ASA finally sees red over results
Times at the Speed Series meet last week have been met with disbelief
ATHLETICS SA (ASA) is investigating the times from its Speed Series meet in Bloemfontein this week, where 60% of sprinters and hurdlers were credited with personal bests.
“When there is suspicion, you need to do something,” the federation’s president, Aleck Skhosana, admitted to the Sunday Times on Friday, adding he had blasted the technical team that did duty in the Free State capital.
The electronic timing system dished out 15 personal best times — including three national records — to the 25 competitors early in the evening. They slashed 5.27sec off their combined career optimals over a consolidated 510m.
It started with two bests in the women’s 100m hurdles, followed by four in the men’s 110m hurdles, five in two women’s 100m races and four in the men’s 100m B race.
Then in the feature race — the men’s 100m dash where 18-year-old Gift Leotlela upstaged Olympic 400m champion Wayde van Niekerk — the system crashed completely, providing no times at all.
So many red flags had been raised in the arena by the end of the evening you could almost smell the bull.
At trackside straight afterwards, Skhosana said he had been given no reason to doubt the electronic times by his technical people, and instead he explained the times were part of South Africa’s sprint revolution.
But his advisers must have been the only ones who were not suspicious.
Local athletes like Akani Simbine and Henricho Bruintjies, watching the meet from afar, expressed their scepticism on social media, and early the next day the Scandinavian Tilastopaya athletics website had “doubtful timing” listed alongside all the results.
Ruan de Vries, the 31-year-old journeyman who had never got to a senior world championships, broke the African 110m hurdles record with a 13.23sec effort that was 0.36 quicker than his best. Only four men ran that race and all achieved career best times, taking a whopping 2.7 seconds off their combined bests. That was the first red flag. The first two men behind De Vries had previously struggled to break even 14 seconds, yet both beat the qualifying standard for the world championships in London in August, going 13.28 and 13.41 respectively. Never before had SA qualified more than one 110m hurdler for a top-flight competition since readmission, and suddenly there was a full house of three? Alarm bells. The results of the men’s 100m B race also seemed too good to be true with four of the five entrants, including the top three, taking a combined 1.27sec off their combined bests. When Jamaican legend Usain Bolt led five of eight men to what were then career bests in the 100m final of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, they shaved just 0.13sec off their combined bests. Yet another red flag.
Winner Le Roux van Tonder, 28, made the biggest improvement in that B race, dropping from 10.51sec to 10.09, one-hundredth of a second better than Anaso Jobodwana’s personal best.
For the 100m feature race they had to resort to hand times — the back-up in case the electronic system fails — yet only the top three received times.
“Why were they not taking hand times for all the runners in that race?” asked one coach.
Leotlela, who spent ages anxiously awaiting an electronic time that never came, was given a hand time of 10.0.
One insider said that equated to an electronic 10.24, with Van Niekerk’s 10.1 hand time working out to 10.34.
How is it possible that Leotlela, Van Niekerk and third-placed Emile Erasmus, also a hand 10.1, could be effectively slower than the first three finishers of the B race? Absurd. One more red flag.
Leotlela, a professional athlete who has a Nike contract, could have suffered financially, his agent Lee-Roy Newton said.
His deal offers bonus incentives for breaking records.
He isn’t just eyeing Simbine’s 10.19 national junior mark, but the 9.97 men’s under-20 world record.
“We have identified it was a potential sub10,” Newton said of Leotlela’s run.
Had Leotlela received an official time, there could have been “three or four deals” to be made, plus there might have been qualification for the world championships.
“For sure, he will go sub-10 this season,” added Newton, who in his days as a sprinter had a 9.95 sprint in Durban disallowed after an investigation by ASA.
TV commentator and former 400m runner Arnaud Malherbe, who hand-timed videos of some races, believes the timing of the women’s 100m hurdles race, with bests by winner Rikenette Steenkamp and Maryke Brits, was potentially legitimate.
After that, the accuracy of the timing equipment possibly deteriorated.
“I don’t have an issue as long as ASA do their due diligence [on the results]. We’ve had issues like this before . . . If the times stand, then the athletes should repeat their times.”
Others were scathing of ASA’s initial reluctance to launch a probe.
One coach said if the timing was out, it would cast doubt — even unfairly — on other results from the country, such as Van Niekerk’s 9.98sec in Bloemfontein last year, when he became the only man on the planet to break 10 seconds for the 100m, 20 for the 200m and 44 for the 400m.
“ASA needed to come out quickly,” said a former athlete. “People needed to know ASA was on top of this.”
“We all make mistakes,” added a coach. “Admit the problem.”
ASA has done that now, even if it moved slower than the times spat out by the suspect timing system.