ASA scrooges need to move with the times

In 1994, shortly after delivering a brave front-running effort to win the Comrades Marathon, American athlete Alberto Salazar announced he would be donating his prizemoney to charity.

Even in those early stages of the professional era, Salazar was stunned to learn that there was no money.

His kind gesture evaporated in a puff of wishful smoke, and with it the South African amateur road running era.

The following year, the Comrades introduced prizemoney for the first time, and just like that, a lengthy uncomfortable process in transforming the sport from amateur to professional was completed. Or so we may have thought.

Fast forward more than two decades and it seems Athletics South Africa (ASA) would do well to upgrade from fax to e-mail because they still haven’t got the memo.

While race promoters have managed to rope in corporate support, which in turn offers lucrative benefits for the country’s top athletes, the national federation has been left lagging.

As with any sport, the talent is key, and if road running is going to attract corporate support, a large chunk of the profits needs to be set aside for the elite athletes.

A number of races around the country now offer prize purses in excess of R1 million, giving athletes the opportunity to perform at their best on home soil, rather than having to ply their trade overseas in order to put food on

Wesley Bo on

the table as professionals.

In Durban tomorrow, some of the world’s top 10km runners will be gunning for massive bonus payments at the FNB CitySurf Run, and a national record will be worth R300 000 to anyone who has got the legs to give it a go.

That’s a real incentive, and local runners will be giving everything they’ve got to try and make the grade for a big pay day.

In Mbombela next month, however, ASA has attempted to push the athletes to go for similarly fast times, but they’re offering two cents short of a pittance.

For an athlete to break a national record at the SA 10km Championships, they have been offered a R2 000 carrot, which is hardly enough to buy a new pair of running shoes.

That’s like asking Usain Bolt to chase his 100m world record for a bag of toffee apples. It’s a slap in the face.

During the amateur era, the various national road running championships produced worldclass performances, and they formed the pinnacle of the domestic circuit, but times have changed.

With promoters offering massive prize purses for races around the country, there are plenty of options for those chasing fast times and lucrative rewards, but the national championships is not one of them.

And that’s OK. There’s nothing wrong with SA Championship events being contested as slower, tactical races, but if you want athletes to rip their legs to pieces in order to break new ground, they must be compensated.

Bolt doesn’t run for sweets, and our top distance runners shouldn’t have to either.

If they’re going to run worldclass times on home soil, it must be worth their while, and athletes should be paid at full value.

They might not be worth the commercial value of an athlete like Bolt, but surely we can agree that they’re worth more than a bag of toffee apples.