Faster, higher, stranger – A South African Olympic history

Text: Ian Macloed. Photos: Gallo Images/Getty Images/Afp. Article from the August 2012 issue of Sports Illustrated Magazine.

The French poet Alphonse Lamartine said: “History teaches everything, including the future.” If  South Africa’s Olympics history is anything to go by we have a very interesting London Games to look forward to.

The exploits of South Africa’s first Olympians went unreported at home. In fact, even to the host city, the Games were a side-show for the prestigious World’s Fair, also on the go in St Louis in 1904. But one visitor from Aliwal North, Bob Harris, showed some gusto by entering the marathon, amid rumours he had a fine running pedigree in the Cape. Two of his countrymen – Tswana war veterans Len Tau and Jan Mashiani, in the USA as part of a travelling act performing Boer War re-enactments – were persuaded to enter the race with just two weeks to go. Incorrectly recorded at the time as Zulus named Lentauw and Yamasani, and with no evidence of any training apart from probable dashes behind battle lines as messengers under General Piet Cronje, they nonetheless became the first black Africans to earn Olympic stripes.

In front of 5 000 curious spectators, the starting bunch of 32 began the 40km quest – the 42.2km standard emerged only later – in the remorseless heat of mid-afternoon Missouri. Set mainly over dirt roads still open to traffic and with a  single water point, the much-favoured Harris called it quits not much after the halfway mark.

And one of them could have done better. He lost seven minutes when chased off course by a stray dog.

Despite what official reports called “a growing sentiment in favour of abolishing the man-killing run”, Tau and Mashiani were nothing short of troopers. Perhaps enjoying the relative safety of running without the threat of enemy fire, they trotted barefoot to ninth and 12th respectively. And one of them – accounts differ as to which – could have done better.

He lost seven minutes when chased off course by a stray dog. Or, as the St Louis Daily Globe-Democrat so eloquently put it, when pursued “wildly across a stubblefield… with prospects of a speedy union between the cavernous display of canine molars and the rearmost portion of the lion’s garments” – suggesting the hapless man was Tau (‘lion’ in Tswana).

There is also evidence that a team of  ‘Boers’ came tie fifth in the tug of war. But no South African won a medal. That account was opened four years later when the first official Springbok team went to London, in 1908.  Reg Walker, a compact 19-year-old from Durban, won the 100m dash when he equalled the Olympic best of 10.8s.

Unlucky in Antwerp

Antwerp 1920 was the site of one of the original Olympic hard-luck stories. Cyclist Henry Kaltenbrun was part of a fancied crew of Springbok riders and favourite for gold in the 175km time trial. It seemed he’d lived up to this billing, too, when results came through that he’d scored the quickest time by nearly a minute and a half. But a jubilant Kaltenbrun had barely been hoisted onto teammates’ shoulders when a challenge was lodged by the Swedish camp.

The cycling course had made six railway crossings on its meandering route through the Flanders countryside, and the apparent bronze medallist, Harry Stenqvist, claimed the time he’d spent waiting for a train to pass at one of them was yet to be factored in. Indeed, the timekeeper posted to the site in question confirmed a four-minute delay which, when deducted from the Swede’s time, dropped the luckless Kaltenbrun to second. The integrity of the result has never been questioned, but sports fans should wonder about the cruelty of taking Olympic glory from a man who thought he’d earned it for just long enough to begin planning how he’d recount the triumph back home.

By contrast, one of Kaltenbrun’s countrymen at those seventh Modern Games was a paragon of good luck. Born into wealth – his grandfather was the business partner of Cecil John Rhodes – Bevil Gordon D’Urban Rudd was blessed with the sort of natural abilities most sportsmen can only discuss in longing tones over post-match braais. By the time he arrived in Belgium, the St Andrew’s College old boy had attended Oxford on a scholarship, survived the First World War, and been awarded the Military Cross for bravery while leading a tank charge in France.

In Antwerp it wasn’t so much the three medals he collected as the way he did it that impressed. Preferring the gentlemanly pastimes of smoking and drinking to the rigours of training, he was often seen reclining in a shady spot, pipe in mouth and icy beer in hand, cheering on his competitors who were toiling away. For his troubles he won the 400m sprint, anchored his 400m relay team to silver, and settled for bronze in the 800m. It wasn’t fluke, either; sports historian Tim Harris describes one race the following year: “Rudd laid down his cigar trackside, broke the 400 yards world record, picked it up again and carried on puffing away.” Some guys have all the luck.

Vir volk en Führer

It took the drama of a stand-off between Jesse Owens and Adolf Hitler to relegate one South African spin-off of the 1936 Games to the footnotes of history. Potchefstroom-born bruiser Robey Leibbrandt ended fourth in the lightheavyweight boxing competition when a fractured right hand kept him from starting the bronze medal bout – despite his demands for a soothing cocaine injection directly into the grotesquely swollen appendage. Of more consequence was the adulation the  former policeman had developed for Hitler and his Nazi party. Before departing Berlin, Leibbrandt declared to the shouty despot at a special reception for pro-German athletes, “Mein Kampf has become my Bible. I know it almost by heart.”

