I had the pleasure of meeting Elana Meyer last week to discuss her Endurocad programme, which was launched two years ago to help turn around our once proud but now flagging middle- and long-distance running fortunes. We spoke at length about how sports science and coaching might deliver the tools to support her constantly expanding vision, which aside from Endurocad includes transforming the Cape Town Marathon into one of the world's great races.She is now focused on a long-term plan to discover female athletes, which would go a long way towards correcting what has become an alarming gender gap in South African sport.One thing Meyer said struck me as particularly significant, because it negates every possible "best practice" method that science and coaching can deliver. She referred to a "lost generation" of athletes.There was a time when South Africa produced many of the world's finest athletes. Meyer was one of them.In fact, one of my earliest sporting memories is of watching Meyer race against Ethiopia's Derartu Tulu in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.A handful of South African women, and perhaps a dozen of our men, featured regularly at the top of the world rankings during that period, and were it not for the apartheid-induced sanctions they would no doubt have won a fair number of Olympic and world championship medals.Unfortunately, that success, which should have laid a foundation for future generations, was buried beneath apathy borne of mismanagement and a resultant lack of support.The result is that our talent potential - which is best thought of as our supply of raw materials - while still present, is now much deeper underground and will require a far greater effort to unearth.There may well have been a generation that was inspired by the likes of Meyer, Willie Mtolo and Josiah Thugwane, but they found no means to pursue that dream.The problem is, once that first generation is lost, the barrier to success becomes exponentially bigger, because the next generation has neither the knowledge nor the desire to emulate them.In short, we lost the culture for the sport that those world-class "pioneers" worked so hard to create. This is the product of that lost generation.One of the reasons for the sustainable dominance of Kenyan runners is that success is reinvested, both in the form of expertise and inspiration.Success thus breeds success, because children need not imagine their best possible outcome - all they need to do is imitate what others have already done.Add this to the retention of knowledge and the result is one generation after another who keep winning.On both counts - inspiration and intellect - we were wasteful, and the result is Meyer's "lost generation", which is more accurately about three or four generations, because about 20 years' worth of potential has been wasted.That's the challenge facing the ambitious few who see South Africa's true athletic potential: How do you inspire people to take up the sport?Looking at South African athletics now, there are signs of re-emergence. National records are falling, the gap to the global standard is narrowing and we see an upturn in the quality and depth of performance in a few track events.That we have these "pockets of success" - 400m hurdling, 100m sprinting, long jump - is an indication that this current wave is being driven by motivated individuals rather than by a system-wide intervention by Athletics South Africa, which has been tied up in one leadership dispute and court case after the other.With a bit of foresight and strategic planning, this current crop of athletes, who may well go to the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro next year and win a few medals (something the SA Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee will ride for about eight years), could become the catalyst for the 2024 and 2028 Olympic groups - and so on.The tide is rising and with it comes the opportunity to grab hold of the most powerful and elusive of all the ingredients for success - culture.Failure to do so will extend the lost generation of athletes to 40 years...