Far more than the Ironman at stake for Bay’s citizens

IN 1978 Queen’s lead singer, Freddie Mercury, watched the Tour de France in Montreux (Switzerland). Who could have known what this moment would bring – a chain of cool (new) happenings that started with a song about riding a bike, that 40 years later the man with iron lungs could inform our views of the Ironman?

But it did. King Freddie sang: “I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride it where I like. You say black, I say white; you say bark, I say bite.”

This sentiment seems to pretty much sum up the debate we’re having here in Nelson Mandela Bay regarding our hosting of the Ironman 70.3 World Championship.

The successful release of the song back in 1979 led to an infamous Queen music video, controversial because it featured 65 naked female models racing around a stadium on bicycles.

Every time Queen played in any city, bicycle shops would run out of bells as fans sought to ring along to the song.

Queen then bought the recording studio in Montreux and recorded many of their great hits there. Why was Queen in Montreux? They were there because they were being taxed heavily back home and – more importantly – because of a vision that the city’s tourist office employee, Claude Nobs, had had 11 years previously.

Passionate about music, he set about convincing prominent musicians to come and play in this little out-of-the-way village on the edge of Lake Geneva.

The Montreux Jazz Festival is now the second largest such music festival in the world and has been going for 51 years.

Did Nobs ever think that investing in his vision would lead to naked female bike-riding?

Some 23 years before the Tour de France event, on June 25 and 26 1955, the Congress of the People gathered delegates at Kliptown (now part of Soweto) to discuss, and subsequently adopt, the Freedom Charter.

The gathering was the outcome of months of work by the Congress Alliance, a non-racial united front led by the ANC and of the estimated 3 000 delegates (representing more than 200 invited organisations) – while the overwhelming majority was black – there were more than 300 Indians, 200 coloureds and 100 whites. A truly rainbow moment. The gathering, and its subsequent seminal document, fundamentally shaped the freedom struggle and informed much of our constitution.

It’s founding principle is that the “people shall govern” and makes clear that “our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality; that our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities”.

In 2017, the triathlon will test Nelson Mandela Bay’s ability to live out that “brotherhood”. But it isn’t just about tarring a stretch of road. The issue centres on how (and where) the city spends its money.

Should it address urgent needs (which citizens can see), or should it invest its scarce resources in facilities that leverage our assets – the immediate benefit of which is out of sight for most of our citizens? Why invest in this particular triathlon? Some 4 500 triathletes will travel from all over the world to compete in the September 2018 Ironman 70.3 World Championship (previously known as the Half-Ironman).

These include the world’s top triathletes. The event starts with a 1.8km swim (from Hobie Beach), a 90km bike ride (out and back along Marine Drive via Seaview to Beachview) and a 21.1km run for the finish that ends back at Hobie.

The route has been carefully selected to meet triathlon championship standards and minimise disruption to the city.

The athletes – 92% of whom are foreign – will bring an estimated 16 000 people with them in support.

It’s expected that they’ll spend some R300-million while eating, sleeping and shopping as they tourist their way through our bay.

The championship event is not to be mistaken for our 15th full Ironman event, which will happen in April next year, drawing some 2 000 athletes (40% foreign) and generating some R75-million direct spend. So, hosting the championship itself is kind of a big deal.

But this isn’t just because of the direct spend of the visitors. For those marketing gurus selling the Bay as a destination (vs a gateway), the optics of the route along Marine Drive are world class.

Think bottlenose dolphins leaping, birds singing and waves crashing as those sweaty, swearing, lean machines whizz by!

To have a championship cycling route sets the platform for the Bay to become the venue of choice for cycling events, it’s key to building the brand of being the world’s most active city – it’s potentially a Claude Nobs moment.

But it comes at a cost. The city has to pay the event organisers money for the privilege: a R7.8-million sponsorship fee (already paid), R8-million in expenses and the chicken-bone-in-the-throat amount of R200-million to flatten out the bumpy and (mainly provincial) potholed road.

Province has given the go-ahead for the municipality to make the repairs, but there’s no money to pay for it.

So it’s go-it-alone or go home for the municipality. And therein lies the biggest pothole. To get the job done by July, the municipality has to reshuffle its long-term budget, shifting some money from this year’s left pocket to next year’s right pocket to do the necessary.

It wants to take money from the budget allocated for other roads.

This means the pothole at the end of your road that has you gritting your teeth and clinching your, err. . . , toes every time you absentmindedly drive over it won’t get repaired next year.

Every resident thus affected has the right to question whether the city’s really working for him or her?

And therein too lies the political opportunism.

“You say black, I say white, you say bark, I say bite” – members on both sides of the council seem to be channelling Mercury’s ghost. But it’s not the only ghost of relevance. We’ve been here before. In 2010, the World Cup stadium cost more than promised and we had to cough up an extra R261-million.

The following year, the city cancelled capital projects worth R800-million: bucket toilets, five clinics, and yep – you guessed it – R80-million on roads for previously disadvantaged communities. Our citizens have heard this tune before.

We can do a lot of wheel-spinning while playing who’s-to-blame, but that game always ends in confirming the adage we teach our children: point your finger and there are always four fingers pointing back.

It is disingenuous of the party that was in power when we said “yes” to Ironman 70.3 to now wash its hands of the deal (given too its handling of the stadium). It is equally disingenuous for the party now in power to demean the warnings from the opposition when it has sounded similar cautions through the years.

For Nelson Mandela Bay to solve its youth unemployment crisis (and its multitude of other issues) we have to grow the cake, not cut the slices more thinly. This means recognising our assets and making them sweat.

We’re an ideal triathlon venue – that’s an asset. More triathlons, not less, should be the goal.

We’re already contracted to Ironman to deliver a world-class venue for the championship. We need to honour that commitment. Dither, and Ironman must go elsewhere (like the Sevens went to Cape Town), we can’t afford “NMB-can’t-deliver” as our brand.

But the real crisis we face is that we have to convince those who were robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace that our city will deliver a different future.

And to deliver that our council must find a way to work together or we will truly become a town haunted by the ghosts of our past.

For Nelson Mandela Bay to solve its youth unemployment crisis (and its multitude of other issues) we have to grow the cake