In the history of athletic achievement, there are shared moments of spectacle that become revered as milestones belonging to the competitor, near winner, and the public at large. Bannister’s four-minute mile, Willie Mays’s ‘bread basket’ World Series catch, Bob Beamon’s miraculous long jump in the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City.
For the most part, those are moments to be cherished and appreciated for their singular greatness. And for the most part, my observations of sport, in particular world-class sport, have been of those events that form part of a bigger picture filled with the excitement that great competition creates. However, there is one event that will stay with me, that represents the ultimate moment of disappointment and loss.
Thirty-six years ago, I was attending my first Olympic Games—the Los Angeles 1984 Summer Games—for TIME magazine. Athletes were emerging who would become famous in the annals of American Olympic history: Mary Lou Retton, Carl Lewis, Valerie Brisco-Hooks, Greg Louganis. It was a year of pent-up demand, as the United States had boycotted the 1980 Moscow Games after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The divers were there to dive, the runners were there to run, all were there to compete in the extreme.
On the last Friday of the Games, the women’s 3000-meter final was set to run at sunset. The American Mary Decker was poised to win the gold; she’d been denied the chance four years earlier. Amid the international crowd of runners was a 18-year-old South African named Zola Budd, who famously ran barefoot. Because South Africa (still under apartheid) was banned from the Olympics, Zola, who had a British grandfather, was able to obtain citizenship and run for Great Britain. Press had hyped the Decker/Budd match-up nearly to the exclusion of most of the other very fast runners.
I had spent much of that week working near the finish line, a place always well populated with photographers for the simple reason that so many big races are won at the end. It is a location packed with the potential for drama. But at the end of a week of dealing with elbows, and the overpowering presence of some track specialists who became the bullies on the block with their legions of cameras, I decided to find a new place to shoot from. I grabbed my gear and started walking along the final leg of the track. About 60 yards down I saw two photographers sitting on a bench that could hold three or four. I plunked my gear on the grass, about as close to the track as anyone in the stadium. It was a good spot. With a 400mm long lens I could see the pack come out of turn four, and moments later with an 85mm I could see them pass in front of me. I settled in, happy to have just found a quiet place with a couple of good angles, away from the craziness of the finish line.
Races with many laps (this one was seven and a half) require a constant edge on the photographer’s part. In the pre-digital age, rolls of film with 36 exposures and cameras shooting at four frames per second forced you to figure out, each time the runners passed, if you had enough film for one more lap or if you should quickly rewind and change the film. You had about a minute until the runners would be around again, so there wasn’t a lot of time for quiet reflection.
Decker led most of the way, and midrace, Zola Budd made a move to try and take the lead coming out of turn 4, which I was following with my long lens. I grabbed the 85, and shot the group as they ran past us, aware that something wasn’t right. Because a typical reflex camera only shows you what you are shooting when the mirror is down, at the moment you are taking a picture the mirror is up and all you see is black inside the camera. When you shoot a sequence, the flicker of light creates intermittent moments of vision, with greater moments of blanked out nothing. It’s like seeing a 1920s action movie.
It was just in front of me that the collision happened. Zola had cut into the lead, just ahead of Mary. Their feet collided and Decker lost her balance, careening onto the infield grass. Because of the flickering in my camera, I couldn’t really see what had happened, only that there was a patch of red (Mary’s outfit) moving into a place it shouldn’t have been. In that moment of happenstance, I grabbed the 400mm, framed Mary on the ground as she lay in anguish looking down the track at the sight of her competition disappearing into the distance. This was still the days of manual-focus lenses, and I remember taking that fraction of a second to be sure I was in focus before hitting the shutter button.
Within a few seconds the infield pool cameramen had arrived, and as is their wont, stood around Mary, shooting their close-ups, and effectively blocking anyone else in the stadium with a camera from seeing her. In seconds it was over. Although the race was eventually won by Romanian runner Maricica Puică, it is mostly remembered for what happened midway.
My film was sent on the overnight plane to New York, processed and edited the next morning, and the image led the TIME magazine coverage when it came out Monday. It went on to be one of the most published sports pictures of the decade. For me, there was an oddly personal tone to it. The pain in Mary Decker’s face—so raw, and apparent—was something that almost should have remained the ultimate private moment. It was the anguish of a moment seen by 75,000 in the stadium, and millions around the world via television. Never have I witnessed such a raw public-private moment. When a young runner saw her Olympic dreams go up in smoke, you can easily imagine something astonishingly personal about it. Yet it was played out before the world. It became Mary’s worst day.
I knew that neither athlete looked upon that day as one of their finest. They were doing their best, yet fate conspired to take a small error and turn it into a tragedy for both of these great athletes. Some years ago, they got together to talk about it for the BBC, and have since become, and remain, friends.
This year, as part of a grant project on senior athletes, I reached out to both of them (Zola is now 54, Mary 61) and though neither of them thinks of themselves as a “senior” athlete, each agreed to meet and be photographed. Zola (who now goes by Zola Pieterse) coaches at Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and still regularly runs. Her children are long distance runners as well.
A string of arthritis attacks no longer permits Mary (who now uses her married name, Slaney) to run, but she walks her dogs in the hilly woods near her home in Oregon; we met there in August 2019, 35 years to the week since the Los Angeles Games. She still looks like she could run five miles, though these days she is dedicated to her four dogs. The visit was pleasant and we both spent the time dancing around not discussing an image that made me famous and made that failed race infamous. At one point I said something about ’84, and with good humor she guided me back to 2019—she clearly wasn’t of a mind to dwell on the ups and downs of that time, and I didn’t want to press it too heavily especially as a believer that a picture is worth a thousand words. When you have spent your life meeting and photographing people, often in their best or worst moments, you learn, sometimes the hard way, that some truths are best left unspoken.
