DAVID ISAACSON | In SA you have elite athletes, then you have sleeping administrators

High-performance sport in South Africa is in serious trouble.

This sad realisation hit me last week after seeing three different codes getting smacked in the nuts in a short space of time. 

The problem, in a nutshell, is administrators not being held to the same high standards expected of the country’s elite competitors.

High-performance sport refers to an ecosystem where experts harness talent; technical coaches, conditioning coaches, physiotherapists, biokineticists, physiologists and all sorts of sports scientists, really, work around athletes.

And somewhere in there, assisting everyone to perform at their optimum, are supposed administrators doing the pen pushing and cheque writing required to make things happen.

Sport is hugely expensive, and when one thinks the aim is about making only small improvements, it’s the antithesis of business where the idea is to get maximum returns for minimal investments.

Chew on this for example: when Tatjana Schoenmaker lowered her 200m breaststroke African record at the 2021 national championships to 2 min 20.17 sec, it represented an improvement of 1.14%.

When she went 2:19.16 in the heats at the Tokyo Olympics, her gain was 0.7%. And when Schoenmaker set her 2:18.95 world record, winning gold in the final, that was a growth of only 0.21%.

Likewise, when Wayde van Niekerk won the 400m gold at Rio 2016 in 43.03, he lowered Michael Johnson’s 17-year-old 43.18 world record by just 0.348%.

These are the margins that athletes are chasing. To paraphrase Neil Armstrong, one small movement on the stopwatch, a giant stride for an athlete. 

Then you get South African administrators.

First you had the SA Football Association (Safa) unveiling its Vision 2030, where they want Bafana Bafana to be in the top 10 in Africa and top 50 in the world.

That might seem ambitious for a fan who started watching football three minutes ago  — the SA men’s team is ranked 68th in the world and 13th on the continent. But for a side that were once the kings of Africa and the 16th best side on the planet, Safa’s goal is nothing less than capitulation. They’ve basically lowered the pass mark to 33%.

Safa’s previous Vision 2022, where they wanted the men to get to the top three in Africa and top 20 in the world, failed dismally, but at least they were looking forward. 

Then you get the SA Hockey Association (Saha). They showed initiative by hosting the Nations Cup tournament in Potchefstroom, a tournament that rewarded the winning team a spot in the all-important Pro League, featuring the best outfits in the world.

The Pro League offers invaluable experience for a team like SA, which took part in 2021/22. That is how the men outgrew their whipping boy status and reduced the gap on the top nations.

Add to that the incredible talent of some youngsters, like Mustapha Cassiem, and suddenly there was an outside shot of glory at the 2024 Olympics in Paris. An impossible dream could switch to reality.

But then Saha pulled the plug on the Pro League, saying they were unable to raise the R10m surety to enter the team into the 2023/24 edition, explaining the turnaround between SA’s victory on December 4 and the mid-January 2023 deadline was too short to secure that sort of cash.

That makes no sense. South Africa was announced as hosts of the Nations Cup in June last year. That’s when Saha should have started approaching potential sponsors, including government, because they should have known the SA men had a chance of winning and therefore qualifying.

Every South African competitor who wins a medal in Paris next year would have started their preparation almost immediately after Tokyo 2020, though in reality they were preparing long before that.

Hockey Ireland understood what this opportunity meant for their men. “The focus for us is on the continued growth and development of our squads, and the Pro League is an important opportunity for us in this regard,” the Irish federation said in a brief response to some questions I had emailed them.  

The Irish have a game plan, Saha does not. 

The third problem I noticed in SA sport was in swimming, where load-shedding threatens to damage the country’s top athletes come winter, both this year and next. The bulk of the country’s medal hopes train in outdoor pools in Pretoria.

Pools need to be heated and heating systems require a lot of electricity. The size of generators needed are expensive to obtain and run.

Schoenmaker, Lara van Niekerk, Kaylene Corbett, Pieter Coetze and Matthew Sates, if he continues training at Tuks, are the core of what could be SA’s greatest aquatics team in history.

SA swimming has never won more than three Olympic medals at a single Games, but they could beat that by a two medals, maybe more, at Paris 2024. 

Their potential, however, could be curtailed by government incompetence and corruption as well as a lack of foresight by local administrators. 

Tuks Swimming had to hire a generator for one month before the Olympics in 2021. Unable to secure a generator two months before the Commonwealth Games last year, they had to switch to a nearby pool to get heated water. That pool won’t be available for them this winter because the heating is too expensive.

The danger of load-shedding for swimming has been looming for nearly two years, but nobody in a position of power had thought to begin steps towards finding a solution. 

In the short term, administrative shortfalls might be counted on the medal tables at top competitions, but the real risk over time is that coaches, sports scientists and even athletes drift abroad where they will avoid frustrations and thrive in professional environments.

And by the time the suits of SA sport awaken from their slumber, should that happen, there’ll be no expertise left.