into the Olympic movement, would send a team to Barcelona, and that team would include Zola Budd.
The four years between her return to South Africa and her return to the Olympics were for Budd a time of healing, personal joy, and continued drama and tragedy.
Though she had had boyfriends in the past, while she was constantly training, competing, and traveling between Great Britain and South Africa, she had felt like she lacked the time or energy for a more than casual relationship. Back in Bloemfontein, allowing her body and emotions to heal, she suddenly had plenty of time.
Zola had met Mike Pieterse in 1986 through her sister Estelle, and they met again upon her return to Bloemfontein. As she later reflected, “I never dreamed then that we would end up getting engaged. And who would have guessed that poor little Zola would be the one to pop the question?”
Pieterse came from a prominent family in Bloemfontein, and he owned and operated a liquor store with his brother. The relationship between him and Zola quickly became serious, and it was no surprise to the young bride-to-be when he accepted her marriage proposal. The wedding, by design a smaller, more intimate version of what would have been a major social event in the community, was scheduled for April 15, 1989. It was a joyous occasion in all but one respect, with Frank Budd again casting a cloud over his youngest daughter’s life.
Zola remained estranged from her father but still invited him to the wedding. However, she asked her brother Quintus to walk her down the aisle. When Frank Budd learned of this arrangement, he threatened to write Quintus out of his will. Wanting to avoid a disruptive confrontation at the wedding, she decided to disinvite her father. Vindictive to the end, Frank Budd told a South African reporter, “Zola, I curse you. . . I no longer have a daughter named Zola. To me she is dead.” He further stipulated that Zola was forbidden to attend his funeral when he died and that she should no longer plan on being buried in the Budd family plot.
Despite the drama involving her father, Zola Budd’s wedding to Mike Pieterse was a truly joyous occasion and one that would in multiple ways be life-changing.
The tragedy that was the last few years of Frank Budd’s life would tragically come to an end just a few months after the marriage of his youngest daughter. Unknown to his family, he had been diagnosed with cancer of the liver and spleen and had secretly been receiving chemotherapy treatment for some time. But the malignancy would not take his life. In September of 1989, reports began to filter back to his family that Frank had not been seen for some time. Going to his father’s stone farmhouse to check on him, Zola’s brother Quintus found Frank Budd’s bloody body slumped across his bed. He had shotgun wounds in his side and shoulder, and police would determine from spent shells on the floor that he had been shot with his own weapon. Frank Budd’s shotgun and pickup truck were both missing. The next day, a twenty-four-year-old farmworker who at times had worked for Frank Budd was arrested. At his trial, the defendant, Christian Botha Barnard, said that Frank Budd had made a “sexual approach” at him and in response, Barnard had shot and killed him. He was convicted of murder and theft, but the judge sentenced Barnard to only twelve years in prison because of what he referred to as “extenuating circumstances.”
Regarding the possibility that her father had been gay, Zola later offered, “If he had been born (a few) years later, his life would have been different and he might never have married. But society didn’t accept homosexuals back then and it all took a terrible toll on him.”
Brutally murdered at the age of fifty-six, Frank Budd had ceased to play a role in his daughter Zola’s life several years earlier. As she reflected a few years after his passing, “We had no contact before his death. I would have liked to have a reconciliation. I would have liked to remind him that I once loved him. There was no chance, and that was quite terrible for all of us. But he gave me no choice.”
It would be nearly two decades before she visited her father’s grave.
Particularly the early years of her marriage were happy ones for Zola Budd Pieterse. As she wrote in her autobiography shortly after her wedding, “. . . had I known what contentment marriage would bring, I would have married earlier.” As she continued, “I know that I’m going to be happy with Mike, who will support me all the way, no matter what decisions I make about my athletics career.”
It was this last issue that the young newlywed couple had to resolve shortly after their marriage. In short, they were happiest in South Africa, their families and friends were in that nation, and Mike Pieterse’s business interests were in Bloemfontein. But if Zola were to continue her international running career, as South Africa was at the time still banned from international competitions, she would need to retain her ties to Great Britain and reside in that country at least half of the time. She found this not to be a difficult decision, which she announced at a press conference in June of 1989. Her statement said in part, “After careful consideration of all the elements affecting my personal and professional life, I have decided not to return to the United Kingdom to pursue my running career.” After thanking the British people for their support, expressing how much she valued her British heritage, and suggesting she bore no animosity toward those who fought to prevent her from participating in international competitions, she spoke to her future athletic aspirations. “I love running and hope to return to competition soon. I have taken control of my own life, however, and in the future will seek to run on my own terms. . .”
