Lebogang Shange could have set a new South African 20km race walk record at the South African Senior Athletics Championship in Stellenbosch yesterday if he was a bit more focused during the early stages of the race.

The Tuks/hpc race walker won in a time of 1 hour 20 minutes and 42 seconds, which is just 36 seconds slower than the record he set in Adelaide, Australia, earlier this year. Wayne Snyman was second in 1:20:46 and Sizwe Ndebele third in 1:28:58.

The times set by both Shange and Snyman are the fastest in the history of race walking at a South African Championship.  Both of them again qualified for the Olympic Games which will take place in Rio.

Shange and his coach, Chris Britz, are the first to admit that they did not plan for him to walk at such a fast pace. In fact, Britz’s advice to Shange at the start was to win in the slowest possible time and that was exactly what the SA record holder (1:20:06) intended to do.

Unfortunately Snyman had a different race strategy. He set off at a brisk pace right from the start and was soon in the lead while Shange was fooling around, worrying about his sunglasses and chatting away with his fans on route. When Shange realized that Snyman was not going to slow down, he set out to catch up with him, which he did at about the 10km marker.  Then, somewhat surprisingly, Shange seemed to slow down again before catching up with Snyman for a second time. During the next few kilometres the two of them were involved in a titanic struggle with Shange eventually taking the lead with 1.5km to go.

Britz afterwards commented that Shange could possibly have become the first South African to set a time faster than 1 hour and 20 minutes if he had raced aggressively right from the start.

“The reason why I told Lebogang to take it easy was because he had raced at an IAAF Race Walking Challenge event in Portugal the previous weekend and I was not sure whether he had fully recovered.”

Shange was full of praise for the way Snyman raced.

“I did not expect to have to work so hard to win the South African title,” the Tuks/hpc athlete said. He added that he has mind set on winning at least ten South African titles, which means that he still needs to win five more. He won his first national title in 2012 and since then kept on raking in one national title after another.

The South African champion is quite philosophical about missing out on breaking 80 minutes on Saturday.

“It is still early in the season so at the moment there is no need for me to go for a really fast time. I fully agree with my coach that it is important for me to pace myself in the build-up to the Olympic Games in Rio. It would be wrong for me to do too much too early in the season and then lose when it really matters at the Games.”

Shange will fly to Spain for a training camp tomorrow.

PHOTO CREDIT: REG CALDECOTT