On the Run No More : Despite Painful Memories, Budd Finds Happiness in South Africa

If ever there was a place where a person could go to hide from the rest of the world, this would be it. Now, in the high summer, there is something desolate and scorched about it, lying dead in the center of southern Africa. It’s as if Nature had been here once, but left in a hurry.

It might be the richest region in South Africa. Far under the earth lie fields of diamonds and vast veins of gold. The mining operations in the Orange Free State are the country’s most extensive, with shafts running both vertically and horizontally. It is possible to imagine the ground under your feet as being hollow and your footsteps echoing in the ears of miners laboring below.

This is where many Afrikaners found haven in the 19th Century--driven north from the Cape Colony and the hated British. These Dutch-descended white settlers halted here, put down their Calvinist roots and set about the business of producing children who would become South Africa’s ruling elite.

Bloemfontein is the capital of the Orange Free State--the most conservative, most insular of South Africa’s four provinces. It is the home of the Afrikaners, the stubborn, hardy and proud people who view their province as a kind of oasis in a sea of madness.

An enduring symbol of the Afrikaner is the laager , or protective circle of wagons, an effective method of defense while under attack. The image of the laager , if not the fact of it, lingers.

Today, as then, Afrikaans is spoken here. It is the language that begat the word apartheid , or separateness. In the thick Afrikaans accent, the word is pronounced, APART-hate.

This is where Zola Budd ran to when she could no longer run. Budd, one of the world’s most reviled athletes, came home when, at last, she wanted no one to find her. The Free State swallowed her, and she was lost to the world.

This is where she found herself again.

A JOURNEY BACK, A STEP FORWARD

The directions were clear, but quite wrong. Take the Kimberly road for about one kilometer to Tarrel Road, then right. Look for the animal kennel on the corner. Follow the dirt road to the third house on the right, on Van Vuuren Laan. No address.

There is no Tarrel Road exit off the N1. Every scrubby gravel street looks the same. All the low-slung ranch-style houses look identical. A check of the directions didn’t help. They are clearly the product of a person to whom street names had less navigational value than local landmarks, much as a rural resident might helpfully explain, “Turn left down at the Miller place, by the old elm tree.”

Finally, the animals give it away. Ducks, dogs, ostriches, cats, a menagerie roaming peacefully around the front yard. This is the home of Zola Budd Pieterse. A guest might not find this place easily, but the visitor is not unwelcome once here.

Sitting in a sunny living room, two cats on her lap, Budd tries to reconstruct the blocks of her life since she left England hurriedly in May of 1988, suffering from nervous exhaustion. At the time, Budd said she was retiring from international competition.

Since returning to her home in Bloemfontein, Budd has watched the disintegration of her family, gotten married, resumed her running career and finally broken her long silence and denounced apartheid.

And when attention had begun to wane, Budd was in the news again. Her father, Frank Budd, was found murdered last September, killed with his own shotgun. The killer told police that Budd, 56, had made homosexual advances toward him.

Frank Budd, who had engineered his daughter’s career and withheld huge sums of money from her, left specific instructions in his will that Zola be barred from his funeral. Further, he forbade her burial in the family plot.

Despite all this and sporadic international curiosity, Budd, 23, says she is the most relaxed and happy she has ever been. She is at peace.

“I finally feel settled,” she said. “At the end of the day, I feel satisfied with what I’ve done. I don’t feel I could have done more. I really enjoy just a normal life. It’s nice to be normal. Being here is a relief from the pressure and attention from the press. It’s a relief.”

The relief was welcome.

Only months after her controversial collision with Mary Decker Slaney in the 3,000 meters at the L.A. Olympics in 1984, in which she competed as a British citizen, Budd was once again the target of the international anti-apartheid lobby. Budd had returned to South Africa to seek treatment for a persistent leg injury.

The International Amateur Athletic Federation, which governs track and field, discovered that while she was in South Africa, Budd had attended two road races. The IAAF found this to be in violation of its rule that forbids “participation” in competition in South Africa. After hearings in London, the IAAF recommended to the British track authorities that Budd be suspended for a year.

