The first I knew of the doubts over Caster Semenya’s gender was in an e-mail from Zola Budd whose South African junior 800 metres record she had just eclipsed.

That was a month before controversy erupted after Semenya won gold in the World Championships but it seems ironic now when a senior Athletics South Africa official, Dr Simon Diamini, is claiming that Semenya's problems were caused because her critics were racially motivated to jealousy after she broke Budd's record.
    

Jealousy was not Zola's motivation in sending me a link to a story on a South African website. Now she lives in the United States on a two-year working visa she keeps in touch with her homeland through the internet and occasionally links me to articles she thinks may be of professional interest.
    

We met first when the Daily Mail sent me to South Africa in 1984 to check out the phenomenon of a teenager who was breaking world records running bare-foot in a country banned from international competition because of its apartheid policies. My journey resulted in her coming to England some three weeks later and receiving a British passport to which she was entitled by her grandfather's birth there.

The rest is history, the controversy that split the British public and Parliament, caused her to be attacked on a cross country course, hated in the United States because of her accidental involvement in the fall of that nation’s darling, Mary Decker, at the Olympic Games and the eventual International Amateur Athletics Federation - as it was then called - ban on Budd’s participation in the World Cross Country Championship which drove her to return to her homeland.
     

All now very old history. We have stayed in touch but Zola is about as far removed from the political machinations of South African athletics as it is possible to be. For more than a year now she and her family have lived an ocean away.
     

The now Mrs Pieterse, 43 and a mother of three, lives in Myrtle Beach, North Carolina, where her children attend local public schools. Her husband Mike chose the location when she expressed an interest in running on the US masters circuit because it was renowned for its golf courses, his game.
      

She runs in low-key Masters division races throughout the Carolinas, winning many from five miles to half-marathon.  She has even run cross country there, the discipline in which she was twice world champion. Few of her rivals recognise her as a former world champion or even her name. When she signed up as a volunteer coach at her local college just one student on the athletics team knew of her background. The one happened not to be American-born. The nation that in 1984 hated her has long forgotten.
     

She runs because she has always enjoyed running. She ran the New York Marathon last year – in just under three hours – for the fun of it and is contemplating Boston next year and applying for an extension of her two-year visa. As she says, the only person she competes against now is herself.
      

The future may include coaching daughter Lisa, 13, who has started running, but when a local Carolina newspaper interviewed this autumn the writer said that the only hint that a famous runner lived there was the treadmill on the stoop.
    

It was, he noted, on the steepest setting. Zola’s never been anything but competitive, even when it is only with herself. At her peak she would have given Semenya a run for her money, whatever her gender.
 

Neil Wilson is Olympic and athletics correspondent of The Daily Mail. He has covered 18 Summer and Winter Olympic Games.