The closing ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games has been held and the Olympic flag has been passed to Los Angeles where the next Olympic Games will be held in 2028. The last time the Olympic games was held in Los Angeles was in 1984 and many people will remember the women’s 3,000m race at those games. The race featured Mary Decker and Zola Budd. Mary was a long-established champion who had won World Athletics gold medals and held the world record for the women’s 3,000m. Zola was a barefooted 18-year-old from South Africa who was showing great promise. In 1982 Zola won her national championships at 1500m and 3000m and in 1985 broke the world record for the 5,000m.

Zola’s participation in the Los Angeles Olympics was controversial. At that time South African athletes were banned from competing in the Olympic Games because of the apartheid policy. Because Zola’s grandfather was British, she was fast-tracked for a British passport so that she could represent Britain at the Games. Zola found suddenly being at the Olympic Games difficult. She said, “I was upset. Away from home I missed my family. It wasn’t the greatest time of my life, to be honest. I thought, ‘Just get in this Olympics and get it over with.’”

More than halfway into the race as Zola overtook Mary they collided, and Mary fell by the side of the track and took no further part in the race. The crowd started to jeer Zola, and she slowed down. She didn’t want to win a medal because she was terrified at the prospect of standing on the podium and experiencing the full fury of the crowd. After the race Mary blamed Zola for what had happened, although many years later she said it was not Zola’s fault. Zola received death threats and when she left the US was escorted by armed police to her plane to prevent her being assassinated.

When Zola was interviewed in 2012, at the time of the London Olympics, she said, “The 1984 Olympics is one of my greatest regrets. I wish I’d never taken part; I had no idea what I was getting myself into and I really felt the pressure. I wasn’t thinking about getting gold. I just wanted to survive the games. My children don’t know about my running career. It is not a topic of conversation in our house. In her 1989 autobiography she wrote, “The Bible says all people are born equal before God. I can’t reconcile segregation along racial lines with the words of the Bible. As a Christian I find apartheid intolerable.”