Miner who struck rich running vein

It was with a mixture of excitement and anxiety that I drove recently with Springbok athlete Matthews Temane to a village outside Vryburg looking for Matthews Batswadi.

Many previous attempts over the past decade to trace the first black athlete to receive Springbok colours under apartheid seemed to symbolise not only how South African athletics has lost its way, but also its grievous failure to honour past heroes.

My anxiety was fuelled not so much by whether we would find Batswadi, but what would await us when we reached his ancestral village. After so many years in obscurity he might be a shadow of the man who left such an indelible mark on SA sport.

But locating Batswadi was surprisingly easy. After the trail briefly ran dead just outside Vryburg, we were redirected to Dithakong, 70km away, where we found him sitting, not as his former rivals might have expected in the local tavern, but in the back yard of his home, basking in the setting sun.

He was a far cry from the reputed hard-drinking "bad boy" of his competitive days and radiated an almost monk-like serenity. Temane and Batswadi embraced joyfully after having last competed against each other more than 30 years ago.

Batswadi revealed an impish sense of humour and joked that when Temane and I first approached him, he thought for a moment that his "past" had finally caught up with him; that we were detectives sent to arrest him.

Now 60, he lives in the house in which he was born, supported by his younger brother, and cultivates a large vegetable garden nearby.

Known as a man who contributes to his community, Batswadi jogs from one task to another. He also works on a water reticulation system for communal agricultural land.

Batswadi typifies the uncomplaining cheerfulness, hardiness and resilience of the millions of men who have worked deep in the earth in South Africa's gold mines.

An astonishing fact revealed by Batswadi is that when he first ran with SA touring teams in Europe, in 1974 and 1975, he was working underground at Western Deep Levels, then the world's deepest mine.

He says this negatively affected his running, but an indication of his physical and mental toughness is that he rates his first national cross country title in Roodepoort in 1975 as his finest race. In this event, his trademark front-running overwhelmed opponents.

After he won his last SA title at the 1980 half-marathon championships, his performances slowly declined. In 1986, after losing all his possessions, including his beloved Springbok blazer and his bicycle, during industrial unrest at Beatrix mine, he returned home and withdrew from competitive athletics.

On a training run in Johannesburg I got a retrospective, if scaled-down, taste of what Batswadi's rivals faced in the late '70s. As we started, he immediately tried to break away. Not content with the furious pace and in a move that former rivals will no doubt ruefully remember, he put in a series of surges that left me gasping.

I was reminded of the view of his coach, Koos Keyser, that he was the most naturally gifted of any SA distance athlete. Batswadi confirmed that, to Keyser's eternal frustration, he would train only 60km a week, Monday to Wednesday, at high intensity, with a race on the weekend.

More mileage and a balanced programme would have certainly given him a faster 10000m best time than his 28min-dead, and placed him within striking distance of Henry Rono's 1978 world record of 27min 22sec.

Echoing the sentiments of many past greats, Batswadi would like to help develop the athletics talent of young South Africans.

With changes in the offing in SA athletics, there is hope that the skills and experience of Batswadi and his contemporaries will be harne ssed.

Mayer is the author of Three Men Named Matthews - Memories of the Golden Age of South African Distance Running and its Aftermath, which was published last year.