Where are they now: 800m queen Maria Mutola

Saturday looms as a pretty big day for Maria Mutola. It's not like being holed up in a call-room before an 800m final at the world championships or the Olympics, but it should still be a squeaky-bum day

Mutola's football club, Luso Africa - a Sasol women's league side based in Germiston - face the team that presents a challenge to their qualifying for the league playoffs.

"We're in second place but playing the team in first place," she says. "If they win, they'll win our region and if we do, we'll win it. It's a pretty big game."

Mutola has been turning out for Luso since 2009, the year after she retired from dominating the international 800m scene for over a decade.

Now living in Bryanston and Mozambique - after spending 16 years living and training in Eugene, Oregon - she says soccer is a welcome change from the grind of more than 20 years of middle-distance running.

"It's nice to have something to do and the training is not like it was," she says. "It's more enjoyable now because I can eat whatever I want. If the weather is bad, I can say I'm not going to train. In the past I had to do what it said in the book."

That said, Mutola's in better nick than most 37-year-olds. She still trains at the Wits University track, sometimes doubling that workload with a practice at Luso in the evenings.

This goes some way towards explaining why her younger counterparts in football have been trailing in her wake in her role as striker.

"We've played five or six games, and I've scored eight or nine goals. I scored four in the one game."

Mutola's life has come full circle. It was as a footballer that she was spotted by the poet, Jose Craveirinha, who convinced her to try running.

The move saw Mutola, then 14, turn up at the Seoul Olympics in 1988 as one of Mozambique's promising talents. While she ran her personal best at the distance, she still finished last in her heat.

But the seed had been sown for an obsession. "Suddenly all I wanted was to win an Olympic gold medal."

Six Olympics later (one of only four track and field athletes to have managed that many Games), Mutola has not only run her race, but she also got her gold at the fourth time of asking.

"The Olympics are one of those things that come once every four years in your career. I had to go to three before finally winning in my fourth. I saw Sydney as my last chance to win."

After disappointment in Barcelona and Atlanta, Mutola and her coach ran her Sydney campaign like a military operation.

"We tried to make everything perfect: I was in Australia a month and a half before the Olympics and I even considered not staying in the athletes' village because I'd contracted pneumonia there in Atlanta."

Surprisingly, the gold medal in Sydney was only her second Olympic medal (to go with bronze in Atlanta) in a career in which she dominated the 800m from 1993 to 2007.

While there was validation in getting the Olympic gold, her first World Championship gold medals - indoors and outdoors in 1993 - were her highlights.

"I was the first Mozambican to do it and I was a champion for the first time. The others didn't really matter because I'd done it."

Not that she approached the others as if they didn't matter. She amassed 12 more world championship medals from indoors and outdoors (10 golds, two silvers and two bronze), and two golds and a bronze from the Commonwealth Games.

Indoors, she put in an incredible run of wins from 1993 to 2006, missing out only in 1999.

She went on to become the only athlete to win the $1-million pot of gold by herself after winning all her races in the 2003 Golden League.

Despite her liking for cars - she has a 1952 Cadillac and a Hummer H2 parked in her driveway - it comes as a surprise that she did not spend a cent of it on herself.

Instead, she put some of it in her foundation, the Lurdes Mutola Foundation, back home and invested the rest in property.

The foundation, which offers scholarships to athletes and scholars in Mozambique and generally focuses on trying to uplift her countrymen, is what takes up most of her time.

As Mozambique's greatest export, Mutola is relieved to be out of the spotlight.

"People always expected me to win and I would get phone calls from President (Joaqium) Chissano wishing me luck.

"As much as it was motivational, it was still a bit of pressure, but we have since become friends."

Mutola's still an athletics fan and keeps tabs on what's going on in the sport.

She would pay to watch Usain Bolt run, while she's given Caster Semenya a shoulder to cry on through her troubles with the IAAF.

"She called me after she came back from Berlin and asked for my support," she says. "I told her I was fully behind her, but that she needed to be patient and keep training while waiting for the IAAF to make their decision. But I'm confused now because it's taking them so long to decide."

With the soccer World Cup around the corner, Mutola's getting tickets for her favourite teams, Brazil and Bafana, because she speaks Portuguese and spends most of her time in South Africa.