Zola Budd reveals why she would not let her personal kids race

As Zola Budd Pieterse paces slowly around the running track at the Coetzenburg Stadium, rain is threatening from dark clouds gathering above. She seems oblivious.

Clutching an energy drink, feet in Hoka trainers, the 58-year-old school athletics coach is deep in the memories of a January day 40 years ago.

It was here in this stadium that, as a 17-year-old barefoot runner, Zola broke the world record for the 5000 metres in a time of 15 minutes and 1.83 seconds – shattering the record held by American star Mary Decker by six seconds.

‘I still think of it every time I come to this track, and I still get goosebumps,’ she tells me.

Her time was not officially ratified by the International Amateur Athletics Federation because she was a South African in South Africa, a nation with pariah status because of its apartheid regime. But that historic run put the world on notice and set in train the events that would place the waif-like teenager at the focal point of intense controversy for years to come.

Zola’s passion for running – from childhood she was exceptional – is what made her. It nearly destroyed her but it will never leave her.

She still runs five times a week, distances of up to 10km, and plans to take part in The Comrades, the world’s oldest and largest ultra-marathon, covering 88km (55 miles) in South Africa.

‘I ran it when I was like 45, but at 60 it’s probably going to be more of a challenge,’ she tells me. ‘My brother Quintus always said we were going to run Comrades together. He passed away, so maybe it’s for his memory.’

Challenges are what she embraces but they have left their mark down the years – from the death of siblings to estrangement from her father, his murder, and a depression so deep she once contemplated suicide. It is something Zola has never previously touched upon.

And right up there among the toughest periods of her life is her selection to run for Great Britain in the 3000m at the Los Angeles Games in 1984.

‘The cost of competing at the Olympics was almost my soul,’ she muses.

So burned was she by the experience that when her children – Lisa, now 28 and twins Michael and Ezelle, 26 – were young, she wouldn’t let them run competitively. ‘I thought, they are going to have the same experience I had. I wanted to protect them from that,’ she says.

Now, with the Paris Olympics in full swing, her memories of that tumultuous period are ever-present. Zola’s unofficial world record in 1984 triggered avid interest in the shy girl who’d grown up training on the dusty roads of Bloemfontein, with a dream of Olympic gold.

But as a South African she had no chance – until The Daily Mail’s Chief Sports Writer Ian Wooldridge found she had a British grandfather born in London’s Hackney.

A campaign was launched to get her a British passport – fast-tracked in time for the Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

With the help of the then Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, Zola secured British citizenship in a record nine days.

Anti-apartheid protesters were furious. As a white South African, Zola was seen as the living embodiment of a brutal regime, and they claimed it was a ruse to secure medal glory for Britain.

But her father Frank and coach Pieter Labuschagne were on board. ‘I was excited because it was portrayed to me as: ‘It’s gonna be easy, you can run in the Olympic Games,’ ‘ says Zola.

‘As soon as we landed [in the UK], I told my mum and dad: ‘I want to go back, I don’t want to do this.’ It was so tough for our family. I couldn’t go out or do anything.’

In the months before the Olympics as Zola tried to qualify for selection, protesters attended her races. She was spat at and verbally abused.

‘I landed in this political storm at 17,’ she says. ‘Afrikaans was my first language. I was uninformed about the world, but that is the environment we grew up in. It’s tough because you take it very personally. You can’t blame a 17-year-old for everything that’s wrong in a country. And that’s the burden I felt.’

One of six children, Zola grew up the daughter of Frank, who ran a printing shop, and Tossie, who had a catering business.

Zola idolised her older sister Jenny, a nurse, who enjoyed running and took it up as well. When Jenny died suddenly, aged just 25, running became an escape.

Zola won a place at university to study political science but gave it up to pursue her Olympic dream.

She was selected after winning the 3,000m British Olympic trials and in LA made it to the final, setting up a tantalising race against US poster girl Decker.

Decker had missed the Montreal Games in 1976 and Moscow in 1980. At 26, she was in her running prime at a home Olympics.

With four laps to go, Zola pulled ahead of Decker and the pair made contact. Decker fell. Boos echoed around the stadium.

‘My intention from the starting line was: ‘It’s seven and a half laps and then you can have your life back,’ ‘ says Zola. ‘The next lap coming round [after the collision] I saw Mary lying on the inside of the track and then the booing was bad. And I thought: ‘OK, anything Zola but getting on that winning podium. I don’t have the courage to come back into the stadium [for a medal ceremony].’

‘It just affirmed to me that I wasn’t supposed to be there. I slowed down and I’m glad I came seventh because then all expectations were gone. I think I could have [run for a medal], but the fight I always had in every race wasn’t there.’

The aftermath was terrifying. Zola, warned of threats to her life, required armed protection before being whisked back to London.

‘It was like James Bond,’ she remembers. ‘I was taken straight to the plane on the Tarmac.’

She doesn’t mince her words when describing the pressure she felt from her father, her coach and the sporting authorities.

‘They never realised how good the Russians were, the Eastern Europeans and Mary Decker,’ says Zola. ‘For them to expect me to run against them, I think it was child abuse in a way . . . It was always: ‘Oh, but you’re such a good runner, you have to run,’ It was never: ‘What do you want to do with your life, Zola?’

‘It’s only when I got seriously injured at the end of ’86, when I couldn’t run any more, that all the mentors of that time [including her coach and business manager] just disappeared. It was a relief.’

A year later, she would again break the women’s 5000m world record – officially, this time.

She missed the 1988 Seoul Games citing ‘nervous exhaustion’. Four years later she ran at the 1992 Barcelona Games in the colours of South Africa, following the repeal of apartheid legislation. She was struggling with illness and didn’t make it out of the heats.

It marked the end of an Olympic career that began with much promise but yielded a best finish of seventh. ‘I’m at peace because I now realise that the Olympic Games isn’t the ultimate running experience,’ Zola says.

In her 1989 autobiography she no more than touches on the depression she experienced. But when pressed, Zola is brutally honest. ‘Suicide,’ she says simply. ‘Nobody recognised that I was really depressed. And by that time, my mum and dad were getting a divorce, so I didn’t have any real support.’

Events in her personal life didn’t help. Her father’s controlling nature and iron grip on her finances meant they became estranged.

He declined to attend her 1989 wedding to Michael Pieterse. Just months later, her brother Quintus found Frank dead at his house, shot twice with his own shotgun by a 24-year-old male farm worker to whom he’d allegedly made a sexual advance.

Today Zola works as an athletics coach at Stellenbosch High School, scouting for talent in deprived areas.

‘I always say running is great, but you can destroy someone’s life through competitive sport. I [was] trained in my head since the age of 14-15 that I only have worth if I run well. And that’s the thing I try not to teach the athletes that I coach.

‘I tell them: “I love you, not because you’re pretty or you’re running well. But [because] I can see who you are – and I like that.” ‘