EDITORIAL | We need less talking and more action from sports administrators

Jamaica clocked positions one, two and three. Gold, silver and bronze in the women’s 100m as the black, green and gold flag of the Caribbean nation dominated the podium, above the beaming smiles of Elaine Thompson-Herah, Shelly-Anne Fraser-Price and Shericka Jackson.

A clean-sweep of three medals in one swoop. Something SA can only dream of.

That is a dream that will remain just that, considering that Team SA had no woman 100m participant, let alone a medal hopeful, at the Tokyo 2020 Games.

And anyone who has the slightest inkling of world track and field events will be aware of the exploits of now retired sprint king Usain Bolt.

SA has had her golden moments coming from Caster Semenya and Wayde van Niekerk in the past.

Semenya’s absence in Tokyo and Van Niekerk going to the games cold as he did reduced the country’s medal hopes by two.

But these could be the first Games for SA where more women make the podium than men.

In 1996, two women won three medals and two men two medals, so women have won more medals before, but they haven’t outnumbered the male medallists.

While Covid-19 was expected to have negative impacts on sport, we’ve seen some amazing world records in swimming and athletics and perhaps in future we might see athletes getting to rest more, to emulate the inactivity of hard lockdown. 

Rather than rolling up our sleeves and dirtying our hands with the view of turning things around for the better, we talk. And talk.

Sascoc’s decision to allow all qualifiers helped because surfer Bianca Buitendag would not have qualified otherwise. We would be sitting with two medals right now, from golden-silver girl Tatjana Schoenmaker. 

SA sport is, by and large, far behind the rest of the world, and we need to address that pronto. We can’t continue to do what we do — or not do — when the world is advancing. The gap is getting wider. 

While women have won our first three medals, there’s a problem. Of the athletics team, only four or five were women. Swimming saw eight women to seven men, but all seven men qualified individually, while three of the women were brought along just for the relays. They didn’t qualify for individual races. So it’s a false positive, to some extent. 

At the heart of the problem is that we pay lip service to the challenges that need to be addressed for us to start producing elite sportspeople, who can hold their own against the best in the world.

Chief among them is never-ending indabas. We know what is wrong. Rather than rolling up our sleeves and dirtying our hands with the view of turning things around for the better, we talk. And talk. And talk some more without any tangibles at the end of the hot air our administrators spew.

School sport development is a favourite subject at these indabas. But no efficient programmes come out of it.

What we always consistently see is the fight for positions and never ending squabbles by the people who are supposed to chart a way forward that can bring about meaningful change.

For as long as that continues, our hopes of one day emulating Jamaica will remain but a dream for the longest of time.