Three paltry medals. Won by two women. All offshore, one in surfing and two in swimming. Too dangerous on land, mused one wit. One gold, two silver. Even the traitorous Judas Iscariot held more silver in his hands. A disaster. Poorer neighbours fared much better. Uganda and Ethiopia got four medals each and Kenya a whopping 10. A Namibian woman ran so fast (silver in the 200m finals) that a one-time Polish sprinter requested “a thorough test to find out if she definitely is a woman”.
Even Cuba, an economically starved country of less than 12-million people, got 15 medals. No doubt our illustrious cabinet is considering buying off Cuban athletes with much-needed foreign currency to join their engineers and teachers already working here.
Talking of cabinet. Our minister of sport and poorly timed humour thought this was the moment to comment on our Olympians with this gem: “The team that represented SA at the Olympics was not reflective of the demographics of the country.” Bloody hell. What have you been doing about that for 27 years as the ruling party? It gets worse. As the Olympic torch was being doused in Tokyo, there was a reshuffling of the cabinet in Mzansi.
Leave aside for the moment the quip by a Twitter elder that changing the cabinet in our beloved country is like changing four flat tyres on your car in the hope that the vehicle will move forward.
But back to the demographics of the country. Of the 22 new ministers (10) and deputies (12) replacing the nine shuffled out, every single one was a Black African. How’s that for “reflective of the demographics of the country”. Shameless hypocrites. Chutzpah my Yiddish friends would say; Maseh, my Cape Flats friends.
Then, to add insult to injury, the illustrious South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc) announced it was cash-strapped and, unlike in 2016, would not be rewarding medallists with cash prizes for their achievements. Yes, these important personae cannot acknowledge the Herculean efforts of two young women because they ran out of cash. The backlash was immense.
The South African problem is soluble, they tell me. It starts with early talent identification. We cannot do what we do in education … try to fix 12 years of broken schooling by putting all our efforts into the matric years.
I made the effort to determine the generous monthly stipends the board members earn. If each of them sacrificed only a small portion of their fees, they could reward the two medallists with ample change. Fundraising campaigns kicked off, including by ever-ready political opportunists such as AfriForum. Shamed by the heated public response, Sascoc miraculously found the money.
This week I called experts in sports development around the world. The South African problem is soluble, they tell me. It starts with early talent identification. We cannot do what we do in education ... try to fix 12 years of broken schooling by putting all our efforts into the matric years. There is a reason we are world champions in rugby. Young boys are inducted into the sport even before they reach grade school. Go to Loftus Versfeld in Pretoria on a Saturday morning and see for yourself. The school opposite the field (Affies) has produced an unusually large share of Springboks over the years.
It also means retaining the best coaching minds in the country, the track-and-field equivalent of a Rassie Erasmus, whose world championship team just beat four countries rolled into one, the British and Irish Lions. Listen to this. This is where you will find South African coaching talent in Olympics hockey alone: the assistant coach of the Indian men’s team (silver); the Dutch women’s team (gold); the Belgian men’s team (gold).
The truth is, most of the black athletes and rugby or netball stars come from former white schools. That is because there are no systematic programmes or opportunities for talent development in the majority of our schools. Most do not even offer formal physical education any longer, a sure signal of the value schools place on bodily health and performance.
There are, of course, shortcuts to bringing home a bigger bag of medals from the 2024 Paris Olympics. Concentrate resources in a few sports where we have great talent, such as swimming and athletics; for the Kenyans and Ethiopians, those choices focus on middle- and long-distance running. In other words, do not try to be all things to all codes. Contract the four big “sports” universities as investment targets for specialist coaching and development; that is, the University of Pretoria, with its High Performance Centre, North West University, Stellenbosch University and the University of the Free State.
The problem with shortcuts, as one expert reminds me, is that developing a formidable Olympic team is a 12- to 16-year programme of concentrated development that starts with children. That is how we should prepare youth for excellence in sports and in education. Do the hard work from the ground up so as many young people as possible can participate in development, rather than only choosing only from the few who make it to the top.
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