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Caster Semenya, newly trawling the tracks of Europe, is not mentioned in Richard Mayer’s recent history of South African distance running, Three Men Named Matthews*, having rocketed into world class since the book went to press a year ago.
But she would fit perfectly into the final chapters about the unusual women – Stephanie Gerber, Zola Budd and Elana Meyer – who have emerged in the decades pre and post-majority rule.
That you will almost certainly never have heard of Gerber is testament, as Mayer observes, to that thin line which separates those startlingly talented youngsters who don’t make it from those who do – Gerber was one of the former, better than either Budd or Meyer in her early to mid-teens, while those latter two went on to become world record breakers.
But this book is mostly about men; and that you may neither have heard of the three Matthews – Batswadi, Motshwareteu and Temane – would be because their heyday was in the time when South Africa was banned from Olympic and other international sports arenas, because of the minority government’s apartheid policies.
Like Sydney Maree and Mark Plaatjes, who escaped to the USA and subsequently world record and world title fame, Motshwareteu did spend time at college in the US in the early to mid-80s – winning the NCAA cross country in 1981, with UTEP – but it was on a return trip later that he had what was probably his best performance, defeating an Arturo Barrios at the height of the Mexican’s powers, in 1988.
But a combination of circumstance, geography and Motshwareteu’s volatile nature meant that, though he had many magnificent performances at home in SA, he never again reached the heights of his victory in the Crescent City Classic 10k, 100m ahead of Barrios, in 27.54.
The early chapters of the book, beginning with the first black champion Titus Mamabolo (still competing at 69, according to a recent email from Mayer), but concentrating on the three principals, also give a fascinating insight of how the running community cast off the shackles of apartheid well before the government managed it. And how one of SA’s best known exports, gold, also helped nurture dozens of black athletes, who worked for the mines, but definitely not in them.
Mayer confesses to have been naïve to imagine that the athletes put in a shift down the shaft before coming for air or, rather, anaerobic training. But it all made for a burgeoning track and road-running circuit, which since majority rule and economic hardship has all but fallen apart.
This, the demise of South African distance running is always in the background, and is clearly suggested in the book’s subtitle, Memories of the Golden Age of South African Distance Running, and its Aftermath.
Mayer, a distance runner himself, and coach, is one of the most enduringly vocal critics of his national federation’s incompetence, mostly recently revealed in the farrago surrounding Semenya. But South Africa is not a special case in this regard – talk to any athlete about their national federation, and you will get a catalogue of criticism.
But even to an informed outsider, it does seem extraordinary that a country with all the relative privileges, in social conditions and infrastructure that South Africans can boast – suffice only to have seen the World Cup stadiums – in contrast to, say Kenya and Ethiopia, and with a larger indigenous population living at altitude, they cannot produce scores, if not hundreds more world class runners to rival the likes of David Tsebe, Willie Mtolo, Laurence Peu, Xolile Yawa, Josiah Thugwane, Shadrack Hoff and the irrepressible Hendrick Ramaala.
A few caveats; I wish Mayer had given us as much personal profile of the others who inhabit these pages as he did of his hero Motshwareteu, who suffered an all too frequent South African death, shot for no obvious reason near his house in Soweto one night in 2001. The script and particularly the pictures could have been produced better, and overall it sorely needed a good editor, firstly the trim the litany of races which becomes wearing, secondly to correct some obvious spelling errors. But it is a valuable addition to athletics literature, offering an insight into a world which was largely ignored, due to the intransigeance of its blinkered rulers.
* Three Men Named Matthews, Memories of the Golden Age of South African Distance Running and its Aftermath – Red Lion Books, Johannesburg
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