In her autobiography, she suggested that the choice she made was more complex than it appeared. As she wrote, “It wasn’t as simple as running in South Africa or running overseas, but rather a choice between running and life. I chose life.”
Budd Pieterse held to her stance about being through with serious training and competition . . . for around a year. In the initial months of her marriage, with little activity beyond playing with her animals on the family farm, her weight increased to 122, a normal weight for most young women but significantly larger for a former world-class distance runner who had weighed nearly thirty pounds less in that fateful 3,000 in Los Angeles. Then in mid-1989, she began training again, largely in secret. She asked an acquaintance from her hometown, former middle-distance runner Van Zyl Naude, to serve as her coach. As her new coach described her on her return to running, “When Zola first began to run again, she felt shy. She had no idea whether she could come back, so she didn’t want people to know she was training. At first, she could only train three days a week. It was very difficult for her.”
Zola admitted that her return was particularly challenging, a process that was made more difficult by a severe bout of tick-bite fever and encephalitis that required hospitalization. As she recalled about that time, “My system had all the energy sucked out. I had no resistance. I got infections. I was weak all the time. But I kept trying.” She persevered, though it would be six months before she felt fit enough to pursue serious competition.
Born just a few months after Zola, Elana Meyer had developed as a runner much more gradually than had her more famous South African counterpart. But by 1990, in the vacuum that had been created by Budd Pieterse’s brief respite from competition, Meyer had become the top distance runner in South Africa. Ironically, she was coached by Pieter Labuschagne. Thin in stature but aggressive on the track, and running with a trademark short hairstyle, Meyer would complete a heralded career in running that included an Olympic silver medal in the 10,000 and a world championship in the half-marathon. In the years before Zola Budd gained international fame in the Los Angeles Olympics, she had defeated Meyer on multiple occasions. In January of 1984, before her move to Great Britain, Zola had lapped Meyer in a 5,000 race in which the better-known athlete had set an unofficial world record. But in 1990, with Budd Pieterse just beginning to round into competitive shape, it was assumed that if the two met on the track, Meyer would dominate. As Budd Pieterse explained, “I had only been training a year or so. Her training background was much better than mine since she had been running constantly for five, six years. She was much more fit.”
In a pivotal 3,000 in April of 1990, though their times were pedestrian compared to what they would run later that year, Budd Pieterse defeated Meyer by over eight seconds. In subsequent meetings that year and next, they would trade wins before Meyer eventually gravitated to the much longer 10,000 while Budd Pieterse continued to focus on shorter distances like the 3,000. Regarding the so-called rivalry between the two athletes, Meyer suggested in 1992, “I have been running now for the last ten years, and for the last eight years, there was always Zola in front of me. I just improved slightly every year, and especially now the last two years.” Regarding her South African counterpart, Meyer added, “We know each other very well. We are still friends and I think Zola is going to do very well.”
Meyer was suggesting that Budd Pieterse would do well in the 1992 Games in Barcelona, something that in the preceding years had seemed unimaginable.
Pressure had been building for some time on South Africa to dismantle its brutal system of apartheid, and by the late 1980s, that pressure was beginning to result in substantive change. Negotiations between the South African government and anti-apartheid forces, symbolically led by the long-imprisoned Nelson Mandela, were jump-started in 1989 with the ascension of F.W. de Klerk to the South African presidency. de Klerk began to take actions that would lead to the end of apartheid, including the release of Mandela and other political prisoners and the resumption of freedom of the press. What followed was a series of negotiations that resulted in a free and open election in 1994 in which Mandela was elected president.
By 1991, though the dismantling of apartheid had not yet been completed, significant progress had been made in three areas that had been identified by the International Olympic Committee: the formal abolition of apartheid statutes, the unification of South African sports across racial groups, and the normalization of relations with African sports organizations. As a result, after twenty-one years of being excluded from the Olympic movement, athletes representing the Republic of South Africa would be eligible to compete in the upcoming Barcelona Games.
After such a long drought of international competitive opportunities, many had low expectations for South African athletes in the nation’s first Olympics since 1960. Arguably the greatest hopes for medals in 1992 were Elana Meyer and Zola Budd Pieterse. As Meyer suggested just a few weeks before the Games, “Our country is sports-mad and sometimes our country’s expectations are unrealistic.” As she assessed her chances, “For me, I think it is unrealistic to expect to go there and grab a gold medal. I don’t think it will be that easy.”
