Sunday, Aug. 23, 2009

No looking back for Zola Budd

Zola Budd South African runner who bumped Mary Decker slaney In 1984 Olympics finds peace in South Carolina

MYRTLE BEACH — The only visible sign of running in Zola Budd Pieterse’s one-story brick home is a treadmill on the back porch.

Budd Pieterse bought it at a yard sale and keeps it set at an incline to compensate for the lack of hills in her adopted home.

After all the peaks and valleys in her personal life and running career, Budd Pieterse is ready for a calm, flat stretch.

She has found it in Myrtle Beach, amid the golf courses and man-made lakes, where few of her Carolina Forest neighbors realize the woman circling the subdivisions on her morning runs is one of the most well-known runners in Olympic history, albeit for all the wrong reasons.

“It’s nice and quiet here,” Budd Pieterse said. “Sometimes people recognize me, but not that often.”

Budd Pieterse picked an odd spot to relaunch her running career — a golf Mecca where the humidity frizzes her hair and taxes her legs on long training runs. She moved here a year ago with her husband and three children on a two-year work visa to compete on the U.S. Masters circuit.

The purses and appearance fees for the over-40 races are minimal. But this is about more than money for the South African, who will forever be linked to Mary Decker Slaney for their collision at the 1984 Summer Olympics.

“I think after all the bad experiences that I had as a junior and as a young woman, I thought this was probably something nice to do for myself and just get back into it,” Budd said Tuesday, sitting at her kitchen table. “It’s competitive, but it’s a different competition. It’s more against yourself.”

It was 25 years ago this month that Budd Pieterse, then a waifish 18-year-old known as Zola Budd, became entangled in an international controversy that spilled onto the Los Angeles Coliseum track at the ’84 Games.

Budd Pieterse grew up running barefoot through the fields of her family’s farm in South Africa, which had been banned from international competition since 1976 because of its segregationist, apartheid policy. She sparked public criticism and angry protests when her father and a London newspaper arranged for her to compete for Great Britain, where her grandfather was born, weeks before the start of the Games.

The furor intensified when Budd Pieterse bumped into Decker Slaney, the popular, pig-tailed American, during the final of the 3,000 meters, knocking Decker Slaney from the race and creating an unfortunate legacy for Budd Pieterse.

Despite the two consecutive cross-country championships she won in 1985-86 and the world junior record she holds in the 3,000, Budd Pieterse, now 43, knows the lasting image for most people will be of Decker Slaney sprawled on the ground and crying on the infield while Budd Pieterse glanced back and continued on to a seventh-place finish.

“I don’t think it’s something nice to be remembered by. I won’t be remembered for my athletic ability. I’ll probably be remembered for what happened to me (at the) ’84 Olympic Games,” she said. “In a way, it’s something negative. But on the other hand, I think my life has moved on since 25 years ago.”

FINDING PEACE

Budd Pieterse said the Daily Mail paid 100,000 pounds ($165,000 U.S.) to bring her to London and get the exclusive rights to her story. To retain her amateur status, the money went into a trust fund — or was supposed to.

“My father got most of that money, and the little money I got I had to pay 60 percent tax on,” she said. “Out of the whole Daily Mail deal, I probably got 10,000 pounds ($16,500 U.S.).”

Budd Pieterse became estranged from her father, whom she blames in part for dragging her into the apartheid controversy as a teenager. At press conferences leading up to the Olympics, Budd Pieterse said little about the racist policies in her native country — silence that drew the ire of anti-apartheid activists.

She said she answered the questions “probably the same I would today, and not talk about politics — not publicly, anyway.”

Budd Pieterse renounced apartheid in her 1989 biography, published five years before South Africa held free elections that were won by the African National Congress under Nelson Mandela.

She has forgiven her father, who died 20 years ago after being shot by a man who claimed Frank Budd made a homosexual advance toward him, according to reports.

And she has come to grips with her Olympic experience, as well.

After Decker Slaney went down, the L.A. Coliseum crowd of 85,000 began to boo Budd Pieterse, who said she purposely slowed up and passed on a chance to win a medal.

“The thought of being on the winner’s podium and actually getting a medal was just too much because of the booing and the crowd,” she said.

Budd Pieterse approached Decker Slaney in the tunnel and apologized. Decker Slaney’s response stung the South African teen: “Don’t bother.”

“Looking back at it at 25 years ago, it’s probably accepted reaction after what happened to her,” Budd Pieterse said. “I think both of us, our lives have moved on so much in 25 years.”