Something in her snapped. Running was the only thing that brought her happiness, and now she wouldn’t be allowed to have that. Budd’s London physician later reported that she was experiencing depression and long bouts of crying. He prescribed complete rest. He advised her to go home--to South Africa.

As Budd explained in her autobiography, “Zola,” written last year with South African sportswriter Hugh Eley, “It came to a choice between running and life; I chose life.”

The life she came back to was much as it had been in the simple days of her youth. Budd grew up on a farm surrounded by animals. Today, she and her husband, wealthy liquor store owner Mike Pieterse, live in a modern but modest rural home with six dogs and three cats.

Budd is doing what she has always wanted to do but was not allowed to do. Coming out of high school, she wanted to go to a technical college. Her domineering coach, Pieter Labauschagne, told her she was going to a university. Today, Budd is studying computer programming at a nearby technical college.

Even her marriage was a kind of rebellion. Budd had met Pieterse casually in 1986. Then, after she returned to South Africa, her sister Estelle arranged a dinner where the two would be together.

“I think it was a set-up,” Budd said.

The relationship grew steadily, but Budd was troubled. Having been betrayed in the past, she sought a commitment from Pieterse--she proposed.

“Feminism hasn’t hit the Free State yet,” she joked. “But Mike is very different from other men. I don’t think it was a shock to him. I wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t sure he would say yes.

“I just felt I had to have some security. In past relationships with people, some have been intimidated by my success. But with him, it was quite the opposite. I came back and I wasn’t running well. It didn’t matter to him if I was running well. He’s very patient and much better with people than I am. He takes life much easier than I do. I’ve met a lot of new people and made new friends through Mike, and that is quite nice.

“It’s just another environment. When you do athletics, all the people you know are other athletes. Sometimes it gets really boring. It’s nice not to just talk about athletics. I think that’s one of the things that really attracted me to him. Athletics was one of the subjects we never discussed.”

The wedding was April 15, 1989. Her mother, Tossie, her sisters and her brother, Quintus, were there. Frank Budd was not. Still estranged from her father, Zola had asked Quintus to give her away. But Frank Budd threatened to disinherit his son if that happened. In the end, Zola’s father-in-law gave her away.

The wedding generated enormous attention. For South Africans, the marriage of shy little Zola to “Mike, the big teddy bear,” was the same as if the nation’s youngest sister were getting married. The church was mobbed.

Frank Budd did not attend and was quoted as saying, “I no longer have a daughter called Zola.”

A STAR IS BORN--AND EXPLOITED

Budd has still not worked out her complex relationship with her father.

Frank Budd ran a print shop, worked long hours and was seldom at home. One of Zola’s warmest memories of her father was her tiny hand in his as he proudly marched her around after she had won a race in elementary school.

Frank and Tossie Budd frequently quarreled. Frank, who spoke English, and Tossie, who spoke Afrikaans, would have each of their six children speak to them only in English. The Budds didn’t share similar philosophical outlooks, either. Frank was liberal and outgoing, Tossie was conservative and retiring. They divorced in 1986 after 33 years of marriage.

When Budd broke Mary Decker’s world record at 5,000 meters by more than six seconds on Jan. 4, 1984--because she was a South African, Budd’s time was not recognized as a record--Frank Budd conceived, constructed and got behind the wheel of the great lumbering beast that was to become the Buddwagon. It made him rich.

Within weeks after Zola’s amazing race, in which she ran barefoot in the wind at altitude, Frank Budd and Zola’s coach, Labauschagne, negotiated with representatives of the British tabloid, the Daily Mail. Because her paternal grandfather had been born in London--and with the help of the Mail--Budd was granted British citizenship in 13 days, receiving her passport on April 6, 1984, only three months before the L.A. Olympics.

The furor in England and abroad was immediate. Budd was criticized because of her “passport of convenience” and her status as a South African brought the anti-apartheid lobby into her life.

