Murray Williams celebrates the achievements of sporting personalities who have overcome obstacles in their personal and professional lives.
There's a line in a Parlotones song. It’s immense. It soars like an eagle.
“I’ll be thinking of the times I felt inspired”.
There’s a line by Alan Paton, so
achingly beautiful it almost hurts: “There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it ”
From the top, if there is no mist, “you look down on one of the fairest valleys
of Africa”.
Paton wrote: Cry, the Beloved Country in 1948 -the same year the first Land Rover was made.
About 60 years later, I stood knee-deep in water, watching a South African
standing on a Landy, in the middle of a river, high in the Bolivian Andes.
Martin Dreyer had just won the G4 Challenge. But he was just warming up.
Back home, the multiple Dusi Canoe Marathon champ began pouring every fibre of his being into a band of young Zulu men - in the same place Paton wrote about, the Valley of a Thousand Hills.
For decades, they had watched their white countrymen pass. Dreyer changed that, founding his “Change a Life”
training academy. He ran, paddled and collapsed, exhausted, with them.
This year, with their champion coach breathing fire into their hearts, the Zulu canoeists claimed four places in the Dusi’s top 10 - 10 in the top 20 and 20 in the
top 40.
It’s a story of epic significance, in a land of pain and hate.
The Parlotones’ chorus rings
magnificent.
There’s a line from Chariots of Fire. Eric Liddell is explaining his life’s
mission.
He explains gently that he’s a pastor in the Scottish church. But he’s also a sprinter.
“I believe God made me for a purpose. But he also made me FAST. And, when I run, I feel His pleasure.”
I heard the Parlotones when Sibusiso Vilane summited Mount Everest. When Riaan Manser circumnavigated Africa alone by bicycle. When Josia Thugwane arrived in Atlanta stadium, US, and began waving his arms in joy.
Just five months before the 1996
summer Olympics, he’d been hijacked and shot.
Unbowed, he lifted his bloodied,
bullet-scarred chin, and lifted his
entire country.
On Thursday, Capetonian Chris
Bertish stand-up-paddled into Antigua, two million paddle strokes and 93 days after leaving Morocco.
Some people don’t understand why his achievement is so immense.
But some do. It’s because this Monday morning, I am reminded of my potential, because of you, Chris Bertish.
And of the courage I must summon to cross my own ocean.
“I’ll be thinking of the times I felt inspired .”
* Williams’ “Shooting from the Lip” column appears in the Cape Argus every Monday.