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News05 Mar 2001


Botha battling to defend title in Lisbon

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Botha battling to defend title in Lisbon
Phil Minshull for IAAF

5 March 2001 - Defending IAAF World indoor 800 metres champion Johan Botha has not won a single indoor outing this winter, although to be fair to the 27 year-old former prison guard he did have two outdoor victories to his name in his native South Africa in January before embarking on his month-long European indoor campaign, but he feels his losing streak will end once he gets to Lisbon this week.

"I’m definitely going there feeling optimistic I can defend my title. You are not an athlete if you go there saying maybe I can do it, maybe I won’t," commented Botha.

"I’m going there determined to give it my all to defend my title and if someone beats me then I will have to say he was a better man on the day. And I’ll come back determined to beat him next time!"

Botha will go to Lisbon as the fourth fastest man on this season’s rankings, with a best time of 1:45.80, clocked when he finished third behind Switzerland’s Andre Bucher and Kenya’s David Lelei in the super-fast Stockholm race on February 15, one of the highlights of the indoor season so far.

Botha figures that Bucher and the Russian whizz-kid, teenager Yuriy Borzakovskiy, who ran a world-leading 1:44.15 in the German city of Karlsruhe back in January, will be the main pretenders to his throne.

However Botha insisted that he will not give up his one-and-only global honour lightly.

"I’ve come to Europe a week before Lisbon so I can adapt to the climate and everything else here, and I think I’ve got more speed now than I had a few weeks ago. My legs were feeling a little tired after running in Birmingham.

"I’ve been training in Johannesburg with Hezekiel Sepeng and another good guy Werner Botha, who ran 1:44 last year. There are two other guys who’ve run 1:45 and two others who have run 1:46 so it’s a strong group."

However, he will not have any of his training partners for company in the Portuguese capital.

"The others don’t want to come for various reason. One is a little bit injured and Hezekiel has just become a father, so I’m the only one running the 800 for South Africa. But despite the fact that everyone has got different targets, it doesn’t make life too hard for me. I feel I have to come to Europe at the beginning of the year because the races are just like training for me, they make me stronger."

"When I’ve finished racing indoors in Europe I go back and do more endurance work for a couple of months and then come back and race here during the summer. For me, racing is sometimes better than training. A couple of hard races in Europe is ideal for me and better than running outdoors in South Africa, as at this stage in South Africa the guys there are running 1:47 and we are running indoors 1:45 or 1:46 -- that compares to a 1:44 outdoors," said Botha.

After a number of years on the fringes of upper echelon of 800 runners, including making the semifinals of the 1996 Olympics and taking a bronze at the 1998 Commonwealth Games, winning the IAAF World Indoor title in Maebashi two years ago heralded Botha’s breakthrough to the very top.

In a memorable final, after Botha had confidently won both his heat and semifinal, he edged past Germany Nico Motchebon, who was eventually to take the bronze, in the final 50 metres. Wilson Kipketer surged from a long way back but for once struck too late with his lightening finish, and the Kenyan-born Dane had to settle for the silver by almost the slimmest of margins. Botha won in 1:45.47 with Kipketer just two-hundredths of a second behind.

In June of the same year, Botha set what remains his personal best of 1:43.91, finishing behind Kipketer at the Bislett Games in Oslo.

However, fortune has not been entirely kind to him since then. He could only make the semifinals of the 1999 IAAF World Championships, an event which he went into with a shot at the medals, and went out again at the semifinal stage of the 2000 Olympics, where Botha is only too ready to admit that he did not do himself justice.

Appropriately though, the man who used to enforce judicial decisions for a living is hoping that he will be judged a little more kindly when the 800 medals are handed out in Lisbon next Sunday.

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