Budd, then 17, hated her new life in England, away from her home and her animals. She begged to go back, but the adults around her--with the exception of her mother, who also hated England--told her she must see this thing through.

At work were her father and coach. From her book: “Together with the Daily Mail, which arranged the cloak-and-dagger operation to get me to England in what was, for it, a massive and highly successful publicity stunt, they turned me into some kind of circus animal. I was expected to perform, and perform well, every time I put a foot on the track.”

The deal Frank Budd had negotiated was for 100,000 pounds, and it broke down this way: 20,000 in a trust fund for Zola, 20,000 for Pieter Labauschagne, 5,000 each to Budd’s brother and two of her sisters, and, notably, 45,000 for Frank Budd. Additionally, Frank Budd acted as his daughter’s agent, taking 35% of the gross.

Looking back, Budd realizes she relied almost totally on the advice of her father and others and therein made critical mistakes. She also found that the Buddwagon was a cynical and cruel way to extort money from her.

Budd made the gradual discovery that it was her running--not her--that was so loved by her father and coach. She says now that as a result she lost her ability to trust anyone for years. Budd has tried to work this out, but she has kept the pain as a souvenir. There are some lessons she doesn’t want to forget.

“When I ran well and everything was going well, they were interested,” she said. “I think that was the main reason they were interested in me. I don’t think it was a personal matter, or that they wanted to be involved with me as a person. It was the athletics. When that didn’t fulfill all the potential they wanted, they just disappeared.

“It was painful, especially with my coach, because we spent a lot of time together, seven years together. It was very difficult for me to handle that.”

Budd said she became aware that Labauschagne’s loyalty was contingent on her performance when she ran poorly in England in 1986 and returned to South Africa with an injury. Labauschagne told Budd she was faking the injury and told her to get back to Europe and run.

“That’s when I decided he was not interested in me,” she said. “The point is, you need a coach when you are running well, but when you really need a coach is when you are not running well. That’s the time when you need people.”

Budd’s estrangement from her father was slow to build but exploded suddenly. They had a fight and she moved out of the house. She rarely spoke to him after that. Problems with her father put a strain on Budd’s relationship with her brother, Quintus. He never understood what had happened between Budd and her father while she was living in England. He never knew about the problems with Zola’s missing money.

“Even now, it’s very difficult for my brother to understand,” Budd said. “I think, in a way, he still blames me for things that have happened between my mother and my father. Relations between us aren’t as bad as they were between me and my father. He’s still upset about everything. He’s taking it very badly.”

The it Budd referred to was their father’s murder and the subsequent allegations of his homosexuality.

“I wasn’t seeing him before his death,” she said. “It was quite hard for me to accept. I always hoped that one day we would have a reconciliation. It is a terrible thing not to have said, ‘I love you.’ ”

Budd learned from her sister the provisions in Frank Budd’s will. She didn’t attend the reading of the will. She did not attend the trial of Christian Johannes Botha Barnard, the 24-year-old who worked on Frank Budd’s farm, “The Hope” near Bloemfontein.

Barnard was charged with shooting Budd twice with Budd’s shotgun, then stealing Budd’s truck and checkbook. Barnard testified that Budd had made derogatory remarks about the younger man’s girlfriend and had, on the night of Sept. 30, made sexual advances toward him.

Barnard faced the death penalty, but the judge, citing “extenuating circumstances,” sentenced Barnard to 12 years in prison.

Asked how she felt toward her father’s killer, Budd said she had “sort of a neutral feeling.”

SILENT NO MORE

In January, Budd did something many people had wanted her to do for a long time. On a BBC television program, she gave her views about apartheid. She told the audience that she could never accept a political system that entrenches the superiority of one race over another. She said that, as a Christian, she believed that all people were created equal. Her country’s system of apartheid was wrong, she said.

The statement was astonishing not in that she held those beliefs, but in that she actually voiced them. For six years, ever since she had become a world-class runner, Budd had been asked her views on apartheid. For six years she had steadfastly refused to share her views, saying she was an athlete, not a politician.

