Former champ Sephooa will be a tough act to follow

AS excitement builds with the anticipation that Gerda Steyn will set yet another Two Oceans Marathon record at the weekend, the discerning road running follower would most likely be transported back to the early years when other women runners dominated the 56km ultra.

Monica Drögemöller’s four wins, which included a hat-trick of victories from 1990 to 1992, will no doubt be uppermost in the minds of the older generation.

No doubt there will be those who think of Frith van der Merwe, whose long-standing Two Oceans record from 1989 Steyn smashed two years ago.

For me, it is the name Angelina Sephooa I think of when the topic of great women of the Two Oceans comes up.

Like Drögemöller and Steyn, the runner from Lesotho won a hat-trick of titles from 1997 to 1999, earning herself the status of Two Oceans legend.

Now dearly departed, Sephooa was, of course, not as phenomenally fast as Steyn, but she was a fierce competitor.

The first black woman to win the race, she stunned everyone when she deposed defending champion and hot favourite Maria Bak in 1997.

The German was expected to hold on to her title with consummate ease, but no one counted on the woman from Lesotho, by then still unmarried and using her maiden surname Pitso.

She was gutsy in the race, going toe-to-toe with Bak and beating her by 27sec – her time was 3:45:45.

It was a clean sweep for Gold Fields athletics as another dearly departed great, Zithulele Sinqe, reigned supreme in the men’s race to hold on to his title from the previous year.

Thoughts that Pitso’s victory was a fluke got dispelled the following year.

Now a married woman and using a new surname, Sephooa, she had little trouble as she sauntered to victory by a good three minutes over the runner-up, but in a time much slower than that of the previous year as she crossed the line in 3:49:56.

Not since Drögemöller’s success from the early 1990s had a woman won the race in three successive years.

Could Sephooa change this was the question on everyone’s lips in the pre-millennium race of 1999. Much older but more experienced now, she ran her personal best time of 3:38:09 to join Drögemöller on a hat-trick of victories.

Sephooa finished seventh and sixth at the Two Oceans in 2003 and 2004, thus cementing her status as one of the race’s all-time greats.

She died at the beginning of 2006, leaving behind a great legacy for not only Lesotho runners, but black runners in general.