Zola Budd’s athletics career has come full circle and the local icon is back at home, running barefoot again in the Western Cape. Athletics 🏃♀️
Zola Budd speaks to the media after the Spar Grand Prix 10km race in Cape Town last week. Picture: Petri Oeschger
Following multiple sojourns overseas, Budd has returned to South Africa to settle down, and though she is no longer the sprightly, nervous young woman who shook the distance-running world with her spectacular results on the track, she is still doing what she does best.Between juggling her multiple roles as a student, coach and mother, Budd can even be seen among the masses these days at local road races in and around Cape Town.
So it was that she found herself on the track at the start of the Olympic women’s 3,000m final, representing what was still to her a foreign country in a place where nobody spoke her home language. While Budd continued to the end, ultimately finishing seventh, she was booed around the track and later blamed for ending the medal hopes of Decker, the home crowd favourite and America’s darling.
Budd eventually decided to return home, and after South Africa’s readmission in the early Nineties, she went on to compete in the colours of her country of birth at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. She also finished fourth in SA colours at the World Cross Country Championships in Spain the following year.