Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 61, August 2014 | Page 4

Ma Editor’s letter Hitting Close W hen you read the Living Legend article on Donovan Wright on page 20, I hope that it will make you stop and think about how we all need to make the most of the time that we have. I can tell you this, it was one of the harder articles I have ever written – not just because Donovan talked virtually non-stop for more than an hour and I had enough notes to write a book, but because Donny and I go back so many years, and his ongoing fight against cancer is still hard to accept. I first interviewed Donovan in 2000, shortly after his fourth-place finish in the Comrades Marathon, and remember choosing a front cover image of him kneeling to pray just before the Comrades finish line. The coverline was ‘Donovan Wright and the Boston Kenyans.’ You see, he used to live in the suburb of Boston in the northern suburbs of Cape Town, and he had a group of young, disadvantaged athletes living with his family so that he could coach, mentor and support them. They trained like Kenyans, hence their nickname, and it was an incredibly inspirational story, of a top runner who was going way beyond the proverbial call of duty in terms of giving back to the sport by helping others. Just a few months later I received a call at about 3am from Donny. He kept apologising for the late hour, but asked if I would mind chatting for a while. He had recently been PUBLISHERS Mike Bray & Craig Van der Westhuizen [email protected] EDITORIAL TEAM EDITOR Sean Falconer [email protected] JOURNALIST & RACE EDITOR Lauren van der Vyver [email protected] DESIGNER & JOURNALIST Nicole de Villiers [email protected] diagnosed with brain cancer and was in terrific pain nearly all the time, so was unable to sleep. He said that he just needed somebody to talk to in order to take his mind off the pain, at least for a while, and he didn’t want to wake his wife, Marita, who was already beyond exhausted from caring for and worrying about him. I immediately said no problem, let’s chat, and more than an hour later he rang off, saying he was feeling a bit better and reckoned he might try some sleep again – and that was not our last chat in the wee hours of the morning, either. I, on the other hand, sat there unable to sleep further, tot