Budd, a Runner Apart, Breaks Silence

South African-born Zola Budd first gained international attention in January, 1984, when she ran a better time than the existing world record in the 5,000 meters. However, being a South African, her time was not recognized. Soon after, Budd became a British subject in only 10 days. Controversy continued to follow her, including the Olympic 3,000-meter race in which she and Mary Decker tangled, causing Decker to fall. Recently, Budd has again been the focus of dispute, which resulted in her suspension from international competition. In a rare interview, she discusses her career.

A Russian exile, commenting on the recent warming of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, said: “The Russians want to be our friends, but when they come to kiss us, we find they have no lips.”

Now, after years of silence, we find Zola Budd has wanted to tell us everything all along. But she has had no tongue.

If Zola wants to be our friend, she must speak. She realizes that now. She is 21 years old, but is only learning how this is done. Learning the difficult lesson of whom to trust and when.

“You say you are on business, what sort?”

The immigration officer at London’s Gatwick airport is peering at an American passport.

“I am a sportswriter.”

“Hmm, what are you going to do here?”

“I’ll be interviewing Zola Budd.”

“Zola. Poor little thing, everyone always after her, chasing her about. I’ll tell you, there would be none of this fuss if she was black. I wish people would leave her alone.”

The train weaves through the wet British countryside, which grows greener as London recedes. Fields of ranging sheep and goats blur past, until the land gives way to the gently rolling hills of Guildford.

The taxi driver finds Foxglove Garden and stops in front of a small, unremarkable house, identical in every way to the dozens like it on this quiet street.

“Be nice to that girl, you hear?” the driver says.

No mention of Zola Budd has been made.

A man with curly hair and a South African accent answers the door. “Where are you from?”

“Los Angeles.”

He opens the door and smiles: “Zola will be right down. Just a minute please.”

Budd, dressed in sweat shirt and sweat pants, enters to greet her visitor. This is her first in-depth interview in five years and she appears apprehensive but calm. After all, what can happen to her that already hasn’t? What can this reporter say about her that hasn’t already been made up by someone else?

When did she first begin to regret her decision to leave South Africa in 1984 and become a British citizen?

“It took a few weeks,” she said. “The first two weeks, everything was so new. After that, when everything started to quiet down, it started to dawn on me that I had problems. The main source of that information was the newspapers.”

Budd was the love-hate child of the British tabloids in those first weeks. The Daily Mail, which had bankrolled her move to England and had paid her about $200,000 for the exclusive story, was crowing. Other papers, motivated as much by jealousy as news judgment, debated the propriety of Budd’s receiving a British passport in only 10 days. After all, there were 60,000 resident aliens ahead of her still waiting.

Headlines screamed: “Zola: How The Cynical Manipulators Have Turned Her Into A Circus Act.” “Zola Go Home.”

This was the message Budd was getting from her new homeland. Through it all, Budd was silent.

“I said to someone the other day, if I had known what would have happened, I wouldn’t have done it,” she said.

“I never knew what to expect. I was 17 years old, I had just come out of school. I had attended my first course at university and I didn’t like it. So, in a way, it was a kind of escape for me. See what happens, I could always go back to South Africa. There was always a kind of back door. I knew that if it didn’t work out, I would go back. It was an escape.

“I didn’t know what would happen until I came here. I didn’t realize what it meant to leave until I came here. I didn’t realize the importance of the decision I had made. I had second thoughts even then. But I could never really give myself into going back because I knew I had a chance.”

Leaving South Africa is the only chance any world-class athlete there has to compete freely. In many sports, especially track and field, there are restrictions against competing in South Africa, or against South Africans, because of that country’s policy of racial separation or apartheid.

That has been the crux of Budd’s troubles, which have not ceased since she sneaked out of South Africa under the name of Miss Hamilton. To many, Budd is a collaborator. They want Budd to denounce the South African government. They want her to speak out against apartheid. They want her to sever all ties to her homeland.

Budd has steadfastly refused to discuss politics. “I am a runner, not a politician,” she said. “I have my political opinions, and they are very strong ones. If you simplify the whole situation, I’m just a runner. No one expects a thing of other athletes. But I am always attached to problems. I just want to run.”

Even so, Budd retains her ties to South Africa. Until February of this year, she spent up to six months a year in South Africa with her family. Her coaches and advisers were South Africans.

To Britons, this was a slap in the face.

