This Women’s Month we are highlighting stories, as they were written at the time, of significant achievements by Team SA’s top women’s athletes. Here we revisit the first black SA female to win a Paralympic gold medal. This is the original story at the time written by Team SA’s Gary Lemke. Sadly, Zanele Situ passed away in November 2023, aged 52.
The door to her room is wide open and the kettle on the table in the middle of it still warm. She picks up her mask and puts it on and checks to see that she has her room key with her. She has a purple piece of paper in her hand, having written seven lines of motivation that she wants to take down to the Team SA medical room one floor below.
Zanele Situ might not be a household name in South African sport. Yet, she should be. Then again, that’s true of many Paralympic athletes who are now occupying the same rooms and sharing the same Olympic Village experiences that their able-bodied counterparts did just a few short weeks ago.
At the age of 11, Situ’s parents took her to hospital after she was constantly weak and fatigued and struggled to walk. She spent three years in hospital when the doctors declared of her spinal cord damage, “You’ll never walk again”.
Situ is now 50, the oldest member of the 34-strong Team SA Paralympic squad. This is her sixth Paralympic Games experience where she’s a four-time medallist – two golds in the javelin in 2000 and 2004, silver in the discus in 2000 and bronze in the javelin in 2016. She was the first black South African to win Paralympic gold, is a two-time world javelin champion. At the 2004 Paralympics in Athens, she was handed the Whang Youn Dai achievement award, one of only two South Africans to be bestowed the honour, Natalie du Toit receiving it in 2008.
On that purple piece of paper Zitu has written:
Be your own friend
Associate with positive people
Set personal goals
Maintain self-discipline
Maintain a positive attitude
Work hard
Ignore things that you can’t control
Seven short, powerful life lessons from the gogo of South African Paralympians. It will go up in the medical room alongside those from other members of Team SA.
She doesn’t need reminding that she’s 50, having been born into a very different South Africa, in Kokstad in 1970. “I don’t do birthdays, but my friends had a little birthday for me on my 50th. It was in January this year, during Covid lockdown. But age is just a number.”
As if to amplify the point, she says, “I don’t feel 50. After these Games I will go back to Stellenbosch and train for what happens next. I don’t feel any difference with age. As long as you carry on you feel strong, you don’t feel the age. It’s something I have always done, every day. But …” There’s a long pause. “… the Covid lockdowns haven’t made things easy.
“Lockdown meant that the body takes time to rewake again and getting back to this stage has been tough.”
South Africa’s Covid-19 lockdown has been in effect for 515 days, and counting. The end is not yet in sight and the country is still on level three. Many athletes at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, where the squad took home three medals, spoke about how restrictive lockdown was to their preparations. Lack of training camps, lack of competition, lack of travel, geographical remoteness, loadshedding and closure of facilities all form part of the narrative that the naysayers refuse to see when taking South Africa’s medals tally into effect.
It also applies to the Paralympians.
“The Covid lockdown and pandemic has been more than bad,” says Situ. “When lockdown happened in March last year, no one thought we’d get to September this year and still be in lockdown. We’ve had to sacrifice a lot. Covid is a bad thing. Through all that we have tried to do our best to train. It hasn’t been easy because training has been like a stop and go. One day things are open, the next day closed. You train one day and the next the facilities are shut. It has not been a nice way to prepare this year, but out of that we did try to find a way to be here. And here we are.”
Situ experienced a 12-year medal drought between 2004 javelin gold in Athens and bronze at Rio 2016. It’s not inconceivable that she adds to that tally in Tokyo, given she qualified for the F54 class in Pretoria in June this year with a throw that left her fourth in the rankings. Yet, she won’t be drawn into any predictions. “I am expecting the team to do well as a whole. We have summer but it’s not like summer here, and although the hottest part of the season has passed, it’s still uncomfortable. I just want to play my part to help people back home to forget about Covid, even if it’s just for a moment. Here in Tokyo, though, we must just focus on what we came to do and try not to think about Covid.”
However, coronavirus has become a way of life and it’s impossible to ignore. Like the Olympics a few weeks before them, the Paralympians are in a Covid-19 bubble in the athletes’ village, with daily testing taking place and travel restricted to the buses that take athletes and officials to training and competition venues and then bring them back to the village. All this as cases surge in Tokyo, a normally vibrant city but now one that is in a state of emergency until 12 September.
And Situ admits she is “scared” of Covid. “I’m happy to have qualified for Tokyo and glad that the Games are going on because it gives us all hope. But, it has been very difficult and we weren’t sure for long periods whether they were going to take place or not. And qualifying was difficult, especially being in lockdown levels three to five for so long. I’m happy to be on the safe side of Covid for now. If you get Covid it means your Games are over and even before coming here it was like that. It has been a threat hanging over our heads now since March last year.”
It might all be part of the new normal but some things still take time to adjust to. “Having to wear the mask everywhere you go here isn’t easy. You have got to tell yourself not to forget. It’s a really different Games, that’s for sure. You have to learn to live with wearing a mask. Every time you leave the room it’s you and the mask. Even in this very hot weather, you still have the mask. You only take it off when eating, competing and sleeping. You have to try to get used to it.”
Situ’s seventh life lesson resonates mostly with the younger athletes in the squad: Ignore things that you can’t control.
“I would like to say to the younger generation who are competing in Tokyo … If you can, you must be yourself. Keep the routine and steps you normally take, do the same things when you’re here that got you here. People around you might have different ways of doing things. Don’t copy them. Ignore things you’re not used to. Stay in your lane. You can’t control everything.”
As for herself, she says, “I’m not here because I’m old. I’m an athlete, like everybody else. I’m not part of the old-age squad. I’m here to compete. When you’re an athlete you mustn’t worry about age.”
