Long RunMaria Mutola's journey from Mozambique has taken her to the brink of a rare Olympic doubleby Tim Layden
She can laugh now. Maria Mutola can stretch across the plush carpet in the living room of her immaculate ranch house in Eugene, Ore., surrounded by trophies and ribbons and gifts from no less than the president of her native Mozambique, and she can laugh about the journey that brought her to the U.S. more than five years ago.
She was put on a plane in the capital city of Maputo, and from there she flew to Paris. That was the easy part. None of the other Mozambicans on the flight were going to Chicago, so none of them could accompany her on the shuttle bus or help her find her connecting gate. She spoke neither English nor French. She had five hours to find her flight, and she needed the full five hours. From Chicago she flew to San Francisco and from there to Eugene, where on the night of March 3, 1991, she arrived in a cold rain like she had never felt before.
"She was overwhelmed, intimidated and frightened," recalls Laurie Burke, a high school track coach who was among those who met her at the airport that night.
"I was by myself," says Mutola, waving her arms as if amazed that she didn't somehow land in Oslo or Tucson instead. Her brown eyes dance in the light, and her voice squeaks in shrill relief.
Mutola went to Eugene as an 18-year-old high school student on an Olympic Solidarity Scholarship, which is given by
the International Olympic Committee to athletes from developing nations. She is the favorite to win the 800 meters on Monday night (her semifinal heat is tonight at Olympic Stadium) and has a chance in the 1,500-meter final on Aug. 3 to become the first woman since the Soviet Union's Tatyana Kazankina in 1976 to win the 800 and the 1,500 in the same Games. Mutola is only 23, yet she sits on the cusp of greatness, unbeaten in the 800 meters for almost four years. She is the most famous athlete in her homeland, giving hope to an impoverished nation that has never had an Olympic medal winner.
You hear often of Olympic journeys: from defeat to victory, from illness to health, from hopelessness to success. Every gold medal is woven into the cloth of international drama. There is no contrivance to Mutola's tale, a true journey of the mind, the body and the spirit.
It began in the spring of 1988, on the dirt-covered streets of Macelala, a neighborhood outside the center of Maputo. Mutola, 15, the sixth and youngest child of Joáo and Catarina Mutola, had already shown enough athletic ability to earn a spot on a boys' soccer club and had even scored a game-winning goal. She went to Macelala to play unorganized soccer games with some of those same boys.
Thankful for the help she received, Mutola reached out to her niece Catarina and moved her to Eugene.
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Among those who watched was renowned Mozambican poet Jose Craveirinha, a learned, soulful man whose writings helped fill the nation's cultural void during a 17-year civil war that didn't end until 1992. Craveirinha is often called Mozambique's poet laureate. He is also a passionate supporter of Mozambique's largely untapped athletic talent. In Mutola he saw a fast, powerful girl who might someday represent his nation in the Olympics. "Please forgive me," says Craveirinha, 74. "I take pride in my ability to spot talent. I could tell that Maria deLurdes Mutola would be good at running."
He approached Mutola in the street and the next day introduced her to his son, Stleo, a track and field coach. They gave Mutola a pair of training shoes and two pairs of spikes, and nursed her through six days of easy distance running. On the seventh day they sent her to the track, for a session of 300- and 400-meter intervals. "The next day my whole body was sore," says Mutola. "I quit."
For more than a week she stayed away from Stleo's club. Stleo told his father, who in turn visited Mutola's family. Her father worked as a railroad clerk; her mother raised vegetables to sell at a city market. The Mutolas were a lower-middle-class family by Mozambique's minimal standards but poor by most others, and Craveirinha sold the family on Maria's future. "She's yours," said Joáo to Craveirinha. He thanked the family and left to find Maria walking near the house. Craveirinha offered her a ride to his home, and there he showed her tapes of the 1984 Olympics. "I had never seen such a crowd in a stadium for track and field," says Maria. Soon thereafter she was back in spikes. Just months after her first workout she represented Mozambique at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, finishing seventh in an 800-meter heat more than a month before her 16th birthday.
Yet even as Mutola improved, Jose and Stleo knew that she would ultimately be stifled by Mozambique's lack of athletic structure. "It is truly a sad thing," says Jose. "We have so many great athletes, but we have a culture that doesn't support sports. I had to send her to America because that was where she would improve the most."
