Marathon of a Journey : South African Misery Behind, Mark Plaatjes Finds Winning Stride in Life as Well as Running as an American Citizen

As he sat on the plane from Germany to the United States, memories collided inside his head and his heart.

Mark Plaatjes cried.

“I had been just in a cloud the whole time period, and when I was on the plane, just sitting back on my way back to America, it all hit me,” he said. “I cried, and I felt really stupid, but everything had started to sink in. Until that, everything was just a dream.”

And, sometimes, a nightmare.

It was 1993. He was one of the United States’ newest citizens, running for his new country against athletes from South Africa, his old country, and others in his first international competition and he had won the world championship marathon in Stuttgart.

Five years before, in January 1988, he, wife Shirley and two daughters had come to the United States on vacation and stayed.

They requested political asylum.

As a mixed-race man in South Africa, Plaatjes, 32, had no status to speak of and little life, other than his sport, and he wanted to raise a family away from a society in which color was everything.

Running had been good to him. It had gotten him an overseas education at the University of Georgia and paid his way through physical therapy training. South Africa paid good money for a world-class time, but the time was tainted.

Running 2 hours 8 minutes 58 seconds at Port Elizabeth in 1985 was good, great actually, but was it good enough? There was no way to tell, because South African athletes were ostracized by the international athletic community in a protest against the nation’s racial policies.

“Everybody in South Africa, in all these years of not being able to compete internationally, was just so frustrated because of the caliber of athletes competing there,” he said. “All we could do was run as fast as we could and then compare our times against what other people were doing in marathons, and . . . no two marathons are alike, so the comparisons were actually moot.”

As a new resident of the United States and a potential citizen, he was cleared to run in races here in 1988. But race organizers were wary. He wanted to run in the Boston Marathon, the world’s best.

Boston wasn’t open to him. He was still a South African, and South African athletes were banned in Boston.

But not in Los Angeles, where the marathon was only 3 years old and still feeling its way.

“A guy I knew in Boston called me and told me about him,” said Bill Burke, the race’s president and part-owner. “He came out and I talked to him. He wasn’t getting a chance because he was a black man. I’m a black man and I couldn’t see one black man not giving another a chance.”

Others could. There were protests, before and after, but Plaatjes ran 2:10:49 in 1988, finishing third, 22 seconds behind winner Martin Mondragon of Mexico, who set the course record.

“I had only trained for about four weeks and for the first three miles, I was very emotional,” Plaatjes said. “I just ran the race on emotion.”

He branched out as the freeze against South Africans thawed but retained his ties with Los Angeles.

“Marie (Patrick, Burke’s business partner) and Bill and the marathon organization helped me and my family so much in the ensuing years to help us establish ourselves and to get a hold in America,” Plaatjes said. “If it wasn’t for Marie and Bill and a couple of others, we would have had to go back because (for) the first two years it was very difficult.”

He was fourth in 1990 and won the Los Angeles Marathon in 1991 in 2:10:29, and he talked up the race, recruiting runners for the 1992 event.

By then, citizenship was in view.

He went to the 1993 Houston Marathon to try to qualify for the U.S. team for the World Championships but ran into a head wind and jogged around in 2:16, not good enough.

Then came Boston.

“I went to Boston, and Boston was great because I had to run 2:12:45 to get onto the team, and I ran 2:12:39 with lots of energy to spare,” he said. “It worked out perfectly.”

Now, he was Mark Plaatjes of Boulder, Colo., sixth in the Boston Marathon and on the U.S. team for the World Championships in Stuttgart.

There, he ran against Willie Mtolo, a South African who had won the 1993 New York Marathon and was a lifelong competitor back home; against Lucketz Swartbooi, a Namibian friend, and the rest of the world.

Plaatjes kicked from third in the 25th mile, passed Swartbooi for the lead and finished in 2:13:57, 13 seconds ahead of the field, still in a mental fog.

“Everything--becoming a citizen, having this opportunity in my first try and making the World Championships team, and the race turning out the way it did, and me competing against a fellow Southern African--the whole saga was just so special,” Plaatjes said.

“I couldn’t explain it then, and I still can’t explain it, the way I felt on the podium, getting the medal and hearing the national anthem.”

The expatriate had become a patriot, extolling America in a way perhaps no native-born Americans can.

“I tell Americans all the time that you guys just don’t know, you don’t understand how good you have it here,” he said. “You guys have to travel and see. I’ve been to a lot of countries, and really I tell them if you take the overall picture, this is as good as it gets.”

The emotion carries over into his planning. Atlanta, and running for the United States in the Olympics, prods him.

“I’ve never really pushed the envelope in training,” he said. “Now, I’ve got a goal. Atlanta is the goal. I have a job (as a physical therapist) and I’m pretty comfortable financially, so these next two years, I finally have a reason to push myself, to see how much I can take to get ready for that goal.”

Sunday’s Los Angeles Marathon figures heavily into the equation.

“I need to qualify (for the Olympic trials), so I need to run fast,” he said. “And I need to qualify for the World Championships (being run in August in Sweden). To qualify, I think, I will need to run 2:12 flat. I know I am ready to run under 2:10 and if the weather is good, it’s all systems go.”