Mulaudzi putting in the hard yards

In the weeks leading up to the 2003 IAAF world championships in Paris, Mbulaeni Mulaudzi was undergoing a crisis of confidence and surprisingly turned to his greatest rival for help.

Until then, Mulaudzi and Hezekiel Sepeng had regarded each other with the requisite suspicion you would expect from an incumbent and a contender. But Sepeng threw himself into the job of Mulaudzi's head cheerleader, an endeavour that ended with the latter winning his first 800m medal (bronze) at a major championships.

Early last year, with Mulaudzi now a world champion (from Berlin in 2009), a former World Indoor champion (Budapest 2004), as well as an Olympic silver medallist (Athens 2004), the younger man again came knocking on his mentor's door.

"He approached me and said: 'Look, you have the experience so come and coach me'," explained Sepeng. "I froze at first because I thought: 'this guy's won the world championships, what am I going to do, make him win again?' If I don't I would have failed."

Mulaudzi's approach to his old sparring partner has to do with him wanting to squeeze one final kick out of a career missing two things: Olympic gold and the SA record Sepeng holds.

Surprisingly, Sepeng said, the 30-year-old still had new tricks to learn: "I've had to introduce him to the longer stuff, endurance-wise. My thinking is that he's been struggling with injuries, and the reason is he wasn't putting in a good base.

"He was training just once a day, now he has to do 30 minutes on the road and then come to the track in the afternoon. He also has to go to gym for a third session in the day twice a week."

To work on endurance, Sepeng took him to one of his old haunts, the town of Eldoret in Kenya's famous Rift Valley, for a 22-day camp in December.

"It was a first for him," said Sepeng.

The other thing Sepeng would like to work on is the most famous rolling gait down the final straight: "His running style is not super, he always leans back a bit when things get tough in a race. Now we're trying to make sure he leans a bit forward by working on his core and stability."

The emergence of younger, faster competitors in Kenya's world record holder David Rudisha, 22, and Abubaker Kaki, 21, has also forced Mulaudzi's hand. Rudisha's 1min 41.01sec mark in Rieti means the world is going to see what was previously thought to be impossible - a 1:40sec 800m.

At his age, that is the kind of pyrotechnics Mulaudzi's legs can no longer produce, but Sepeng believes their mix of an 800m and 1500m training programme could net him another reward, the SA record of 1min, 42.69sec. They plan to do that by improving Mulaudzi's best 400m and 1500m times.

For all the changes, the ambitions for this season remain modest.

"The only thing he's focusing on this year is a podium at the world champs," said Sepeng.

"He's already won a gold medal and it's not going to be easy for him to defend that title. It would work out perfectly if he didn't get gold this year because if you have a great year before the Olympics, you're not so hungry and there's too much pressure.

"If he gets a podium, people will say he no longer has it in him to win, and he runs well when people have written him off because then he's got a point to prove."