“I can’t see why people expect me to disown my past or my background,” Budd told the Times of London. “I can’t forsake it because it’s obviously a large part of me. If the real issue is the legitimacy of my British passport, then, quite simply, if it weren’t legal then I wouldn’t have it.”

Budd was eligible to become a British subject because her grandfather was born in England, and she became one so fast because she was under 18.

“I pay my taxes and my rates,” she said. “I think I have contributed to British athletics. I don’t feel guilty about that part.”

Less than three months after her departure from South Africa, Budd was in Los Angeles running in the 3,000-meter Olympic final. She had run in a few meets before leaving Britain for the Games. At some, she had been greeted by anti-apartheid protesters shouting, “Go home, white trash.”

Her reception from British Olympic teammates had been cool. One, Wendy Sly, had threatened to boycott the Olympic trials if Budd ran.

Then, in her worst moment, she ran up Mary Decker’s heels. Decker fell into the infield, cut and bleeding, and Budd finished the race in tears.

“When I think back to Los Angeles, I sort of draw a blind,” Budd said. “I try not to think about it.

“In the race, I wanted to stop. I’d never stopped in a race and I felt I shouldn’t. I just wanted to leave. Then the crowd started to boo. I could really feel their animosity. I slowed down on purpose. I don’t think the people would have wanted to see me win a medal.

“I think now that going to the Olympics was a mistake. I had no international experience at all. It was a shock to go there and to see all those athletes from different countries.

“The moment I arrived, I knew it was a mistake. The trip, the press, everything was a bit too much.”

Budd was feeling a lot of things during the Olympics, pain being foremost. Nothing had gone right for her, and no one seemed to understand. Rejection by her teammates made it worse. She says now it was partly her fault.

“I’m a very difficult person to get to know,” she said. “I don’t make friends very easily because I don’t communicate very well. That has changed a bit in the last few years. But then I was really embarrassed. I brooded. It was my fault as well. I didn’t feel any animosity.”

Perhaps not, but whatever Budd was feeling, and not talking about, sent her fleeing back to England, then, soon after, back to South Africa.

“The Olympics was the final straw,” Budd said, relaxing on an overstuffed sofa in the home that she has bought here, an area of England that reminds her of the countryside where she grew up.

There have been many guidelines in setting up the interview but, surprisingly, there is little Budd won’t discuss: Her pain and humiliation after the Olympics, the betrayal of her coach and advisers, including her father, whom she says stole money from her, and the breakup of her family. She still refuses to speak publicly about apartheid or South African politics.

After the Games, Budd went to South Africa for an extended visit. “I sort of decided I didn’t want to run internationally,” she said.

But, she added, her South African advisers, among them her father, and even her beloved coach, Pieter Labuschagne, told her she must continue her career.

“My coach didn’t want to hear about it,” she said. “He told me to keep running. I was coming to the end of my rope.

“However, at that stage, the alternative to running was not running. I didn’t have any qualifications outside athletics. I couldn’t go out into the world and make a living. That’s probably why I continued. I had no alternative.”

Budd continued to live and train in South Africa, part time. She won the World Cross-Country Championships in 1985 and 1986. But still, everywhere she went she was met with protesters and threats of boycotts.

In late 1986, Budd was beginning to notice a pain in her right hamstring. She went to doctors in England and West Germany, but they could neither diagnose the injury nor ease the pain. Eventually, Budd stopped running altogether. And as she had always done in difficult times, she went back to South Africa.

Why did she go back?

“For one thing, my coach was there,” she said. “I was very dependent on my advisers. On the other hand, I wanted to be close to my family. I am very attached to my family in South Africa. It has been very difficult to live alone.

“My mother and father got divorced after the Olympics. None of my family is prepared to come and live with me, so I had to come here to live on my own. That’s the main reason I suppose I spent so much time in South Africa. I just wasn’t prepared to live on my own.

“No one told me there would be problems. My personal advisers never told me. They never advised me there would be trouble.”

But there was, and plenty of it. Budd was criticized in the British press for returning to South Africa. She never spoke up to explain the problems that had drawn her there.

The only doctor she had found who could treat the problem--a biomechanical imbalance, as it turned out--was in South Africa. She needed to be near her family during a difficult time. And she wanted to take a long look at the guidance she was getting from her managers.

“This has been most difficult on my mother,” she said. “Before I went to Europe, we were a family. We had a home. It was a nice home. We were just a normal family. My mother enjoyed her life. When I came back, there was trouble because of the Olympic Games. They got divorced. I didn’t want to be there with my father, so I moved out, to Stellenbosch. My mother was left alone.

