How do we leap over a 'black hole'?

There are few more volatile and controversial issues in South African sport than transformation.

It is a unique problem with insurmountable challenges, because, regardless of actions taken, somewhere in the system there is a negative outcome for someone. The challenge is finding solutions that have the best long-term outcome for the most people. The key point is that transformation is critical, and failure to do it is short-sighted.

The analogy is that of a farmer who has 100ha of arable land, but chooses to use only 10 - leaving the other 90ha to lie dormant for eternity. If South Africa has 20 million potential sports stars, yet we continue to "farm" only two million of them, we are underachieving relative to our potential. Transformation is key to accessing that talent.

Where disagreement arises is around the issue of how to achieve this. Forced transformation - in the form of quotas - is the most controversial and extreme action, and its effects, good and bad, have been the subject of much debate.

However, one aspect that is overlooked, and which goes to the heart of the problem, is that quotas at junior level create a "black hole" at the point where players graduate to senior level, and make it impossible to accurately gauge the performance of development programmes.

Consider the following hypothetical situation: authorities in a given sport notice that, at junior level, black African players make up 40% to 50% of the teams.

At the senior level, they bemoan the fact that only 10-15% of players come from these previously disadvantaged groups, instigating a firestorm of accusations of bias at senior level. Then follows the on-off-on-off implementation of quotas at senior level, all the while being blinded by the fact that the 40% to 50% at junior level was artificially inflated by quotas to begin with.

Quotas have, in effect, made it impossible to judge the quality rather than the quantity of players being developed at junior level.

In this climate, where transformation is quantity-driven at the expense of monitoring quality, snap judgments are the norm, driven by political and emotional incentives rather than proper understanding of challenges and barriers faced by athletes. This is allied to the staggering lack of research tracking the appearance, and, more importantly, the disappearance of talent within each sport.

SA Cricket has begun to invest expertise in these questions, but SA Rugby leads the way. My colleagues, Professor Mike Lambert and Justin Durandt, of the Sports Science Institute of South Africa's High Performance Centre, have over a decade of data from Craven Weeks, and a picture is beginning to emerge of where players come from, where they go, and, most importantly, why they may fail.

Until this information is known, transformation will remain numerically skewed at the expense of quality. Economically, it creates inefficiencies, where limited resources are invested in the wrong places.

Imagine for a moment you are a basketball scout from the NBA in the US. Are you going to spend money finding superstars among the pygmy population of Congo, whose average height is 1.60m? Or do you go to Eastern Europe, where 1.85m is the average height?

The answer is obvious, but this extreme example illustrates that one cannot force participation and success without first realising that some populations may be excluded from success because of physical factors. Here, too, we simply do not know if this applies in South African sport, because too little research has taken place.

Ultimately, efforts at transformation are hampered by "blindness", which is why we repeatedly stagger and stumble over the same barriers. Until the success, failure and causative factors are quantified and understood properly, we are hoping for the best. Even with better data, creating a sporting culture and dealing with the consequences of transformation is a huge challenge, one where business holds many insights. These are for discussion next time.