Maria de Lurdes Mutola

Maria Mutola
Full name	Maria de Lurdes Mutola
nation	Mozambique
birthday	October 27, 1972
place of birth	Maputo ,  Portuguese East Africa , Portugal
size	167 cm
Weight	50 kg
Career
discipline	Middle distance run
Best performance	1: 55.19 min ( 800 m )
status	resigned
End of career	2008
Medal table
Olympic games 1 × 0 × 1 × World championships 3 × 1 × 3 × African Championships 5 × 2 × 0 × Indoor World Cup 7 × 1 × 1 × Pan-African Games 3 × 0 × 0 × Commonwealth Games 2 × 0 × 1 ×
Olympic games bronze Atlanta 1996 800 m gold Sydney 2000 800 m  World championships gold Stuttgart 1993 800 m bronze Athens 1997 800 m silver Seville 1999 800 m gold Edmonton 2001 800 m gold Paris 2003 800 m  African Championships gold Cairo 1990 800 m gold Cairo 1990 1500 m gold Durban 1993 800 m gold Dakar 1998 800 m gold Tunis 2002 800 m silver Bambous 2006 800 m silver Addis Ababa 2008 800 m  Indoor world championships gold Toronto 1993 800 m gold Barcelona 1995 800 m gold Paris 1997 800 m silver Maebashi 1999 800 m gold Lisbon 2001 800 m gold Birmingham 2003 800 m gold Budapest 2004 800 m gold Moscow 2006 800 m bronze Valencia 2008 800 m  Africa Games gold Cairo 1991 800 m gold Harare 1995 800 m gold Johannesburg 1999 800 m  Commonwealth Games gold Kuala Lumpur 1998 800 m gold Manchester 2002 800 m bronze Melbourne 2006 800 m

Maria de Lurdes Mutola (born October 27, 1972 in Maputo ) is a former Mozambican middle-distance runner . Her specialty was the 800 meter run , in which she was not beaten in any important race between 1999 and 2004. From the introduction of the IAAF world rankings in 2001 to July 2005, she was first in the world.

Sports career

Over the 800 meters, Mutola was three times world champion in her extraordinarily long career, at the 1993 World Championships , the 2001 World Championships and the 2003 World Championships . Add to this a second place at the 1999 World Championships , a third at the 1997 World Championships and a fourth at the 1991 World Championships , her very first participation.

At the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000 Mutola finally won the gold medal, which she was unable to achieve as a co-favorite at the 1992 Games in Barcelona and the 1996 Games in Atlanta against the surprise winners Ellen van Langen and Swetlana Masterkowa . In 2004 she was last as a co-favorite in the final, but lost to her training partner Kelly Holmes . In Beijing 2008 , she finished fifth. The list of successes is rounded off by seven wins at indoor world championships, four African championships and three titles at the Pan-African Games, as well as numerous Grand Prix victories.

In 2003, she won the Golden League and was fortunate enough not to have to share the $ 1 million gold jackpot with anyone.

Maria Mutola is 1.67 m tall and has a competition weight of 50 kg. She is an athlete ambassador for the development aid organization Right to Play . In 2001 she founded the Fundação Lurdes Mutola (Lurdes Mutola Foundation) in the Mozambican capital, Maputo , which promotes female athletes throughout the country. In 2006 she was honored to take part in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games in Turin as one of eight women to bear the Olympic flag . In 2007 she was nominated as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum for the social commitment of her foundation .

Maria Mutola ended her international career at the “ Weltklasse Zürich ” meeting on August 29, 2008. She then returned to the sport of soccer, which she had already played at the age of 14 and before the start of her successful career as a track and field athlete. In the 2009/10 season she played with the Johannesburg club Luso Africa in South Africa's first women's league, the following season at the Mamelodi Sundowns in Pretoria . In September 2011, at the age of 39, she made her debut for the Mozambican national team at the football tournament of the Pan-African Games in Mozambique . She scored the only goal for her team that was eliminated in the preliminary round after two defeats.

At the request of the South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya , Mutola coached her from the end of 2011 as a trainer on her way to the Olympic Games in London 2012 . There Semenya won the silver medal over 800 meters.

Personal best

• 800 meters : 1: 55.19 min, August 17, 1994 in Zurich
• 1500 meters : 4: 01.50 min, July 12, 2002 in Rome

Performance development

year	800 meters (in minutes)	1000 meters (in minutes)	1500 meters (in minutes)
1988	2: 04.36	-	-
1989	2: 05.7	-	-
1990	2: 13.54	-	-
1991	1: 57.63	-	4: 12.72
1992	1: 57.49	-	4: 02.60
1993	1: 55.43	-	4: 04.97
1994	1: 55.19	-	-
1995	1: 55.72	2: 29.34	-
1996	1: 57.07	2: 29.66	4: 01.63
1997	1: 55.29	-	-
1998	1: 56.11	2: 31.55	-
1999	1: 56.04	2: 32.22	-
2000	1: 56.15	-	4: 02.39
2001	1: 56.85	2: 33.53	-
2002	1: 56.16	2: 30.12	4: 01.50
2003	1: 55.55	-	-
2004	1: 56.51	-	4: 07.57
2005	1: 58.96	-	-

Web links

• Maria Mutola in the database of World Athletics (English)
• Maria de Lurdes Mutola in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• Maria Mutola on sporting-heroes.net
• Fundação Lurdes Mutola , official website of the Lurdes Mutola Foundation (Portuguese and English)
• Friends of the Lurdes Mutola Foundation , website of the international support association of the Mutola Foundation (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ History ( Memento of the original from July 12, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Friends of the Lurdes Mutola Foundation website , accessed December 16, 2012 
2. ↑ Mark Gleeson: Maria Mutola still leads from front - but in South African football , in: The Observer of March 21, 2010, accessed December 16, 2012 (English)
3. ^ ^{A b} Maria Mutola new trainer from Caster Semenya , in: Focus Online from October 24, 2011, accessed on December 16, 2012
4. ↑ Maria Mutola storms for Mozambique  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , on the website of the Bavarian Football Association from September 24, 2011, accessed on December 16, 2012