One of South Africa’s most promising middle-distance runners has made his comeback, reports Julian Drew
They often say football’s a funny old game, but athletics, well, that’s such an ordered and precise sport, isn’t it? All those millimetres and hundredths of a second. There’s never any doubt about who came first and who came second.
For South Africa’s latest world champion, athletics has been anything but full of order and predictability, however, and Johan Botha could well be forgiven for applying that well-worn soccer clich to his own sport.
Just a year ago Botha was on the verge of quitting athletics, not through injury like many runners, but simply because he wasn’t cutting it. Today he’s the world indoor champion over 800m following his spectacular triumph in Japan two weeks ago and his future’s so bright the sponsors are queuing up to hang their latest designer shades on him.
Now he can look forward to invitations from Europe’s biggest meets and the handsome appearance money that he could only have dreamed of a year ago. He has set his sights on a world championship medal in Seville in August and believes he can get close to training partner Hezekiel Sepeng’s South African record sometime this year.
In 1996, after reaching the Olympic 800m semi-finals as a 22-year-old and lowering his personal best to a respectable 1:45:17, Botha seemed destined for great things.
But then the wheels came off. While Botha was in Atlanta his coach Tobie du Randt died and on his return he moved back to Pretoria, but was travelling daily to Johannesburg to train under his new coach JP van der Merwe, who had taken Sepeng from schoolboy to Olympic silver.
Early in 1997 Botha picked up an injury following a short stint on the European indoor circuit. He urgently needed a bone scan but didn’t have the R1E000 for medical fees and went to Athletics South Africa. Rather surprisingly, he was told it couldn’t help him.
He wasn’t considered one of South Africa’s top athletes, despite being an Olympic semi-finalist nine months earlier, and was told he had no future in the sport.
Eventually the father of one of his training partners arranged the scan for him and it revealed five different stress fractures in his legs.
Botha became despondent after that and started drinking with his friends in Pretoria where he grew up. He put on 7kg as his 1997 season turned to despair. At the end of the year he realised he had to get a grip of himself and moved to Johannesburg where Sepeng allowed him to stay rent free in his spare apartment.
“I started to train seriously again but when the 1998 season came along things just wouldn’t click into gear. I was running from the front but the guys would always come past me and I couldn’t seem to develop my front running into a winning race,” says Botha. At the South African championships he had a nightmare of a race, finishing ninth in a pedestrian time of 1:50:53.
The following day Van der Merwe called him to his house and Botha says it was the turning point in his career. “JP [van der Merwe] said, `Look Johan, athletics just isn’t working for you. You’re not making any money out of the sport, so what are you going to do when you finish running? I think you should stop athletics and start working on a career for yourself.’ It was really a shock to me. I was almost in tears and JP was almost in tears. Nobody had ever told me anything like that before. It was always, `Oh Johan, you’re so talented,’ and things like that. This was the first time anybody had been honest with me and I decided to do something about it.”
Botha gave himself one last chance at the Engen meeting in Roodepoort the following week. “If things didn’t go well in that race I’d decided to stop running.”
Fortunately for Botha and South African athletics he drew on all his experience and mental strength to finish just behind Sepeng in a reasonable time of 1:46:00, and his career was back on track with a vengeance. With renewed focus and drive and discipline which had never been so fierce, Botha headed for Europe and ran some solid races including a 1:45:49 win over Sepeng in Hengelo.
At the Commonwealth Games in September he stormed home behind Sepeng to claim the bronze medal in a new personal best of 1:44:57. It was South African athletics history in the making as Sepeng and Botha became the first athletes from one coach to medal in the same track event at a major championships.
“It’s incredible really but we got absolutely no recognition for that. I couldn’t believe it but I realised there was no point in looking to the past and concentrated my energy on getting a good start to the 1999 season.” Botha pauses momentarily in reflection. “I think I’ve done that,” he says with a broad grin.
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