Perhaps looking back on the apartheid-related challenges she had faced in her career, Budd Pieterse was philosophical after learning of her country’s official return to the Olympic movement. “There we will be a true South African Olympic team, and many of us will be black, of course, and we will be marching into the stadium in Barcelona, all together. There will be lots of tears and very full throats on that day. I look forward to it very much.” Budd Pieterse qualified to represent South Africa in the 3,000 but, feeling the effects of a relapse of the tick-bite fever she had contracted years earlier (“I was as yellow as a lemon,” she later reflected.), she finished ninth in her preliminary heat and failed to make the final. For this still young athlete whose ceiling had seemed so high just a few years earlier, it would be her last Olympic appearance.
Meyer focused on the 10,000, and her titanic battle with the Ethiopian runner, Derartu Tulu, became more noteworthy for what happened after the race. Meyer took the lead partway through the race, with Tulu running right behind her until sprinting to the win at the end, becoming the first black African woman to win an Olympic medal. With the silver, Meyer won the first medal for South Africa since 1960. Then after the race, this black African athlete and white runner from a nation best known for its previous segregationist and racist laws and practices joined hands and ran a victory lap together. It made for a powerful image, the symbolism of the gesture lost on no one. “That was a very special moment,” Meyer offered later. “We did it for Africa, which needs a couple of very good female runners. At least we were two Africans. At least that is an example for Africa.” It would be Elana Meyer’s only Olympic medal, but she would have a long and successful running career, setting multiple world records in the half-marathon and experiencing great success in the full marathon.
After the Barcelona Olympics, Budd Pieterse continued her running career for a few years, but her best performances were clearly behind her. She faced Mary Slaney in a much-hyped road mile in Australia later that year, a race the American led from start to finish to easily win. It was the last time the two former childhood phenoms would face each other competitively, but it was clear that each runner was on the downhill side of her career. A few months later, Budd Pieterse returned to the World Cross Country Championships in Spain, for the first time in this competition representing her native South Africa. She finished ahead of such noteworthy runners as Elana Meyer, Liz McColgan of Great Britain, and another Brit, a young and emergent Paula Radcliffe, but finished fourth and off the podium. Budd Pieterse would return to this competition three more times, finishing seventh in 1994, fifty-ninth in 1996, and eighty-sixth in 1997.
Though she never really stopped running and raced occasionally, especially on the roads and cross-country courses, Budd Pieterse’s athletic career became more and more lowkey. But she seemed very contented, being able to keep running and racing in their proper perspective. As she stated before the Barcelona Olympics, “My marriage has changed my whole approach to life. The most significant thing has been the realization that I can still be happy without running.”
Ultimately, though, the life events with the most significant impact on her running career were the births of her three children, a daughter in 1995 and a twin son and daughter in 1998. As she reflected as her children were approaching adulthood, “When my kids were born, after that it changed everything.” As she continued, “The kids really changed a lot because running just became a part of my life; it wasn’t my life anymore.” Fittingly, the Pieterse children would become champion runners in their own right.
Harkening back to her days as a child joyously running on the South African veldt, Budd Pieterse relished her training time, logging countless miles in much greater anonymity than when she had been a budding superstar. Now in her mid-thirties and with her children old enough to require less of her time, she began to plan her first attempt at reaching one of her unfulfilled goals, completing a competitive marathon. For her initial attempt at the distance, she could have chosen any small, lowkey race in which her entry might have been barely noticed. Instead, she chose one of the most famous of the world’s marathons, ironically selecting for her debut the 2003 London Marathon. Returning to Great Britain, her splash into the world of marathon running would be anything but lowkey. As she suggested before the race, while she had no desire to return to her life as a professional runner, she thought she could run a competitive time, hoping to run under 2:30. But she had no visions of finishing at or near the top. As she joked before the race, “Paula Radcliffe will be showered and changed and on her way home by the time I cross the finish line.” Radcliffe would stun the world with her performance that day, running 2:15:25 to break her own world best by almost two minutes.
