Rapprochement of Zola Budd and Mary Decker an uplifting tale

If you're antiquated enough to remember the women's 3,000m final at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, and concluded at the time that if you lived forever you wouldn't witness another sporting drama to match it, the closing scene in the Sky Atlantic documentary The Fall: Decker vs Budd would have left you a little breathless.

Mary and Zola jogging around the stadium together, shooting the breeze, 32 years after their paths had, literally, crossed in that final.

Back then, the prospect of the two women ever meeting up on friendly terms, even three decades on, seemed remote, Decker consumed with bitterness towards the young South African who she blamed for the collision that resulted in her tumbling out of the race.

But after taking us through their life stories – in Budd’s case, a truly remarkable and largely tragic one – the documentary makers reunited the pair at the LA Coliseum, Decker, now 58, Budd 50, nervously approaching one another before warmly embracing.

“I don’t think you know how much this means to me,” said Budd. “It means a lot to me too,” Decker replied.

It's a gem of a documentary (it's still available on Sky's 'catch-up' service), and if you're left wanting to learn more about their lives then the just-published Olympic Collision: The Story of Mary Decker and Zola Budd' by Kyle Keiderling, one of the contributors to the programme, will fill in the gaps.

Different worlds

Decker and Budd came from very different worlds, but there were so many common threads in their backgrounds, both using running as a refuge from lives blighted by loss, abandonment and an absence of any self-esteem.

“They never really had the chance to know each other, they were pitted against each other from the jump,” said Brooks Johnson, coach of the United States’ women’s track and field team at the 1984 Olympics.

“If they had a chance to sit down and start talking about their lives, the parallels, the similarities would totally blow them away. Immediately they would see the sisterhood.”

Budd’s biography alone, her relationship with her father in particular, provides enough material for a mini-series.

She turned to running to free herself of the anger she felt after her beloved sister died at 24, and by the age of 16, said Keiderling, the only competition she had in South Africa was the clock.

We’re familiar enough with the story after that, Budd fast-tracked a British passport so she could bypass the ban on South Africans competing internationally because of apartheid.

But the details of the story burn, her father effectively selling her to the Daily Mail for his own personal profit, the paper's exclusive 'rights' to her leaving her feeling like she was "under house arrest".

“It was very seldom that people ever thought of me as a human being,” she said.

Final insult

She desperately wanted to go home, back to her simple rural life, but her father wouldn’t let her. In the end she told him she didn’t want him to come to the 1984 Games with her.

Soon after her parents split, and five years after Los Angeles, he was murdered in his Bloemfontein home. In his will he stated that he did not want her to attend his funeral.

“That was the final insult from his side,” said Budd, “I went out that afternoon and just ran.”

“I felt like a disease,” she said of the impact of those years on her family, a time when she became a figure of hate for the anti-apartheid movement.

Protestors held up ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ signs when she ran.

“I turned to my coach and asked, ‘who is Nelson Mandela?’”

Few believed she could be that unaware, that she was feigning ignorance to fend off demands that she condemn apartheid, but she had lived so isolated a life until then, her isolated home not even having electricity in her early days, she genuinely appeared oblivious to what was happening in her own land.

“Looking back at both our lives, I think neither of us had a fair chance of ever achieving what we really wanted to,” Budd said to Decker when they met.

“I think that’s sad, both of us were victims of something that happened out of our control.”

Then they went for their jog. Or a “shuffle” in Decker’s case.

“I can’t run anymore,” she said, arthritis now afflicting her.

They chatted as they passed the scene of the ‘collision’.

They finally felt they could move on.