Jose set in motion the complex political mechanics for moving Mutola, who thought about her homeland and what the future might bring. Mozambique in the '80s was a barren, hostile country. Located on the southeast coast of Africa, it is among the world's poorest nations. The civil war began when Mutola was four. "It was dangerous to be in a car and go somewhere," she recalls. "There was a point of no return, where you might not get home safely. I went back after the war ended. I saw burned buildings and cars and trees. It was very scary. The country is better now but still terrible."
No wonder that the decision to accept an Olympic Solidarity Scholarship was not a difficult one. There would be loneliness and fear, but there was no other choice but to leave. Mutola arrived in Eugene in that stinging rain. "I liked the idea, but as soon as I got there, it became too much for me," she recalls.
Mutola has adjusted nicely to the American way of life and to her celebrity status.
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She struggled with the language, with the cold weather and with peers at Springfield High (across the Willamette River from Eugene), who were only slightly younger in age yet vastly younger in life experience than she was. "They were still worried about proms and what to do on their weekends," says Margo Jennings, who along with her former husband, Jeff Fund, has coached Mutola since her arrival in Eugene. "She was miles ahead of them emotionally."
There were bureaucratic fights over her scholastic athletic eligibility, public spats that made her even more visible than she already was as one of the few minority students in the school. (She was never eligible in track, but she won the Oregon girls' cross-country title in 1991, two months after finishing fourth in the 800 meters at the World Championships in Tokyo, a bizarre double, indeed.) There was the halting, surprised reaction to her powerful physique. "They were in awe of her, even the boys," says Burke, who coached track and cross-country at Springfield.
Mutola lived with Doug Abramson, a supervisor with the Lane County Highway Department; his wife, Judy; and their children, Melissa (who was 14 when Mutola arrived) and Josh (who was 10). The Abramsons learned to eat mountains of rice and little beef; Maria learned to laugh at movies she didn't understand.
Amid all the adjustments, Mutola blossomed into the best women's 800-meter runner in the world. "She is one very strong woman," says Jennings. Bob Crites, a former investment broker who was working as a guidance counselor at a Eugene middle school, became her agent, helping her earn more than $250,000 a year (a portion of which is sent to her family in Mozambique). Fund and Jennings have guided Mutola through five years of low-mileage (seldom more than 35 miles a week), high-quality workouts. In August 1994 in Zurich, she ran her best time in the 800, 1:55.19, and last summer she broke the world 1,000 record by running 2:29.34 in Brussels.
However, there have been huge disappointments. After challenging for the lead in the 800 at the '92 Olympics in Barcelona, she faded to fifth. She won the 800 at the 1993 World Championships in Stuttgart and was the favorite at last year's Worlds in Göteborg, Sweden, but she was disqualified for stepping on the lane line early in her semifinal race.
When the disqualification was announced, Mutola dropped to her knees on the track and wailed. However, less than a week later in Zurich, she crushed Göteborg 800 winner Ana Quirot of Cuba, and the 1,000 record fell soon after that. Both Mutola and Jennings suggest that she can challenge the 800-meter world record of 1:53.28, set in 1983 by Jarmila Kratochvilova of Czechoslovakia. It is a record viewed by some as untouchable because of the speculated doping of Eastern bloc athletes of that vintage. Moreover, Mutola is only beginning to grow into the 1,500. "I think you'll see a dominant 1,500-meter runner by the end of this summer," says Jennings.
There are many ways to measure the journey. Mutola is a tough, seasoned athlete at the top of her event. "She's the one I think about when I'm training," says U.S. veteran 800-meter runner Joetta Clark. Mutola is a mature woman who has outgrown her discomfort with U.S. society; she now prefers dresses to sweats in public. But what she did last October is most illustrative of all.
For several years, whenever Mutola would return to her homeland, her niece Catarina would beg to go with her to the U.S. "She would cry so much," says Mutola. Catarina Mutola, 14, is the daughter of Maria's 28-year-old brother, Carlos, and a woman who died of malaria in 1991. Several years ago Maria's parents adopted Catarina, and in October, Maria moved her to Eugene. Next fall she will enter the seventh grade, and she is thriving. "I thought it would be good to help her," says Mutola. "Somebody helped me once."
Upon hearing this news, the old poet laughs into the telephone, sending joy across the miles. He says there will not be a party if Mutola wins a gold medal. "There will be a festival," says Craveirinha. He was first moved to write about track and field by the great performances at the 1968 Mexico City Games. He lives in a country scarred by war. Craveirinha has been writing words for more than five decades, and he is asked if he has written a poem about Mutola. Or if he will write one soon.
"I cannot write about her," he says. "She is poetry itself, a living poem."
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