Zola’s underlying goal had been to represent South Africa in the marathon in the upcoming 2004 Athens Olympics. She had hoped to run 2:40, which would be a stepping stone to later reaching the Olympic marathon standard of 2:32. But it was not to be, as low blood sugar levels forced her to drop out with six miles to go. Though she would not approach the 2:30 or even 2:40 marathon times, she dipped below three hours in several races, all well into her forties. And she would win several marathons, including the Kloppers Marathon in her hometown of Bloemfontein. Though she enjoyed competing and took satisfaction in the wins, the mature Zola ran races more for the joy of the experience. As she explained, “One has to get over yourself. One has to realize that. . . you don’t have to race to race well, but you can race to enjoy it.” As she described this more enjoyable phase of her running career, “I don’t think of myself as a competitor anymore but more of a participant. . . You have to get over your ego and put your ego aside and enjoy running for what it gives you running-wise, not just winning-wise.”
It was as if Zola Budd Pieterse had come full circle. “When I was a child, running gave me a means of escape and direction to my life,” she explained. “But after the clash with Mary, running became a pressure, too. I stopped enjoying it. Now the pressure to perform is gone, and I love running the same way I did when I was a schoolgirl.”
She had been painfully forced into the world’s spotlight as a teenager, but as an adult Zola was largely living her life, raising her family with her husband, running for enjoyment, and occasionally competing, all with minimal notoriety. That all changed in 2006.
The seventeen-year marriage between Zola Budd and Mike Pieterse had for the most part been a happy one, in part because unlike so many of the other men who had influenced her life, Pieterse did little to try to control his wife’s running career. As Zola had suggested, “I love my husband and kids and wouldn’t exchange that for anything else in the world.” Years earlier there had been alleged involvement between Mike Pieterse and a student, and he and Zola had sought marriage counseling to help resolve issues with their relationship. Still, theirs seemed to otherwise be a happy marriage.
That all changed, at least according to Zola, with the insertion of Agatha Pelser, commonly known as “Pinkie.” Pelser was a former beauty queen and married socialite who was allegedly involved in an affair with Mike Pieterse. Pieterse denied the allegation and suggested that he had known Pelser since she was thirteen and that they remained merely friends. Zola responded, “Why do all husbands deny it? I have no idea. But I have more than enough evidence that he is having an affair. More than enough.” Zola filed for divorce, and the story soon took on tabloid-like qualities, including a home (referred to in some publications as a “love shack”) Mike Pieterse was preparing for Pinkie, Pieterse then telling her to vacate the home, a lengthy armed standoff involving Pinkie, and Zola seeking and receiving a restraining order preventing Pelser from having any contact with Zola or her family. As Zola commented as the situation was unfolding, “I suspect they are still having an affair. He is getting a house ready for her in (a suburb of Bloemfontein). She has played a role in our divorce. I have no idea how long it’s been going on, but I guess about a year.”
Mike Pieterse would in time cease having contact with Pinkie Pelser, and he and Zola would eventually reconcile. (Four years later, Agatha Pelser died of an apparent suicide.) But it was all a traumatic experience for Zola and her three children. Traumatic enough that in the summer of 2008, she and her three children moved to the United States, settling in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Mike Pieterse soon joined his family in the United States, and with this move, a new chapter opened in the story of Zola Budd Pieterse.
The many years since Zola Budd Pieterse moved to Myrtle Beach have largely been happy ones; as she reflected in 2014, “I think my life is at a point where I couldn’t ask for anything more.” And much of that life in the United States has revolved around running. Shortly after arriving in the United States in 2008, she became a volunteer assistant track and cross-country coach at nearby Coastal Carolina University; she moved into an official assistant coach position for the Chanticleers in 2015. These positions allowed her to stay connected to the sport and train and compete how and when she wanted. And she brought great insight and experience to the athletes she was coaching. As long-time Coastal Carolina track coach Alan Connie said of his assistant coach, “We value her ability to relate to the athletes and share the wisdom of her experiences.” As he continued, “(the athletes) have a great respect for what she’s accomplished in her life. She is one of the most famous track and field distance runners that has ever lived.”
While at Coastal Carolina, to add to the degree in psychology she completed in South Africa, Budd Pieterse completed master’s degrees in pastoral counseling and sports management. Maintaining her ties both to running and South Africa, she took charge of marketing the new, minimalist brand of running shoes, Newton, in her native country.
And she runs and occasionally competes, at distances from 5K road races to marathons. As a mother, husband, coach, and student, she has kept her training in its proper perspective. As she has commented, “Even now, running is my Prozac.”
