THE CHAMP WHO GAVE TWO ATHLETES THE CHANCE TO WRITE A HAPPY ENDING
WHEN divided pasts create moments of togetherness, the resultant relationships and their impacts can be beautiful and fascinating.
Two women, divided by apartheid, met through athletics in democratic South Africa and came together to mould a precocious teenage talent into a world and Olympic champion and world record holder.
One is Odessa Swarts, the mother of Wayde van Niekerk, now a man, and the other is Anna Botha, the coach of this Olympic champion talent.
Swarts and Botha were separated because of skin colour during apartheid; one was oppressed, the other privileged, in occupied Namibia and South Africa.
Both were athletes, but Botha was much older than Swarts. Botha grew up in the apartheid-supporting athletics structure and Swarts in a non-racial athletics structure that supported the isolation of South Africa.
They did not know each other. Botha has no known history of calling out apartheid and its wrongs. Apartheid hindered their careers. It isolated sports people. At the University of the Free State, a few years after Van Niekerk’s family moved to Bloemfontein, Swarts and Botha met.
They discussed how best to protect the first-year student and unleash his prowess.
As athletics coach at the university, Botha became Van Niekerk’s coach, guiding his development with a change from the 200m to the 400m, then to South African and African champion, and eventually Olympic champion.
And this Olympic champion gave the two women who played pivotal roles in his career the chance to represent a democratic South Africa, accepted around the world.
Cheryl Roberts