More to success than adaptation

When Charles Darwin walked off the HMS Beagle and set foot on the Galapagos Islands in 1835, he would have had little idea that the islands would provide one of the key lines of evidence for his eventual scientific treatise on evolution and natural selection.

Specifically, it was a group of finches that became emblematic of Darwin's theory, because he would discover 12 new species of finch, which differed most importantly in the shape and size of their beaks.

The difference was the result of the type of food the birds had access to on this specific island within the Galapagos. Some birds had narrow, sharp beaks, perfectly suited for insects or seeds in fruit, whereas others had larger, claw-shaped beaks ideal for eating seeds on the ground or nuts.

Darwin didn't fully appreciate the significance of this beak-location link at the time, but the picture eventually emerged that these beak adaptations were driven by the environment to ensure survival.

Left alone, in other words, birds adapted over time to survive best on the food they had available.

I've been struck recently by the realisation that in any domain, including high-performance sport, knowledge is just like those finches, while the sporting world resembles the Galapagos Islands in the sense that each country evolves and adapts its knowledge according to what is available to it.

The problem for South Africa - and I share a personal frustration here - is that we are sometimes so isolated from the best practices of the world that our own evolution is staggeringly slow.

In a world of "survival of the fittest", we cannot survive when we are thrown into the global competitive cauldron.

This is, fundamentally, why we are shown up every four years at the Olympic Games, and why we are threatened with "extinction" in so many global sports.

Having just returned from a month-long trip to the US and the UK for conferences and meetings, I felt much like Darwin may have done as he hopped from island to island discovering new worlds where different forces shape different beak shapes.

In the UK, for example, the most advanced sports management system in the world has been created to dissect and understand every sport, and then to share knowledge to train coaches, scientists and managers who will keep delivering Olympic medals.

Accountability is prized, and sports are audited and rewarded financially based on objective criteria. In the US, innovation and capitalism drive performance, so expert coaching and elite performance is born of competition within their own borders - win the battle in the US, and you'll be leading the world.

What both avoid, is isolation - they facilitate exponential growth. Good people, added to good people, create great people and, when they are empowered to communicate openly with one another, each learns from the success and failure of another. So progress goes into hyper-drive.

By contrast, we have limited opportunities for this in South Africa. When Heyneke Meyer returns with a 50% winning record in the UK, who can he turn to, other than a few limited internal options?

Can Russell Domingo borrow from the global success of SA Rowing? Or SA Sevens? It makes no sense to leave potential solutions locked away in the minds of experts.

Personally, I believe three weeks in the US/UK is more intellectually stimulating than 49 weeks in SA as a result of this 'isolation'.

Just last week, the director of the GB Performance Pathway wanted a meeting to discuss their internal performance audit.

A two-hour meeting on November 26 more than doubled my high performance knowledge for 2015. Imagine 40 hours a week of that kind of stimulation?

That it does not exist points to system failure in SA sport.

Most frustrating of all is that we have the people, who have the passion, and the knowledge in SA.

We just don't use them well enough and so each coach - Meyer, Domingo, and the hundreds of aspirant coaches and scientists like myself - remain finches on isolated islands, adapting to survive, but rarely to win outside their own territory.