Icons' deaths a wake-up call

There have been few darker weeks for South African sport than the one just passed.

A week that began with the death of an Olympic medallist and World and Commonwealth champion on the track, ended with an outpouring of grief for a young man who had only just begun to make his impact on the South African sporting psyche as captain of the team with the broadest support base in the country.

It was punctuated, midway through, by anger and introspection over yet another senseless and tragic loss of life.

My aim is not to provide commentary on the social aspects of life in South Africa but it seems to me both poignant and frustrating that Mbulaeni Mulaudzi's and Senzo Meyiwa's biggest effect on the country's attitudes could be in their untimely deaths.

It's human nature to fail to recognise the value of something until it is lost but, in South Africa, the yawning chasm between our unity in their loss and our inability to value leaders while they're alive seems particularly startling.

It also leads to statements like that of Zwelizima Vavi, the general secretary of Cosatu, who condemned the criminals who shot Mewiya for having "no sense of national assets".

And, while one can understand the sentiment, it also carries with it the rather absurd implication that these - and other criminals - should have paused for a moment to consider who they were about to shoot, and then rather go easy on Meyiwa because he was a public, loved figure.

"We can't shoot this guy, he's an asset, let's go kill someone else."

The reality is that we should not wait for the death of an asset to realise what assets we have.

Nor should we forget that everyone in this country who is shot dead, or dies on our roads, was also an asset, just not as famous as the two we mourned last week.

As much as we rightly mourn how much potential was lost in the death of these two, just consider how many more have been cut down before they ever got the chance to realise it. The reason I raise this is not to trivialise their deaths but, rather, to amplify the value that might emerge if we all just realised two things.

First, we show in our collective grief a unity that we should carry forward beyond the mourning period, to tackle the actual problem with the same sense of purpose , rather than our isolated reaction to it.

This is not a sporting problem, certainly, but one that involves all South Africans who condemn the tragic situation that leads to so much death, but who then never quite unify behind finding a solution.

Sport is a microcosm of this, and when our leaders call for Meyiwa's "good works" to be recognised, I'd ask the sporting community not to continue to mourn him specifically, but rather to put the energy and unity they showed in loss to rather recognise how many more like him there may be.

That applies also to transformation and the development of sport by the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee and sports federations.

There are many athletes whose careers have also been cut short, happily not their lives, but whom we should value as assets now, not after tragedy.

And second, inspired by the recent Performance Leadership Summit I co-organised with the Sports Science Institute of South Africa in Cape Town, I hope the loss of icons makes us realise that their value is not only in the medals they win and the goals they save.

It's in the people they inspire, the knowledge they acquire and should share more widely, and the collective wisdom they could impart. We don't do nearly enough to extract that from them, and then realise it far too late.

Their legacy can become the realisation that "institutional memory" requires that we treat them with the same respect and value shown to them in death, while they still have the chance to teach us more.