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The return to action by sprinter Wayde van Niekerk this week ended a long wait for the athlete’s comeback and cast his veteran coach Anna Botha back into the spotlight.
No athlete/coach pair has become more identifiable in track and field than Van Niekerk and Botha, who is popularly known as Tannie Ans.
With almost 50 years of coaching experience and though she is turning 79 later this year, Botha has given no hints that she’ll retire anytime soon.
Instead, the great-grandmother was her bubbly self when she outlined their plan for this athletics season, which will culminate in the Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan, which begin on July 24.
“With God’s grace and blessings, I am at a point in my life where I have the privilege of still doing what I’m doing. I am praying to take my boy to another Olympics,” Botha told City Press this week.
The eyes of the world will understandably be fixed on Van Niekerk to see whether the 27-year-old still possesses the same horsepower that catapulted him to a world-record 400m sprint in 43.03 seconds at the Rio Olympics in Brazil four years ago.
The same attention will be directed at Botha, who has her own record to break – she’s one of the few coaches in their late seventies who are still actively involved in top-flight sports.
At 72, Crystal Palace head coach Roy Hodgson is the oldest manager in the Premier League, while American football coach Joe Paterno stopped when he was 84 years old.
“At the end of the day, I get so emotional because it is such an honour for me to be coaching such a determined group of athletes. I see the guts and dedication; the joy and the positive attitude; the jokes and the laughs. That’s what drives me. I go down on my knee every day to pray and thank God for the blessings,” said Botha during a telephonic interview a few hours after Van Niekerk marked his long-awaited return to the track at a University of the Free State inter-res competition in Bloemfontein on Monday.
Running on a grass track at the unofficial competition, “Wayde Dreamer” won the 100m race in 10.20 seconds.
The race ended a two-year hiatus since the Bloemfontein-based sprinter sustained a knee injury during a game of celebrity touch rugby in Cape Town in October 2017.
Van Niekerk embarked on what he dubbed a #QuietStorm, even though Botha described their mission as being “a long, hard road” since her charge started training in the third week of August.
A fit Van Niekerk is expected to lead Team SA’s medal charge at the Tokyo Olympics.
Botha, however, warned that they were not focusing on the Olympics just yet.
“We are not concentrating on that, but on what we need to do now. I have to execute the everyday programme,” she explained.
If all goes well, said Botha, Van Niekerk would tick off his first official race at the Free State Championships this coming weekend.
“It was a long, hard road – not only physically, but psychologically as well. We started really slowly. We started with caution and I remember that, at that time, he was doing [a training distance of] 150m a day. I wanted to make sure that he ran a balanced race, with no limping or anything like that,” Botha said of Van Niekerk’s road to recovery.
As for the race on Monday night, Botha said “there were a lot of positives, but we are still working with great care and management”.
“He ran without problems and I really feel positive. He started off on a grass track and he will run on tartan this weekend. We are only testing how he handles the races.”
Van Niekerk was on the verge of a return to competition in April, but withdrew from the SA Senior Track and Field Championships in Germiston, Ekurhuleni.
Missing the national event, and later the World Championships in Qatar, was a blessing in disguise, according to Botha.
“In my opinion, he wouldn’t be where I would have liked him to be had he raced in the two majors competitions.
“I remember he was ready to race the [national championships], but he slipped during warm-up because of the rain. There was a niggle and we said no.”
Botha has also ruled out the possibility of the reigning Olympic champion and world record-holder doing the 200m and 400m double in major championships in the near future.
Van Niekerk brought back medals – a gold and a silver – from the two distances at the 2017 World Championships in London, UK.
“Under no circumstances will we put pressure on him. We tried in 2017 under difficult weather conditions in London. We put ourselves at risk because he ran top races in six consecutive days. It took a lot of out him,” recalls Botha.
She is relieved that the new Olympic programme will afford athletes two days of rest before the 400m final.
But, for now, it’s prayer and one race at a time for Tannie Ans and her golden boy.
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