First run in 1921, the Comrades Marathon is one of the most famous and prestigious ultramarathons in the world. With a distance of around fifty-five miles, Comrades was attractive to Zola Budd Pieterse because of the challenge of pushing herself beyond the marathon distance, and especially because it is annually run in South Africa. She first ran this ultramarathon in 2012, finishing in 8:06:09 as the thirty-seventh female finisher. She had hoped to run again the following year but had to withdraw due to a viral infection, developing symptoms after arriving in South Africa.
At the age of forty-eight, Budd Pieterse returned to South Africa for the 2014 Comrades with the lofty goal of finishing under 7:30:00. Running with more experience with the ultramarathon distance, she completed the tough course in 6:55:55, the first South African woman finisher and seventh overall. She received prize money for her overall finish as well as for finishing first in the forty to forty-nine age group. It was a stellar performance and a joyous experience as she entered the stadium to the crowd shouting, “Zola, Zola. . .”
Her joy was short-lived. She had been issued a veteran competitor’s number that indicated the age group in which she was entered, but race rules suggested that a separate small age group tag needed to be placed on her running top. Because she had failed to wear this tag, race officials stripped her of her age group win and disqualified her from receiving the corresponding cash prize for that victory. The winner of her age group reverted to a runner who finished almost sixteen minutes after Budd Pieterse. Though she was allowed to keep her medal for finishing seventh overall and that accompanying prize money, she had to forfeit the considerable purse that went with the age group win. Regarding this loss of prize money, her manager commented that it, “wasn’t about the money. It’s standing up for the principle.”
Budd Pieterse was incredulous, offering evidence that other veteran age group winners had similarly failed to wear the appropriate tag. “It feels like they are targeting me specifically,” she declared. “Why does this rule apply to me and not to others?”
The 2014 Comrades Marathon did not represent the end of Zola Budd Pieterse’s running career. She has continued to train and occasionally race and announced that she would return to run the 2020 Comrades in memory of her brother Quintus, who had died by suicide the previous year. That race was canceled because of the Covid pandemic.
But in some ways, the controversy associated with her outstanding performance at the 2014 Comrades Marathon is like a microcosm of her running career, at least the career most prominently known to fans of the sport. Regarding her disqualification from her age group win in that race, largely on a technicality, she commented, “I won it fair and square. My whole athletics career has been plagued by politics and interference from administrators who are selective and do not apply the rules consistently.”
Whether from her father, Frank, or her coach, Pieter Labuschagne, or the editors of the Daily Mail, or leaders of the BAAB, or Lamine Diack, or especially the IAAF, she had faced a seemingly endless array of attempts to control her, or remove her, or make her go away on apparent technicalities. Those efforts, often successful, in many respects came to define her career as a runner. And now, she had been stripped of an age group victory she knew she had won fairly, her name removed from the Comrades Marathon record book. . . again on a technicality.
So, what do we make of the career of this running icon? To the many who are only vaguely familiar with her story, the legacy of Zola Budd begins and ends with a tragic race in the 1984 Olympics. As she laments, “People think my career ended after 1984, but then I won the World Cross Country Championships twice.” Both titles were in addition to the two times before her fateful meeting with Mary Decker in which she had run world bests in the 5,000.
It would be short-sighted to view the career of this iconic athlete based solely, or even primarily, on one race. This is especially true given that Budd Pieterse would come to realize that the decision to move to Great Britain and to compete in the 1984 Olympics “was the worst decision of my life.” As she expanded on that thought, “It was way too early in my career, I did not have enough experience running races at that level and I was still very young coming from South Africa.”
But obviously she did run in those Games, in many respects a result of the exploitation of an incredibly talented teenager from a pariah nation who had been largely shielded from the rest of the world. In Los Angeles, her youthful vulnerability and introversion, a freakish accidental entanglement with a runner considered America’s sweetheart, and the derisive reaction of that athlete’s hometown crowd, all contributed to altering not only the course of her career but also the trajectory of her life. As she reflected in 2002, “If I’d been born a couple of years later, I’d have been just another athlete and not a political pawn. My life would have been so very different.”
Perhaps of greatest importance to Zola’s legacy was not what happened in Los Angeles, as obviously career-defining as was that experience. Rather, most significant was what happened after, how she overcame and how she persevered. How she overcame personal tragedy and exploitation, being viewed as the personification of a political system with which she ultimately disagreed, and being banished from the sport as a result. Despite every obstacle she has faced, Zola Budd Pieterse has crafted a productive and largely happy life involving family, coaching, and even ultramarathons. And in the process, she has regained the love of running she had felt as a child, a joy that she had lost during her first Olympic experience. Given where she had been in 1984, an eighteen-year-old running phenom who sacrificed a podium finish so she could avoid further derision from a hostile crowd, that is a significant accomplishment indeed.
