THE FASTEST MILER IN SOUTH AFRICA

BY BUNTU GOTYWA

LIFE CAN BE A BIT TOUGHER for athletes having to juggle trying to be the best in their discipline while equally working on excelling academically. Those who have walked this path say that it is not easy but definitely not impossible, especially with the right support staff around you. Twenty-five-year-old track star Ashley Smith knows this all too well. The 3000m steeplechase specialist recently graduated from the University of Western Cape (UWC) with a Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in politics and history.

The well-known runner’s athletic abilities have taken him across the globe. With his academic work behind him, at least for now, Smith has set his sights on qualifying for the Olympic Games.

The Games are still at least two years away and he is returning to serious training in March in preparation for competitive running. In the meantime, he’s been trying to keep physically and mentally fi t by taking part in road running events.

3:58:63 THE FASTEST MILE RUN IN SOUTH AFRICA IN 25 YEARS

AS ONE WOULD HAVE GUESSED, the competitor in him was not going to treat those as just practice runs and he actually won the recent Spartan Harriers Firgrove 15km challenge.

Smith credits UWC Sport Administration Support Services Manager and manager of the UWC Athletics Club, Glen Bentley, for ensuring that he excels both on track and at his academic pursuits. He says it was Bentley who helped him to get into a UWC programme that allowed him to pursue his degree alongside his running career.

“We always had a very good understanding with him and he and the institution always wanted what’s best for the athletes. So it was easy for me to become an even better athlete than I was when I entered UWC because of the support we had,” says Smith. “Mr Glen was always on our case and made us aware that because we will always have time to focus on sport, we didn’t have to forget about the academic side of things.”

DURING HIS TIME AT UWC, Smith was part of a group of fiercely competitive athletes that included stars like Anthony Timoteus and Duran Faro who were pivotal in UWC being regarded among the best in the country in their specific events.

Smith says he is happy that his team maintained a winning culture on the track that resulted in many medals won locally and internationally.

He says, “We started just wanting to be the best at the university but the work that we put in made us excel and be noticed by the rest of the country.

“I want to take it one day at a time and not get carried away like I did a year ago because the glimpses were there of me being even faster.

“I got carried away and the objective for me going forward is to take control of my training and just take each day and each race as they come. When the time is right, the hard work will be rewarded.”

Among Smith’s recent athletics achievements before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the athletics calendar were being voted UWC Sportsman of the Year for 2019 and winning a bronze medal at the World Student Games in Naples, Italy, in the same year. He is the reigning 3000m steeplechase champion after taking the title at Athletics South Africa’s senior national championship in 2021.

ALSO IN 2021, Smith became a member of an elite group of middle-distance athletes to have run a mile in under four minutes – the so-called Dream Mile. Since Roger Bannister first did it in May 1964, achieving this feat has been the benchmark defining the cream of the top athletes in the world. Smith did it in a time of 3:58:63, recording the fastest mile run in South Africa in 25 years. Incidentally, Smith ‘beat’ Bannister by just 77 hundredths of a second!

Although not coming from a sporting family, Smith says his running talent had always been there but sharpened during the time he spent at UWC.

Smith says he looks forward to pursuing further studies and hopes to achieve a teaching qualification as he wants to work with children to pass on the knowledge he has acquired.

“I continue to have lots of support systems, hence I now understand better this concept of ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. That is what I want to be able to offer in the future once all of this is done,” says Ashley.