For Olympic marathon-winner Josiah Thugwane, who will be competing in the prestigious New York Marathon next weekend, it’s been a long, hard road to success. Gavin Evans reports
When Josiah Thugwane talks of his life’s greatest achievements, he glosses over his Olympic marathon gold medal and a string of other running records and settles on his new-found ability to read, write and speak English.
“They can steal my gold medal but now they can never take away my education,” he says. “I’m happy now because Nelson Mandela has given me this chance. It was because of him my running success was possible and because of him that I started school for the first time in my life last year and it is all paying off.”
It is probably safe to say that no one else in his sport emerged from anything approaching the level of hardship faced by Thugwane, which, no doubt, is one of the reasons why two film companies are negotiating to make a movie about his life. This tiny runner, who will be among the favourites to win the prestigious New York Marathon on November 1, already had several strikes against him when he was born.
What made it far worse was that his mother abandoned him after splitting up with his father, and he was sent to his grandmother’s rural shack and from there to work on a farm owned by a vicious racist near Bethal in Mpumalanga.
“My early life was very difficult,” he acknowledges with considerable understatement. “I suffered a lot. I had to look after the cattle and work from morning to night as a child and so there was no chance of going to school. I was also too busy working to do anything else, and if I didn’t work the farmer would beat me, and said he would kick me off the farm and I’d have no place to sleep. He wasn’t a nice man and he beat me many times, and made me suffer for a long time.”
His only recreation was football with the other farm boys, and despite his lack of stature (1,6m, 45kg today), he excelled as a striker and had dreams of one day turning professional. At the age of 17, however, he got the chance to watch a television programme featuring the South African half- marathon stars Matthews Temane and Xolile Yawa and came up with another idea
“Soccer was my game and I was very fast, although too small, but I had no time to practise because I had to look after the cattle, so instead I tried entered this half-marathon race in the town. I didn’t even have any running shoes, but I won the race, and took home R50 and that was it: I knew I was a runner and this was my way out.”
Eventually he moved beyond the farmer’s range by taking a job as a cleaner at the Koornfontein mine in Middelburg, where he remained until the Atlanta Olympics, living in a tiny zinc shack with no electricity and running water, with his emerging family (two daughters with his current wife, and two from a previous relationship).
It is from the mines, however, that most of South Africa’s leading long-distance runners emerge: the management giving promising prospects the time to train, and in some cases, financial assistance, and so by 1996, Josiah had emerged as one of his country’s leading distance men.
His style was idiosyncratic -arms close to the body, hands swishing back and forth – but highly economical, and his combination of natural speed and stamina, and fervent commitment to training brought him several victories to earn him a place (together with his friend Lawrence Peu and Gert Thys) on South Africa’s Olympic squad.
The South African trio were trained by Jacques Malan, who used a formula of monastic seclusion, high-altitude training, and rest, with no distractions, to get his men ready, and confidently preducted that one of them would take a medal in Atlanta.
So he was only mildly surprised when it was Thugwane who entered the Olympic stadium to win the closest ever Olympic marathon, by three seconds, in a time of 2:12:36.
Before each race, Malan despatches Thugwane and Peu to the Gannahoek Game Park near the Botswana border for a spartan 12-week eat- sleep-run routine which is only broken by swimming, television and a weekly drive to the nearest shop, 45km away. “After a major race he won’t even put on his running shoes for around six weeks and then we start from scratch,” says his coach.
“He and Lawrence will then be on the game farm until a week before the race, and they train 220km a week – a couple of hours early in the morning and then speedwork in the afternoon, and they sleep 14 to 15 hours a day, broken into two or three sessions.”
Thugwane’s main problem is his desire to overdo it, says Malan. “He has immense self-drive and discipline so I never have to check up whether he’s doing the work. Every weekend I go out there for a 36km run and often I have to practically grab him and hold him down because he wants to do more. He just wants to achieve all the time – you can’t believe the determination. Although he’s got all that success, he just wants more and more and more.”
After the Olympics, his next major race was the prestigious Fukuoka Marathon in Japan, when he trounced a top-class field, including Spain’s world champion Abel Anton, with a time of 2:7:28 – only 38 seconds off Belayneh Dinsamo’s 10-year-old world record.
“For me, running fast depends partly on the pacemaker and partly on the weather. If it’s cold my knees seize up, but in Japan it was rainy but not cold, and we had an excellent pacemaker, so I ran very well and won easily, and I think it will be in those kinds of conditions that I will break the world record.”
His next shot came with the 1998 London Marathon, but he had to drop out of the race halfway after sustaining an ankle injury through jumping off the pavement to avoid a wheelchair athlete. Since then he has been working on speed, putting in a string of extremely impressive half- marathons.
Last time out, he overcame wet, blustery conditions to beat the likes of Kenya’s John Mutai and Spain’s Martin Fiz (last year’s world championship silver medallist) and 40E000 others to win the world’s largest-field half- marathon, The Great North Run, in Newcastle recently in a time of 62 minutes 32 seconds. “I needed a fast race before the New York Marathon and although I would have liked to have run faster, the conditions were against me,” he said.
His aim is to crack all the big ones before retiring. “There are still several more marathons I have to win and New York is certainly one of them. If I win there I want to go on to win in London, Boston and then the Olympics again, and to break the world record, and I must also learn to read and write English properly. If I can do all this, then I will feel fine.”
ENDS