Athletics SA (ASA) has a golden opportunity to show local athletes it really does care.
With only 14 South Africans having qualified so far in individual events for the Tokyo Olympics — way short of the 39 who went to the Rio Games — track and field hopefuls for Japan will need opportunities to qualify between now and the June 29 deadline.
In any normal year athletes would have started making plans to migrate to Europe from next month to try to achieve the qualifying standards.
But with Covid-19 and travel restrictions, movement has become a problem. England, for example, requires a 10-day mandatory quarantine period, which is not feasible for elite athletes.
The easiest solution would be local meets, put on especially for them to attempt qualification.
ASA president Aleck Skhosana, who goes to the polls on May 8 to keep his position (though some pundits are tipping James Moloi to take over), said at the weekend that extra meets were being considered.
What an irony that, in what could be Skhosana’s final weeks, he finally shows the athletes he cares.
While he and his board have helped to stabilise ASA and pull it out of threatened bankruptcy in 2014, they missed a few steps when it comes to the sports people.
When SA downgraded to alert level three last year, sports federations frantically put resumption plans together for government to approve, with the exception of ASA.
The less-famous victim of that policy was 400m hurdler Wenda Nel, who achieved two qualifying times, also without international recognition.
When those from other codes were back in training, a clutch of athletes, including Akani Simbine, were still without a track to run on.
In 2017 ASA controversially omitted 14 qualified athletes from the world championships in London.
The sports body had introduced its own, stiffer qualifying standards over and above the entry marks laid down by the world governing body.
And yet, after refusing those who had qualified on the International Association of Athletics Federations’ (IAAF) standards, they accepted invites for a couple of SA athletes who had missed the IAAF standard. In other words, they rejected those they considered second-tier qualifiers, but allowed third-tier qualifiers. Go figure.
The final squad size then was 26, including one relay-specific selection.
A few years before Skhosana was elected president there was the notorious double act by ASA and the SA Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc), which required athletes (and swimmers) to achieve a qualifying standard at least twice to earn selection for the London 2012 Games.
There were other provisos, such as having to produce one of those two times at an international meet, and one time had to be done from March 20 2012 onwards.
The theory was that this would guarantee selected athletes (and swimmers) would perform well at the Olympics. But in practice this brain fart of an experiment failed horribly.
Sprinter Simon Magakwe was the big-name casualty, having clocked up six qualifying times in the 100m and two in the 200m. His crime? He did not achieve one at a meet Sascoc considered international.
The less-famous victim of that policy was 400m hurdler Wenda Nel, who achieved two qualifying times, also without international recognition.
The least ASA could do is organise a few meets for Wenda Nel and others who are within reach of Olympic qualifying, preferably in the heat of the day.
She and Magakwe had achieved times at the now-defunct SA Open in Pretoria, which had several athletes from neighbouring nations, but not enough to satisfy Sascoc.
To have a qualification system in which an athlete who produces eight qualifying performances fails to qualify defies logic.
As it turned out, only about 25% of SA’s athletes and swimmers performed well in London.
Furthermore, the policy arguably cost SA medals there or down the line.
Johan Cronje achieved only one 1,500m qualifying time in 2012, but he went on to win a bronze medal at the world championships the next year. What might have happened had he gone to London?
Nel was disqualified in the final of the 2014 Commonwealth Games. But maybe with an Olympics under her belt she might have taken a medal, as she did at Gold Coast 2018. She also made the final at the 2015 world championships. Leaving her out of the 2012 squad was an error.
Now 32, Nel had hoped to qualify for Tokyo at the SA championships at the weekend, but the autumnal chill that descended on the Tuks stadium during the final session on Saturday evening saw her fall short by just 0.2 sec.
The least ASA could do is organise a few meets for her and others who are within reach of Olympic qualifying, preferably in the heat of the day.
Let’s see if this federation can bat for its athletes.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.