On the bus back to the athletes’ village, a black sprinter from Great Britain cried upon seeing Budd Pieterse.

“I asked her why is she crying. And she said because of what happened to me,” Budd Pieterse said. “I can’t remember her name because I didn’t know her that well. But that was probably the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. I’ll always remember that.”

Budd Pieterse moved out of the village and spent the rest of the week at her mother’s hotel before returning to England. Race officials said Budd had done nothing wrong, and Decker Slaney sent her a conciliatory letter a few weeks after the Games.

The two have not spoken since racing in Sydney in 1993. Budd Pieterse stopped competing a couple of years later to start her family.

She never was in contention for an Olympic medal after ’84. The IAAF banned her from the ’88 Games in Seoul, South Korea, for appearing at a race in South Africa, though Budd Pieterse said she was there as a spectator, not a competitor.

Representing her home country at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, Budd Pieterse failed to qualify for the 3,000 final. By the 1996 Games in Atlanta, Budd Pieterse was a 30-year-old mother retired from running.

“Sometimes you think, ‘OK, I never won a medal.’ But it depends on how you look at life. You have to be thankful for what you actually did achieve,” she said. “I ran well in the cross country (championships). And that’s more than enough for me.”

RACING AGAIN

After her children were born, Budd Pieterse took down all her running trophies and photos and put them in boxes.

“I didn’t want them to grow up with that. I wanted them to get to know me,” she said. “They know I love running, and they know I go out running and racing. But they didn’t have to know all the cruddy details.”

When she decided she was ready to race again, Budd Pieterse and her husband, Mike, a South African businessman with interests in hotels and gas stations, began searching for destinations. She liked Arizona for its dry weather. Mike liked Myrtle Beach for its golf courses.

Golf won.

The couple believed their children — 13-year-old Lisa and 11-year-old twins Mike and Azelle — were at good ages to handle a move. The three attend public schools; Lisa, a seventh-grader, is thinking about going out for the cross country team at Carolina Forest High.

“I’ll never be pushy, but you have to be encouraging, as well. It’s a fine line you tread on,” Budd Pieterse said. “Like now, she loves to go out running. So I’ll go out with her. I’ll always ask her, ‘Are you OK? Do you want to actually go?’”

Budd Pieterse said she is not a “PTO mom,” but has immersed herself in the Grand Strand running community. Last year she contacted Coastal Carolina’s track coaches about training at the school’s facility and ended up joining the staff as a volunteer assistant coach.

When Chanticleers women’s coach Alan Connie told the team about Budd Pieterse, an Irish-born runner was the only team member who had heard of her.

“They had to go and look on the Internet to know about me,” Budd Pieterse said, laughing. “They Googled me.”

They have since seen Budd Pieterse’s talent and competitiveness firsthand. At a cross-country meet last year at Appalachian State, Budd Pieterse entered as an unattached runner against a field of nearly 200 collegiate women.

Connie advised her to stay with the lead pack for the first mile of the 5K race to get an idea of the pace, then watched Budd cruise through the opening mile in 5:18 to take a 30-yard lead.

“I said to a colleague, ‘Well, so much for that advice,’” Connie said.

Budd Pieterse won the race in 17:58 and has finished first in several other races of various distances throughout the Carolinas. The former world record-holder in the 5,000 meters won half-marathons in Asheville and Myrtle Beach, as well as a women’s five-mile race in Columbia in May.

She broke three hours at the New York Marathon in November and is considering extending her visa to train for a few more of the top races, such as the New York and Boston marathons.

Budd Pieterse no longer runs barefoot and is more muscular than in her teenage years, when her race weight was less than 90 pounds. Her outlook on running also has changed.

On their kitchen wall, the Pieterses have one of those boards with magnetic words and phrases. Someone, presumably one of her children, arranged the magnets to spell out the sentence: “My mom chases the dog down the road.”

Left unused at the bottom of the board was the phrase, “runs fast.”

That seems less important now for Budd Pieterse. She runs for fun — not to set records and not as an escape mechanism.

“On a generally day-to-day basis, I think you come to terms with what happened in your life,” she said. “And as you grow older, you become more thankful for the small things in your life and you don’t really — winning an Olympic Games or running your best time in a 10K isn’t that important anymore. I think seeing your kids smile is more important than all that.”

Reach Person at (803) 771-8496.

Get The State newspaper delivered to your home. Click here to subscribe.