ASA board has a clear plan

A LEVEL of stability has set in at Athletics South Africa (ASA) after its board was re-elected at the federation’s Quadrennial General Meeting in Johannesburg over the weekend.

ASA president Aleck Skhosana and his vicepresident Dr Harold Adams were nominated unopposed.

The previous board served a two-year term following an intervention by the IAAF after the previous board reached a stalemate with former president James Evans.

Skhosana said the board managed to “steady the ship” but they would admitted there were still some outstanding issues to address.

“The mandate remains to restore the pride of athletics to its former glory and make it even better than we have in the past two years,” Skhosana said.

“Our focus will be to ensure our athletes, coaches, managers, our technical officials, the public, sponsors, and our partners (including Government) remain our most important stakeholders. “

Skhosana said ASA’s mandate was to develop and nurture talent that would ultimately produce medals at major international competitions.

He said mediocrity would no longer be tolerated as the athletics targets greater international success.

“People expect South Africa to return with more medals from next year’s World Championships in London and Tokyo 2020.

“They expect more when South Africa host the 2022 Commonwealth Games,” he said.

“If athletics is not right, football, rugby and cricket would not be right.

“The reason for that is simple, athletics is the mother of all sports.”

Skhosana added that increased emphasis would be placed on support for coaches.

ASA seemed to have learned from its mistakes from the last few years with its team selections and failure to develop relay teams.

The federation was in the process of developing a uniform selection criteria for all major events.

The country’s failure to send relay teams to the Rio Olympics has finally forced the federation to create more opportunities for teams to qualify.

Skhosana said the country would for the first time send teams to the World Relays in the Bahamas next year.

South Africa did not participate in this first two championships in 2014 and 2015.

“We have plans, among other things, to assemble a formidable team to participate at the World Relay Championships next year in the Bahamas,” Skhosana said.

Meanwhile, Tsholofelo Thipe, who served a two-year ban for a doping offence was elected onto the athlete’s commission. Mamelodi Sundowns

SUNDOWNS WALKED into the lion’s den, marked their territory and left as the new kings of Africa by winning the jungle-like CAF Champions League. This wasn’t a football test. Sundowns’ passed that test already with flying colours by topping a group that had teams with nine titles combined in the continent’s premier club competition. Beating the most successful of those clubs, five-time African