Maria Mutola at Commonwealth Games (© Allsport)
MadridThe distance from Maputo to Madrid is roughly 8000 kilometres. But that journey is nothing compared to the odyssey which has taken Maria Mutola from the dusty soccer pitches of the Mozambican capital to the Estadio de la Comunidad in the Spanish capital for this weekend's 9th IAAF World Cup in Athletics.
It is testament to her precocity and longevity that Mutola's first World Cup win came when she was 19, and she is going for an unprecedented fourth 800m victory on Friday. And she's still on the right side of thirty.
Maria de Lurdes Mutola was born in the shanty town of Chamanculo on October 27, 1972. The youngest of six children, she was also one of the sturdiest, such that when she played football, she played with the boys. Thanks to an intriguing blur of Third World cultural boundaries, her potential was recognised by Mozambican poet, José Craveirinha, whose son was an athletics coach. Within four months of starting to train, the 15 year old Mutola went to the Olympic Games in Seoul 1988, where she finished seventh in her heat of the 800 metres.
With few resources in a country still in the grip of a post-colonial war, in 1991 Mutola accepted an athletics scholarship to the USA under the Olympic Solidarity Programme for developing countries. From the baked earth tracks of Maputo, Mutola flew halfway around the world, to the verdant fields of Eugene, Oregon.
"It was a real change," she said recently, "I didn't speak English at all. It wasn't easy, in fact it was very, very different. It took me a while to adapt, close to a year. It was overpowering to be in such a strange place".
Mutola speaks pretty good English nowadays, with an inevitable American slant, and the only overpowering that gets done is by her to her opponents. But although she is accessible and chatty enough when approached, she remains very much apart from the cliques on the Golden League/Grand Prix circuit. She prefers to relax with her coach, Margo Jennings, who was her first contact in Eugene when she went into High School to learn English.
Within months of arriving in Eugene, she had achieved the unlikely double of winning the local schoolgirls cross country title, and finishing fourth in the world championships 800 metres in Tokyo. She was fifth in the Olympics the following year, but with her first World Cup win in Havana immediately afterwards, she quickly established herself as the world number one.
Apart from a misjudgement, when she stepped out of lane in the semi-finals of the World championships in Gothenburg in 1995, earning disqualification, she was unbeaten in 50 consecutive finals at 800 metres from 1992 to 1996. That included winning her first World title in 1993 in Stuttgart. Her 'run' came to an end in the Olympics in Atlanta, where she took bronze. But she finally rectified that omission, when she won gold in Sydney. Cue the explosion of joy back home, where she visits once a year for three or four weeks.
"It was incredible. It's not every day that a country like Mozambique wins an Olympic gold medal. There are only 16 million people in the whole country, and it felt that they were all there to welcome me home. There must have been hundreds of thousands of people. We couldn't move".
The primary school she attended was named after her, and one of the thoroughfares of Maputo is now called Maria Mutola Avenue.
For the last three years, she has been living closer to home, in Sandton, near Johannesburg, ever since she realised that it was Eugene's notorious climate - high pollen counts - that were causing her allergies. "I used to think that maybe Sydney in 2000 would be my last Olympic Games, but as long as I stay injury-free, and listen to my body, then maybe I can go on to Athens".