“I think, definitely, if it weren’t for my athletics, they would still be together. I definitely feel that. I know that they had problems. It would have happened sometime, but I don’t think it would have been like this. I think they would have somehow endured each other.”

The key to understanding Budd’s silence over the years is remembering her background. She is from a small town in a country where all the media are government controlled. She grew up on a dairy farm, the youngest, by a dozen years, of six children.

“It was too far to travel to see my school friends,” she said. “I was always on my own with my animals. I grew up entertaining myself. I never had any girlfriends. I think I had a really sheltered upbringing. It was an easy life. I think at that stage, athletic pressure (to do well) was the only form of pressure I knew. I really had no problems. My life was not complicated.”

Mark Plaatjes, a former South African runner who is seeking American citizenship, well remembers Budd as a young athlete.

“She gets upset very easily,” Plaatjes said. “She’s very, very shy and bashful. When she used to accept awards, she couldn’t say anything but ‘Thank you.’ Then she would sit down and blush from head to toe.

“Put it into perspective. The city is small. It’s old-fashioned. The biggest thing on a Sunday is people spend all day cleaning and polishing their cars and then they go into the town and drive around in a circle in the middle of town, going 5 m.p.h.

“They are so protected there. Everything is edited. Zola would have grown up not seeing any nudity or promiscuity. People forget where she’s from.”

Where she’s from, she’s the most popular person around. And not just among whites.

“Popular is not the word,” Plaatjes said. “Nonwhites in South Africa have to ride in special mini-vans as public transportation. Those buses are called Zola’s, by the people. That’s black people. They didn’t accept other white South African athletes that way. There is something people see in her.

“She was given an award, black sportsman of the year. Zola was the only white person to have won the award. “

Budd has never spoken of this, but she nodded when she heard the story.

“When I walk down the streets in South Africa, it is always the black people greeting me,” she said. “I can feel their honesty. I never mind, if I am running, if people shout at me, if it is black people. Because, I don’t know why, I really believe them more. Blacks in South Africa are much more honest.”

It’s a point that is important to Budd, who maintains that she was swindled by her former advisers. They lost interest in her when she was injured in 1986.

“I went home for my birthday and I sort of knew it was the end,” she said. “I knew I would never run again.

“At that stage, no one really bothered with me, just my family. There were no phone calls. I knew they had cheated me. It was quite hard. It was difficult for me to trust people. I had trusted them. In the end, it was the best for me. I eventually broke with them.”

Budd also broke with her father, Frank, whom she had not spoken with for some time.

Budd said that the whole episode has prompted her decision to take more control in her life and career.

Zola Budd is now suspended from international competition. Last weekend the International Amateur Athletic Federation advised the British Amateur Athletics Board to suspend Budd for at least 12 months because, the IAAF says, she broke the spirit of the rule against competing in South Africa.

Budd admitted to having watched a cross-country race in Brakpan, South Africa. Watched it.

Such behavior is now, apparently, against the rules. Sunday the BAAB will hand down its decision.

Budd says: “It’s been quite hard. It’s something I have no control over. I’m in their hands.”

If the BAAB agrees to suspend Budd, it will be backing down from its previous public statements that Budd had done nothing wrong. Also, the BAAB will probably be sued.

If the BAAB refuses to suspend Budd, the IAAF has threatened to suspend the entire British federation, thus preventing any British athletes or officials from competing at international meets, including the Olympics. Just like South Africa.

Budd, who left South Africa to be able to run freely, has never run in peace. Clearly, there are some in the international community who want her out.

Sports has given Zola Budd the back of its hand. After all this, what makes Zola run?

“I think what will happen is that in 10 years’ time, I’ll look back and think, ‘Oh my word, I could have had this opportunity.’ I had a chance and I wanted to use it. I have hung onto running as a kind of last resort. It is a thing that I can do better than other people. I am in love with running.

“There are a few things I would have done differently. But at that stage, the things I did were right for me at the time. I would like to have been more outgoing and spoken up more. I wouldn’t have spent as much time in South Africa. I wouldn’t have gone to the Olympics.

“People have told me that my policy of silence hasn’t worked. They say I should speak out.

“I don’t really know what people think of me. I don’t know what their opinion is. I guess people think I am quiet. I’m not as quiet, not as docile as they may think. I am different.

“I won’t give up. I couldn’t live with myself if I quit. I think the best thing is, when I am running, I am alone.”