South African 400m hurdles record holder LJ van Zyl would rather be the underdog than the favourite going into the London Olympics at the end of July.
He clocked the four fastest times in the world last year, but could not carry his form through to the IAAF world championships in Daegu, South Korea, where he secured the bronze medal.
“I don’t want to go into something like the Olympics as the number one,” Van Zyl said at the weekend. “I want to be second-, third- or fourth-fastest in the world. I always run better when I am the underdog.”
The 26-year-old added that he had learned a valuable lesson from last season when he hit the ground running early in his domestic campaign.
“I reached my top form from February through to June, and my petrol ran out by the time of the world championships,” he explained. “Luckily I pulled through to win the bronze medal.”
Van Zyl clocked 47.66sec in Pretoria in his first race of 2011, improving Llewellyn Herbert’s 11-year-old national record by 0.15sec.
“This year my plan is to hit that top form by June, July and August,” he said. “I have to be at my best (during) those three months, which is the period of the Olympic Games. I want to go to the Olympics with a time of 47sec, even if it is a 47.99. For confidence, I would like to have a 47.”
He will be in action in his first international race of the season at the Shanghai Diamond League meeting on Saturday.
Unlike last year, Van Zyl had a rocky start to his 2012 campaign as he was nursing a niggling injury going into the SA senior championships in Port Elizabeth in April.
He said his reluctance to listen to the advice of his coach, Hennie Kotze, who suggested that he withdraw from the championships, set him back a bit.
“I was a little bit upset with myself, because Hennie said ‘relax, recover first, train again, then we can run in Doha’,” Van Zyl revealed. “I thought, ‘oh well, I can still run well even though I have a niggle’. Then things didn’t go that well and I ran poorly and afterwards I had to go for some treatment, which worked pretty well, and now I am back in training.”
He said his coach was right 90% of the time, and he should have listened to Kotze’s advice.
“I didn’t have to run at the SA championships because I had already qualified twice for the Olympics.”
Van Zyl added that he was excited about the prospect of being a member of a South African 4x400m relay squad also including Ofentse Mogowane, Willie de Beer, Shaun de Jager and Lebogang Moeng at the Rome Diamond League meeting on May 31.
“It is the first time that I will be running a relay at the Diamond League, so I am really looking forward to that,” he said. “We have a good chance in the relay at the London Games, and I think the more we train together and run together, the better our chances will be.”
The country’s men’s 4x400m relay squad, consisting of Shane Victor, Oscar Pistorius, Mogawane, De Beer and Van Zyl, bagged a silver medal at last year’s world championships.
Van Zyl said the relay team would take to the track in Rome two hours after his hurdles race. – Sapa