For her silence and because she failed to sever her ties to South Africa, Budd was made Public Enemy No. 1 by the world’s anti-apartheid groups. She was picketed every time she ran, and the British team was threatened with boycotts at meets in which she took part. There was a simple way to defuse all this--denounce apartheid. Budd refused. It was a revealing decision, for it showed her stubbornness and her willingness to fight, even in a battle she had little chance to win.

“I’ve been quiet for so long, I just spoke my mind,” Budd recalled, losing a battle to keep her kitten out of a photographer’s bag. “In a way, it was a relief. I could finally say what I thought. But I still felt it was unfair for people to expect me to talk about politics. I have opinions, but they are private.

“I felt I didn’t want to be forced into making political statements just because they wanted it. In a way, the whole time I was just a bit stubborn, because I didn’t want to give in to their demands. I don’t think you can ever win against the people who were as fanatical as the people I was up against, or even with the press.”

Budd said that the reaction to her views in South Africa was mixed. She said she received hate mail from “the conservative elements,” as she had previously been threatened by anti-apartheid groups. Nevertheless, she is not sorry she spoke her mind, especially given the political changes recently.

“I think South Africa had to change,” she said. “The time is right. I just hope people accept the changes and work together. I just hope South Africa survives as a country. You can expect violence from both sides, but I think it is time for people to accept what is happening, to accept what the opinion of the whole world is.

“It’s hard here because it’s been going on for so long. I’m 23 years old and I know nothing else. I’ve never seen an international running team in South Africa. So, from a practical side, it will be difficult for South Africa to adapt to the change.

“To look back on it, the anti-apartheid people have been very--not stupid, but I think if they had allowed (South African) blacks to compete overseas and not the whites, it would have been much harder for people here. Changes would have come much quicker.”

Budd recently began to compete here, at a low-key level. She understands that by doing that, under the present rules, she has made herself ineligible to compete internationally, even though she still holds a British passport. But she won’t miss it.

“No, I think I have seen it all and been through it all,” she said. “I realize now how artificial everything was. Running, although it is a sport, is very artificial. You run well today and tomorrow is the next day and you have to perform well all over again. When I look back on three years of running, I don’t really feel I have achieved a lot, especially not as a person.

“It’s all right, running well. But at the end of the day you have to satisfy your own needs. Looking back on it, it was a very boring time. I got overwhelmed by just doing athletics.

“If something reckless happened, and South Africa was allowed back into the Olympics tomorrow, and the opportunity arose for me to run a few meetings, I might do it. But on the other hand, I would be very careful not to let athletics take over again. Not to run because I have to but because I enjoy it. There is always the balance.

“Running is something that is a part of my life. In the past, it was the only thing and I had to do it well. So it’s really nice now, if I don’t run well today I’ll come home and just forget about it. There are so many other things to do now. I enjoy running, but I’m far from my best of a few years ago. It’s not important for me to run well again. I don’t want running to take over my life as it once did.”

Budd might have accepted this, but the people of South Africa yearn for their Zola to beat the world again, so that, through her, they become winners. Budd tells them to look elsewhere for a symbol.

“People seem to take it for granted that I am going to run well again and that I am going to achieve,” she said, sighing. “It’s something I’ll just have to cope with. When people ask me what my future plans are, I reply that I just don’t know. I’ll take it as it comes.”

THE LONG ROAD HOME

The road that leads away from Zola Budd’s home is easier to find than the one that leads to it. There is an airport close by and the town. There is a world beyond Bloemfontein and the Orange Free State and even beyond the borders of this isolated country.

Zola Budd has seen what lies beyond. And that is what has driven her back here. You get the impression that after losing herself out there, she has found herself again here, and that she doesn’t ever want to leave again.

BACKGROUND Because of its policy of apartheid, or racial separation, South Africa has been shunned by the international sporting community. It has been banned from the Olympics since 1960 and international sporting codes prohibit South African athletes from competing anywhere outside their country and impose lengthy bans on any athlete who competes in South Africa.