Maria Mutola grew up in a civil war. The world’s best 800m runner, who retained her Commonwealth title in Manchester, may be involved in a battle of a different sort now, against the drugs that have blighted her sport, but the haunting memories of the conflict that tore apart her native Mozambique over 20 years have turned the 29-year-old Olympic champion into a hardened battler.
”You grow up in a war, you learn to appreciate sport,” Mutola says. ”We had no freedom. We couldn’t do anything, we couldn’t go anywhere. We couldn’t visit our relatives in other cities. Many people were killed or maimed by land mines. Other families starved to death.
”We lived our lives on a knife-edge. We would hear the gunfire from neighbouring cities and we would see the casualties of war, the orphans. We had to live with the constant worry that the war might spill into our city and steal our homes and loved ones.”
The troubles in Mozambique ended in 1992, and Mutola is now a foot- soldier in the war against drugs, which athletics’ governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), appears to be losing and which threatens to eclipse the triumphs of athletes.
Take last year. By even her high standards, Mutola had an extraordinary run of success on the track, but much more coverage was given to the drugs storm that centred on the Russian athlete Olga Yegorova, who had come from nowhere to win the 5 000m in the world championships in Edmonton. Suspicion was aroused over the previous year when she knocked minutes, not seconds, off her personal best.
When Yegorova was finally asked to provide a blood sample after the Golden League meeting in Paris, it was no surprise it contained traces of erythropoietin (EPO).
Unfortunately no second sample, needed to secure a drugs ban, was taken and two days later Yegorova was cleared of wrongdoing and reinstated.
Mutola was outraged. ”We all knew that she was guilty. She was making fun of the sport. I don’t blame her rivals for castigating her in public. My training partner was due to race her. Imagine if you had sacrificed 10 years of your life to training and you had peaked for the world championships, only to learn that one of the competitors was going to be impossible to beat because she has taken drugs. No one wants to race with a druggy.”
Mutola was more angry at the IAAF. ”The drug squads are a joke. There is no consistency as far as testing is concerned. They should realise that blood testing is the most accurate way of telling whether someone is taking steroids. In the Sydney Olympics, the officials promised us that they were going to take blood. But in the end they changed their minds. I think they thought blood testing would prove to be too expensive. I hope things will have changed in Manchester.”
On the track, Mutola says motivation is her biggest worry, though she had few problems in winning another gold medal. After securing gold at the Sydney Olympics, Mutola fears neither Stephanie Graf’s lightning kick nor Kelly Holmes’s aggressive front-running.
”After Australia, I found it incredibly difficult to motivate myself. I was so desperate I called in a sports psychologist, but he couldn’t help at all,” Mutola says. ”My coach Margot Jennings gave some great advice but it was a politician who rescued my career.”
The politician was Nelson Mandela, who asked to meet her during a stay at the presidential palace in Mozambique. ”When I saw him for the first time, I couldn’t speak,” Mutola says. ”He had always been my hero. Meeting him gave me the power to go on. I was struck by his energy and enthusiasm. He is a huge sports fan. I was surprised at just how much he knew about athletics.”
Between 1992 and 1995 Mutola did not lose a race over 800m, so perhaps it is no surprise that she began to question her motivation. And what does this say about the standard of women’s middle-distance running? Without any prompting, the Mozambique athlete is critical of her fellow competitors.
”Graf and Holmes are not intelligent runners. It is easy to predict their tactics. They must learn that athletics is as much a mental contest as it is a physical one. Graf always tries to beat me but she hasn’t really helped me to run faster. Her main tactic is to sit on my shoulder and try to outsprint me,” she says.
She has praise for Ana Fidelia Quirot, a Cuban who always got the better of Mutola until she sustained severe burns in a house fire that forced her into an early retirement.
”Quirot was the most talented middle-distance runner that I have ever seen. She was such a clever tactician. It was impossible to predict her game plan. You just had to wait for the gun to see what she would do,” Mutola says. ”I always ran my fastest times against her. If she was still running, maybe I would have broken the world record by now.”
Conflict during her childhood, and competition and cheating in athletics have conspired to teach Mutola how to cope with success. Her ambitions extend beyond sport and the Athens Olympics in two years’ time. Her meeting with Mandela may have altered her career path. Don’t be surprised if one day Mutola is banging the drum for Mozambique in a United Nations conference room. —