Lebogang Shange, star walker and a Tuks hight performance centre (HPC) sponsored athlete, proved on Saturday in Dudinska, Slovakia with his victory in the International Association of Athletics Frederations (IAAF) 20km race walking challenge that once he is in the “zone” there is no stopping him.

His winning time of 1:22:44 was just 54 seconds slower than his South African record performance of the previous weekend. Brazil’s Andres Choche was second in 1:23:20.

Shange actually reached another milestone becoming the first South African to win a race in the IAAF Race Walking Challenge-series. The series started in 2003. “As I started the IAAF race in Slovakia, I asked God to walk with me. He stayed by my side until I crossed the finishing line and won the race,” an elated Shange posted on his Facebook page afterwards.

The HPC athlete really has been on a roll-over the last three weeks. His success story started with breaking the South African 3 000m track record (11 minutes and 20.39 seconds) at a Tuks league meeting. He continued his SA record-breaking spree a week later when he finished second in a time of 1:21:50 in a 20km race-walk event in Lugano, Switzerland.

The plan was for Shange to compete in one more European race next weekend but Chris Britz, his coach, thinks he has made enough of an impact on the international race walking scene and that he should return to South Africa to recover a bit before getting down to serious training again. “With his victory in Dudinska, Lebogang has gained a valuable 12 points in the race walk series. As part of his build-up to the World Championships in Beijing he will be competing in a few more of the challenge-races,” said Britz afterwards. Britz said there was no doubt that Shange was capable of walking even faster times.

“Lebogang has improved by leaps and bounds in the last year. Two years ago he was not able to finish at the World Championships in Moscow. That left him very despondent.

“One of the major challenges I faced when I started to coach Lebogang was to get him to believe in his abilities. That meant he used to have a very conservative approach when he raced. He would only start to up the pace over the last few kilometres when he felt sure that there is nothing that could go wrong.

“It is only now that he is confident enough to make the race and set the challenge to other walkers to keep up with him if they don’t want to get dropped.”

Marc Mundell, also from HPC, made sure that he qualified for the World Championships in Beijing by finishing 10th in the 50km walk. His time was 3 hours 56 minutes and 47 seconds.