After the fall

At the age of 18, Zola Budd briefly became one of the most famous women in Britain. The runner was born in apartheid South Africa, but on the basis of a British grandfather, was able to compete for Britain at the 1984 Olympics. In the build-up, the press had a field day about the looming confrontation between the barefoot runner from the veld and her all-conquering US rival Mary Decker. The 3,000-metre final in LA seemed destined to be a great sporting moment; but when the two athletes met, it ended in mutual disaster. At 1,600 metres, the runners bunched up; Zola got spiked; her leg splayed out – and Decker crashed to the ground. For Budd, it was a blur. “I only knew someone had fallen,” she told Rosie Millard in the Radio Times. “When I passed by the spot again, on the next lap, it was then I realised it was Mary. And the crowd started booing. That’s when I gave up. Everything leading up to it, all the politics, all the hype, and then for Mary to fall! It was like a soap opera, it couldn’t be real. I slowed down deliberately. I didn’t want to be on the medal podium.” Budd finished seventh, and – wrongly accused of tripping Decker – became a focus of anti-apartheid anger. But three decades on, Budd insists she is not bitter; as for her rival, with whom she was recently reunited for a new documentary, “I don’t think about it,” says Decker. “It’s something that almost happened in a different lifetime. People need to understand that the Olympics are important, but they don’t define your entire career.”