Filled with self-doubt, Wayde van Niekerk cried before breaking the men’s 400m world record

“I’ve always been a low-confidence athlete. Somewhat insecure.”

On August 14, at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, Wayde van Niekerk ran the final of the men’s 400m in 43.03 seconds to not only become Olympic champion but also break Michael Johnson’s world record.

It is a record that still stands today.

But the hours and minutes leading up to his historic run was a battle between body and mind. Ten years on, the South African talks about the perfectionist mindset he has struggled with across his career.

“There was a moment — in the warm-up area, as doubts and fears crept in — where I had to wipe my tears and shake the emotion off,” he recalls.

“I said to myself, ‘Hey, the race is going to happen with or without you. Are you going to be ready for it?’”

Van Niekerk, now 34, was never an overly positive athlete, but this was the first time he had cried before a race.

Perhaps it was because he knew what the expectations were, and, despite being 24 and a part-time athlete still studying marketing at the University of Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, there was no better time to etch his name into the history books.

Wayde van Niekerk leading Kirani James of Grenada and Lashawn Merritt of the United States in the men’s 400 meter Olympic final in Rio. (Patrick Smith / Getty Images)

The year previous, he had won the 400m at the World Championships in Beijing for his first senior international gold medal.

And just five months before his Olympic final, he broke the 10-second barrier in the 100m, becoming the first athlete in history to run a sub-44-second 400m, a sub 20-second 200m and a sub 10-second 100m.

He had every statistical reason to believe he could win Olympic gold.

Van Niekerk remembers his confidence was “so high” in the semifinal, despite only qualifying in second place.

But those doubts he felt in the call room followed him to the line in the final, where he felt sensitivity in his right hamstring — something that caused him to ease off in his heat and semifinal.

“I got to the blocks and lowered my standards more and more,” he says. “You start telling yourself, ‘You know what? Silver is good. I can still call myself the second fastest in the world.’

“Then, ‘Hey, bronze is so good. You still stand on the podium. The country will still be proud of you.’

“Then, ‘Hey, I’m top eight in the world. I’m sure that being called the top eight in the world is also a massive achievement.’”

Once the gun went, Van Niekerk could no longer think about the what-ifs. His body did what it was trained to do, his mind locked into race mode.

He set out from lane eight, traditionally unfavored in the 400m because it is harder to judge pace from the outside lane.

“In that moment, many people did not believe in lane eight that much, and I didn’t really care,” he remembers. “I knew that everyone was about to chase me, and my goal was to make sure I opened up a substantial gap. It is very much you versus you.”

Van Niekerk bolted into an early lead, but faced competition from Grenada’s Kirani James, the 2012 Olympic gold medalist, and U.S. sprinter LaShawn Merritt, athletes the South African saw as “big inspirations.”

He crossed the 200m mark in 20.54s. He was still “very much in my own head, but after that, I put my head down and went for the finish.”

Wayde van Niekerk (R) crosses the line way ahead of his rivals in Rio. (Richard Heathcote / Getty Images)

As he emerged onto the home straight, it was clear something special was on. He was half a metre ahead of Merritt and James. He unlocked a gear his competitors could not match, and pulled a metre ahead with 70m to go. Once he reached the line, the gap was over 5m.

“I felt a sneak of lactic acid entering my body at the 50-metre mark, but I shook that off and God carried me to the finish,” he says.

“When I looked up, the first thing I saw was the world record. It did not click then and it is all very much a blurred experience, because I was focused in the moment on my mentality.”

It was not just any world record. Van Niekerk had taken 15 hundredths off Johnson’s effort from 1999, and it remains one of only three current track world records to have been set in Olympic finals.

Van Niekerk now understands the doubts he felt pre-race differently.

“I have realized that the negativity was just the perfectionist in me, wanting to get everything to a tee,” he explains. “I did not feel like I could win the race, but you look back and realize everybody has a niggle going on somewhere.

