29 July, 2016 - 08:45
When it comes to the 1984 Olympic Games, Zola Budd is unequivocal. I mean it wasn't a happy memory, she says. And you can see in her eyes that the 3,000 metres final, when she collided with the favourite Mary Decker, sending the American sprawling off the Los Angeles track, remains a moment she would happily consign to the dustbin of history, unheralded, unnoticed, unforgiven.
There is no chance of that now, however. Not this week, when a documentary film about the race is released. Called The Fall, it is a film with which the two of them collaborated, a film which, the pair believe, finally tells the story through their eyes.
Normally sporting movies are celebrations of triumph, usually against the odds. The Fall is different. It is a catalogue of misery. And it is all the more compelling for that.
Beautifully shot and brilliantly edited, it tells of how the paths of Budd and Decker came to cross in a jumble of limbs that August day 32 years ago. Budd was just 18, a desperately shy barefoot runner from backwater Bloemfontein, who was reluctantly propelled into the centre of attention by the combination of a greedy father and a rapacious tabloid newspaper.
At the time, South Africa was barred from world sport, a pariah state. And when Budd was fast-tracked into the British Olympic team thanks to a combination of her grandfather's nationality and the newspaper's political contacts, she immediately found herself the focus of anti-apartheid attention.
With English her third language, hopelessly unworldly (she had never heard the name Nelson Mandela) she floundered in front of relentless questioning. Almost as soon as she arrived in Britain, she wanted to go home. Her father - and the paper - refused to let her.
By the time she got to Los Angeles for the Games she says she wanted to be anywhere but there. It was not the ideal mindset to go for gold. There is little wonder that after the collision, as boos rang out round the stadium, she fell back down the field of runners, hoping as she went that the ground would open up and swallow her.
For Decker, the world champion, the poster girl of the home team, the race was expected to be her crowning glory. Instead, she found herself sobbing on the trackside, and her bitter immediate post-race press conference, in which she gracelessly blamed Budd for the collision, turned her from America's darling into a national laughing stock.
Time, though, heals. And here are Budd and Decker, now promoting the film together, happy and relaxed in each other's company. Indeed, what comes across in the documentary is the extraordinary connection the women share. Their backgrounds, their fraught relationship with their fathers, their tactical approach to racing: these were two peas from the same pod.
With the entire media build-up to the race about the two of them, speculating who of the champion and the fastest contender would ultimately stand atop the podium, even at the time it seemed there was something inevitable that, among the 12 runners, it was the two of them who collided.
Decker calls it fate. I get goosebumps just talking about it, she says.
And Budd admits, after it happened, she found it hard to maintain the spiritual certainties of her Calvinist upbringing. It changed my relationship with God, definitely, she says.
One thing neither woman did, however, was turn on their sport. Not for a second did either feel it was running that had subjected them to pillory.
www.telegraph.co.uk
Documentaries
Africa South Africa
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29 July, 2016 - 08:45 
