Julian DrewAthletics
This week the track and field season stepped up a gear with the arrival of the Engen Grand Prix Series on the local calendar and with it a sudden influx of international talent. After last weekend and what was the best South African championships in recent memory many of our stars are in top form and ready for the challenge provided by the visitors.
As far as big names in the athletics world go they don’t come any bigger than that of Jonathan Edwards whose performance at the 1995 world championships in Gothenburg was as much a quantum leap for his event – or perhaps that should be a quantum hop, skip and jump – as was Bob Beamon’s historic long jump at the Mexico City Olympics back in 1968.
Beamonesque quickly entered the lexicon of sporting superlatives and while Edwardsesque has yet to do so there is a good chance that Edwards’s 18.29m triple jump world record will be around for many years to come.
With South Africa now producing its own crop of world-beaters like Marius Corbett and Llewellyn Herbert, a lesson they can perhaps learn from Edwards is the price that such success can exact upon a young athlete. Edwards – a devout Christian – is more level-headed than most but he still had to face up to problems he was never really prepared for.
“All of a sudden my life became much more complicated than it had been and it wasn’t easy. I had to learn to live in a new world and it took a huge amount of energy to get my life organised,” reveals Edwards who had to employ a secretary just to cope with all the correspondence he began to receive. “I had to deal with the fact that I was now the world record-holder and that everybody expected me to win the Olympics and the world championships.
“I think I won just about every sports award there was that year and not just within athletics. It was difficult to get used to being who I was after being just a good athlete but not a particularly great one. I had to think about things a lot. I had a lot of questions and I would try and reason things through. It has certainly been an intertesting time but it’s only really now that I’ve come out of the shadow of it all.”
Having revolutionised his event and become the first man to jump beyond 18m – he did so seven times in 1995 although some of his marks were wind-aided – Edwards has struggled to match the expectations that followed his every sprint down the triple jump runway.
Although he won silver medals in the Atlanta Olympics and last year’s world championships in Athens those performances were disappointments to a success-hungry public and he has yet to break the 18m barrier again.
Besides some niggling injuries in 1997 Edwards says there are two main reasons why he hasn’t managed to return to the levels of 1995. “A big factor was that having achieved something way beyond that which I ever thought possible I haven’t had that burning passion over the last couple of years which I used to have. I did something that I could happily retire with and now the feeling of going out at every meeting to strive for a personal best, to reach some kind of goal which I think most sportsmen have, that has been taken away from me and that is part of the great challenge of athletics.
“Another factor which has always been a fundamental drive within me has been my Christian faith and the desire to please God in what I’m doing. After jumping so far my life suddenly became much more pressured and I think somewhere along the way I lost that vital connection between myself as a Christian and myself as an athlete. I got quite tied up with how I was going to jump a long way rather than why I was going to jump a long way.”
Indeed Edwards’s loss of direction led to his now famous quote when he questioned why he was”jumping into a sandpit” for a living but thankfully those days are behind him.
“I think I had to answer some fundamental questions in terms of my own spiritual health which was much more important than whether I was a good athlete or not. I think I’ve set about addressing those questions and for that reason I now feel at peace with myself which I haven’t felt for a long time in the athletics environment.
“That can only be good for my performance and certainly in terms of my enjoyment of what I’m doing, I’ve got that back again. I feel much more positive now that what I’m doing is right and I see no reason why I shouldn’t jump as well again as I did in 1995.”
South African athletics fans were quite fortunate to catch Edwards in action at the first Engen Grand Prix in Pietersburg on Wednesday, for his appearance came about purely by chance. Edwards actually came to South Africa to shoot a promotional video on behalf of the Salvation Army which will be used around the world to raise funds for three homes in Johannesburg and Soweto for HIV-positive children.
When his agent found out he was coming at the same time as the Engen Series he was quickly signed up to compete in Pietersburg. Edwards won’t be around for the remaining meetings in Roodepoort on Monday and then the final next Friday in Cape Town due to a commitment to attend the induction of his father as vicar to his new parish in England on Friday.
But there are still plenty of other exciting encounters to look forward to and it is in the sprints where the biggest fireworks can be expected. Frankie Fredericks, African record-holder over 100m and 200m, will be up against 1997 world bronze medallist Tim Montgomery from America and with the thin air of Roodepoort a fast time of under 10 seconds could be on the cards.
In the women’s sprints 1997 world 200m champion and 100m silver medallist Zhanna Pintussevich of the Ukraine could push Heide Seyerling to an even faster time than her personal best of 22.89 from the national championships on Saturday.
Another star performer on Saturday, Arnaud Malherbe who lowered the South African 400m record to 44.88, will have American twins Alvin and Calvin Harrison as well as Britain’s Iwan Thomas to help him to an even more respectable time. Alvin Harrison was fourth in the Atlanta Olympics with Thomas one place behind.
While these races should provide the highlights South Africa currently has plenty of athletes capable of upstaging the runners with world-class performances on the infield. Riaan Botha and Okkert Brits in the pole vault, Burger Lambrechts and new world junior record holder Janus Robberts in the shot put and Marius Corbett in the javelin are all in a rich vein of form at the moment which could result in some exceptional performances.