“That was probably the highlight of my mindset. If you are not perfect, you can still achieve something that nobody else has.”

Wayde van Niekerk (L) embraces celebrates Kirani James after breaking the world record.  (Olivier Morin / AFP via Getty Images)

Post-Rio, van Niekerk’s return to university prompted the thinking that now was the time to take up track full-time. He was unable to keep up with his studies alongside the travel demands of being an international athlete, and the attention he received on campus further restricted him.

“I would enter my classes, as a world-record holder, 20 or 30 minutes late because people would be asking for photos and conversations with me,” he says.

“In a lot of European countries, the moment an athlete shows potential, they are supported. The only time African athletes can call it Plan A is when they win a gold medal, and that still largely stands now.”

(source: World Athletics)

In the 2017 season, Van Niekerk reverted to his broader sprinting approach, targeting the 400m and 200m events at the World Championships in London.

Despite feeling “in great shape” to better his 400m record and break sub-43, the cold weather made it an uncomfortable race and he had to settle for a time of 43.98, though he did defend his world title and, two days later, picked up a silver medal in the 200m final.

He was the athlete he once “dreamed of being.”

Then things came crashing down overnight.

He was participating in a celebrity tag rugby match in October 2017 when he tore the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in his right knee, leaving him out of action for the entirety of the 2018 season.

“There were a lot of consequences,” he says. “I lost a load of sponsors and had a mental dip, but it was always in my mind to bounce back again.”

The journey back was long, but Van Niekerk still had plenty he wanted to achieve. He pulled out of the 2019 World Championships in Doha, but the following year, operating from his training base in Italy, Van Niekerk’s biggest obstacle was not his own fitness but the Covid pandemic. Italy was hit worse than most nations and that stalled his track return, just when he felt it was imminent.

“I was getting close to my Rio fitness again,” he says, “but Covid took all that away from me.

“I could not get out for 26 days, even though I had already had the virus, which saw me lose so much motivation to continue. It gave me a knock because you need that momentum to continue, especially when you are fighting back.”

The question, then, was no longer whether van Niekerk could return to the athlete he was, but whether he wanted to be one at all.

“I had been struggling to convince myself to stay in the sport more than I had been telling myself not to quit,” he says, “but I chose to do it with a smile rather than annoyance.

“Every day the quitting was there, and that’s where I adopted the mentality of trying to take things day by day.”

Van Niekerk describes “puzzling everything back together” since 2020, reverting back to the 400m event initially for “comfort.”

In the year-delayed Tokyo Olympics, he was knocked out of the 400m after placing fifth in the semifinal (running 45.14), and a year later finished fifth overall in the Worlds final in 44.97.

The old Van Niekerk was not returning.

Wayde Van Niekerk competes in the men’s 400m semifinal at the 2023 World Athletics Championships in Budapest. (Patrick Smith / Getty Images)

Ahead of Paris 2024, he remembers “wrestling” with the thought of reverting back to the 200m for the first time post-injury, describing how he entered a “good and happy place mentally” once he chose to focus on the shorter events. He placed last in the 200m semifinals.

He has recently moved further down the sprinting spectrum, running 9.83s in a wind-assisted 100m race at the Austrian Open on July 1, 2026 in yet another summer curtailed early by injury.

“(Injury) happens so much I do not even get annoyed anymore,” Van Niekerk says, revealing that he plans to retire after the 2027 season, barring any surprise improvement ahead of the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. “But it does give me hope that my body can still move that fast.”

Beyond life on the track, Van Niekerk has begun coaching and set up an academy, aiming to “get together the best talents in South Africa and push them to a space where we can challenge for world records.”

It is still astonishing to Van Niekerk that young 400m runners are training to meet his benchmark.

“Every great athlete you see today is most likely thinking of you, and pushing themselves to be better than what you were,” he says.

“That does sometimes hit deep because who would have thought? Not me.”