Epilogue: Finally a Reunion, Thirty-Two Years Later
It is unfortunate that two generational talents, among the greatest athletes of their time, should be perpetually linked together by a race that one runner didn’t finish and the other didn’t finish well. And it is ironic that the two young women, so closely associated with one another, never developed more than a passing acquaintance. As legendary mentor Brooks Johnson, head coach of the 1984 U.S. Olympic Track and Field team, described this relationship, “They never really had the chance to know each other, they were pitted against each other from the jump.” As he continued, “If they had a chance to sit down and start talking about their lives, the parallels, the similarities would totally blow them away.”
After that fateful race in Los Angeles, they met at races on a few occasions, typically offering cordialities but otherwise each simply going about her business. As Brooks Johnson had intimated, they had so much in common. Both had demonstrated freakish running ability at a very young age. Each had grown up in a home beset by marital difficulties, with each developing a strong bond with her mother. Each athlete derived so much joy from the simple act of running, and despite their hard work and natural talent, neither experienced Olympic success. Each, however, won two world titles in track or cross-country. And each had dealt with what she considered to be unfair allegations and sanctions from international governing bodies.
Apart from running, both remained in lengthy marriages, and each took great joy from motherhood. And while each in her time had been among the best-known athletes in the world, as older adults, neither sought the limelight and largely lived lives away from public scrutiny.
And of course, they had in common what had occurred on the homestretch of the Olympic track in the Los Angeles Coliseum, an entanglement that would forever alter the course of their lives.
These two women had so much they could have discussed but had simply not had the opportunity to get together to do so.
That changed in 2016.
The saga of Mary Decker and Zola Budd had been previously depicted in film and on television, including a 2013 documentary aired on ESPN. But never had they been brought together to view, process, and discuss what happened in that fateful 3,000-meter final and its aftermath.
Then, thirty-two years after that momentous evening in Los Angeles, the producers of The Fall: Decker vs. Budd, a documentary for the British Sky Atlantic network, brought the two athletes back to the Coliseum to tape a segment for the film. As Budd Pieterse suggested regarding the rationale for agreeing to participate in the project, “One of the reasons both of us decided to do this is that it hopefully will give us closure.” When they first met for the filming, Slaney, then fifty-eight, and Budd Pieterse, then fifty, approached each other cautiously before embracing like old friends. As Budd Pieterse commented to her former rival, “I don’t think you know how much this means to me.” Decker responded, “It means a lot to me.”
In the film, and particularly in media interviews surrounding its release, the two are portrayed as parts of a rivalry that has survived to this day. But both are quick to dispel those notions, suggesting that any lasting bitterness was created and hyped by the media. Still, each recognized the impact that singular race had on her life and athletic career. Asked if she still thought about the race, Budd Pieterse said, “Yes, I do. You can’t not. It becomes a part of your life.” Slaney similarly stated, “I still think about that race every day. Making this film has been cathartic.”
The historic Los Angeles Coliseum, home to Olympic Games in 1932 and 1984, in many ways looks much as it did when Decker, Budd, Puica, Sly, and Williams battled for medals in that latter year, in a race that for different reasons would help define each runner. But the track has long since been removed to make it a more football-friendly venue, the eight-lane synthetic surface replaced with turf.
In a moving scene in The Fall, Slaney and Budd Pieterse take a slow jog together around the edge of the field, intimating where the running track had been thirty-two years earlier. They pause only slightly as they pass the spot near where the two young runners became entangled, and where Slaney fell in pain to the infield. But it is a joyous scene watching the two running together again, Slaney likely doing so in pain, with this simple act symbolizing the two of them moving on from whatever limited ill feelings and animosity they may have maintained for all those years.
As Budd Pieterse reflected, being together like that was “probably good for both of us. To be there with Mary put a lot of things to rest. Before, it was this huge stadium full of booing people. But meeting Mary normalized everything. It healed both of us.” As Slaney suggested, “I think I have arrived at a good place. I have one child, Zola has three. We have life.”
To have survived all the challenges each had faced, “having life” is a wonderful accomplishment.
Read the full Mary Decker and Zola Budd – Los Angeles 1984 series:
References
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Copyright 2021 by Rob Leachman – All Rights Reserved