He returned to Germany in 1938 to train at the Reich Academy for Gymnastics. When war broke out the next year he joined his host nation’s army, where he earned his glider licence and paratrooper wings. And now it was the always-scheming Führer who saw opportunity in his burly South African follower. He ordered Operation Weissdorn (‘White Thorn’), in which Leibbrandt, code name Walter Kempf, would infiltrate the country of his birth, stoke the revolutionary sentiments of the anti-war Ossewa Brandwag, and eliminate the Allied-friendly South African prime minister Jan Smuts. The ultimate goal was a coup d’etat that would win Hitler rich new spoils on the southern tip of Africa. Of course, it didn’t work out that way.

‘Kempf’ set sail from France on the deep sea yacht Kyloe in April 1941 – not, as he later bragged, in a U-boat – and reached South Africa’s west coast largely undetected. He did conjure up a motley crew of disciples with some fiery speeches in the old Transvaal and Orange Free State, demanding their allegiance with a blood oath before training them in sabotage. But it wasn’t long before a tip-off led police to the gang’s hideout, where they captured their own former four-time SA Police Force heavyweight champ after just a brief confrontation. A headline in the Rand Daily Mail read simply, “Leibbrandt Group Smashed”.

The would-be assassin was convicted of high treason and sentenced to death in 1942, but Smuts commuted this to life in prison months later. Following the National Party victory in the 1948 elections, Leibbrandt was released as a political prisoner and saw out his days as a butcher and greengrocer before dying of a heart attack in Ladybrand in 1966.

Collision at the Coliseum

On a windy January evening in Stellenbosch in 1984, a racer from Bloemfontein zipped around the Coetzenburg Stadium in a tiny rage of flapping arms and fizzing legs until she’d covered 5 000m in the startling time of 15:01.83. Zola Budd had bettered the world record of her idol and America’s track golden girl, Mary Decker, by nearly seven seconds. Trouble was, with apartheid South Africa then excluded from international sport, Budd’s feat would never be officially recorded. It did, however, set in motion one of the great controversies of the modern Games.

Facing placards reading “Lola, go home! she recalls back then she had “never even heard of Nelson Mandela”.

On the dime of an enterprising London tabloid, Budd moved to the UK months later, where she took up citizenship. The 17-year-old just wanted to ran in the upcoming Los Angeles Olympics, but became a symbol of racist South Africa to the British public. Facing placards reading “Zola, go home!” she recalls that back then she had “never even heard of Nelson Mandela”. Nonetheless she was chosen to represent Great Britain in LA, and in no time the buzz of the Games was a 3 000m showdown between Budd and hometown favourite Decker. Both women eased into the final, where they met in front of 85 000 fans at the magnificent LA Coliseum. Decker led from the gun, with the kaalvoet Budd on her tail. But the pace slowed towards the mid-way mark, and Zola knew she had to push it to take the sting out of Decker’s more impressive finishing kick. With her signature wide elbows, Budd flitted past the leader and began moving back to the inside lane as they entered the home straight with three laps to go.

Just then Decker’s right foot clipped the bare heel of Budd and the two stumbled precariously. No sooner had they righted themselves than their limbs met again, this time flipping Decker wildly off the track and onto the grass where she lay, contorted and wailing. Budd stayed upright and continued, but the sight of her stricken hero when she passed her a lap later must have broken her heart, and she trundled on to a teary-eyed seventh under an awful hum of boos.

Decker was left spitting angry, with an aching hip instead of Olympic gold. Years later Budd reckoned “(Mary) has forgiven me, but she still blames me.” And theories still abound as to who was wrong that night in California. For her part, Budd has never watched the footage of that fateful collision. Now living with her family in South Carolina, she coaches athletics at a local university and ran her first Comrades Marathon in June.

Back in the games

At the Barcelona Games of 1992, with the country’s institutional racism at last rejected, the first South African Olympic team since that of Rome 1960 made a proud return to the greatest show on earth. On what Edward Griffiths describes as a “balmy evening beside the Mediterranean” where “the glory overflowed for every South African,” it was again a lion of a man who led. Flagbearer Jan Tau, a 32-year- old marathoner from Olifantshoek in the Northern Cape, was out in front of this multi-coloured bunch in their unfashionable track-suits. That year Elana Meyer won silver in the 10 000m and tennis pairing Wayne Ferreira and Pietie Norval did the same in the men’s doubles.

Gold would have to wait until Atlanta 1996. There Penny Heyns was untouchable in the breaststroke, winning the 100m and 200m events. And remember pictures of little Josiah Thugwane in those oversized sunnies and a Cheshire-cat smile. Perceptive viewers will have spotted a fresh scar on his chin when he crossed the tape first in the marathon. A glancing bullet had left the wound five months earlier, in a hijacking in which a petrified Thugwane had also damaged his back when forced to jump for his life from a moving car. “I won the medal for all the people of South Africa,” he declared later, “and especially for my president, Nelson Mandela.”

There has since been the high of Athens 2004, with that muscle-busting celebration of swimmer Lyndon Ferns, and the gutsy finish by Mbulaeni Mulaudzi to pip the great Wilson Kipketer for silver in the 800m. Beijing 2008 was a lean year, with only the ballistic long-jumping of Khotso Mokoena earning precious metal. Whatever combination of faster, higher, stranger emerges at the Games of the XXXth Olympiad in London this year, it can only add to this unfinished tale already chock full of all three.