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As much-needed breaks go, few are as inconvenient as the career-threatening injury that gave Wayde van Niekerk a year and a half breather from the relentless treadmill that is the business end of track and field athletics.
The reigning Olympic 400m champion, two-time world 400m champion and world 400m record holder made a tentative step back into the limelight this week with a media appearance to renew his T-Systems sponsorship. He was ruled out of competition after a knee injury suffered in a celebrity touch rugby game in 2017.
While kicking his heels on the sidelines wouldn’t have been ideal for either Van Niekerk or his army of top-dollar sponsors, it was rest he desperately needed.
People forget that Van Niekerk cut the figure of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown at the 2017 IAAF World Championships, where he sobbed during an interview in which he demanded respect for what he had done in the sport as he creaked under the mental and physical strain of trying to win the 200m and 400m double.
“You don’t want breaks like this, you’d rather just take a month off and get back into it,” he said this week. “I guess it had its positives in terms of a break for myself because I feel more motivated than ever before. I assume that this injury played a massive role in it.”
Renewed motivation or not, the threat to his career the knee reconstruction posed was still harrowing.
“My faith, spending time with my Bible and making contact with my friends and family on a spiritual level kept me very grounded and focused on where I want to be. I wouldn’t say there were moments when I thought there wasn’t going to be a comeback. It was more regret and the doubts were more physical pain doubts, but I swept those under the carpet very quickly,” he said.
Read: Van Niekerk slowly on the mend
“I went very deeply into a very spiritual and very Bible-based kind of mentality, and it really helped me a lot in terms of staying positive from the moment I came out of surgery. That was my way of not entertaining the doubts and fears that I had.”
In this day of ubiquitous social media, news of his comeback filtered out at the weekend through a leaked YouTube video of a 400m training race he ran and won in 47.28 seconds in Bloemfontein – this after literally jogging for the first 200m.
Van Niekerk’s feedback from the gallop that went viral was that, apart from not running pain free, he was rusty and needed to work on his strength and speed, among other things.
The biggest news to come from his media gathering is that his flirtation with returning to the shorter sprints, which he did before fame and fortune came knocking in the form of the 400m, is indefinitely on ice.
“You’re going to have to miss me in that area [the 100m and 200m],” said Van Niekerk. “I haven’t had any thoughts of doing that, but if the times come [in the 400m], I guess the opportunities will come.
“We’re basically leaning towards the 400m; I want to see 42 seconds.”
This would make Van Niekerk, whose world record is 43.03 seconds, the first man to dip under 43 for the 400m.
“That’s where my heart and mind is. I want to focus and properly invest in getting that 42. Then I can get back to what I really want to do – the one and two [100m and 200m].”
Van Niekerk was coy about his schedule. When asked when his first race would be, he said: “I do know, but you won’t!”
He still has lofty ambitions for this year’s World Championships, which – if one believes in omens – will intriguingly be held in Doha, Qatar, where the sprinter has done the bulk of his rehabilitation work since surgery.
“I’ve felt gold, so I don’t want anything else,” he said. “But the reality is that I need to respect where the body is and what it is capable of doing. The mentality is to go out for gold. It’s where my heart and mind is, and I still believe I can do it. Reality and what you want aren’t always the same, but I’m hoping for the same.”
