Paralympics leader Leon is in it for the love

BUSY TIMES: Leon Fleiser takes care of things for Team South Africa LEON Fleiser, the newly appointed chef de mission of Team South Africa for the 2016 Rio Paralympics in September, is a rare breed.

For the first time in SA history, at least when it comes to the big showpieces, a former athlete will head up the team administration.

“The one thing I’ve always tried to do as an administrator is, I always think, ‘if I’m an athlete, what would I want?’,” said Fleiser, who captained the wheelchair basketball team at Sydney 2000.

“I make sure that all the athletes should worry more about their performance.”

Fleiser, a manager at the SA Olympic Committee (Sascoc), has been to the last two Olympics, as well as the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and Glasgow, but he has also been to tougher events, like the 2007 All-African showpiece.

There was a well-documented food shortage in the main village there, but Fleiser was in another compound with different challenges. “Our food was a little bit better, but we had toilets that didn’t work at all. We made a plan.

“As South Africans we don’t complain, we confront the problem.

“All the Games I’ve been to are special. I live for Games time . . . this is when I start thriving,” said Fleiser, pointing out the long hours have started already. “We seldom get out of the office before 8pm. With the time difference, I’m doing emails from home.”

He believes the SA Paralympic team in Rio can match the eight golds from London 2012, though he knows they won’t get close to the overall medal tally of 29.

“Charl Bouwer [retired], Natalie du Toit [retired] and Oscar Pistorius [awaiting sentencing] won 16 medals on their own, but the quality of this team is good.”

As chef he will have almost no sleep during the Games, spreading himself between watching the athletes until late at night and then getting up early for meetings.

His work will start two days before the team lands in Rio, doing the delegation registration meeting where he must double-check all the events that athletes have entered, as well as completing a checklist of all the rooms and equipment.

“The day you check out you’ve got to go back and check, and whatever’s missing you pay for.

“Our athletes are normally pretty good . . . The most frequent things the athletes lose are their keys. They’re terrible with keys.” There’s time for fun too. At one Games, South Africa were disturbed by triumphant New Zealanders celebrating a gold medal with a haka at 1am.

“We then won a medal and we were blowing the vuvuzela — also about 1am — and the New Zealand guys came out to complain and my one colleague said, ‘you guys were talking to your spirits yesterday, we’re speaking to ours today, go back inside’. And they left.”

Fleiser, always quick to throw a smile and unleash his Eddie Murphy-esque laugh, was paralysed in a Hillbrow nightclub shooting a week before his 21st birthday in 1991.

“We were young and stupid, the guys started shooting, I got shot in the back and that changed my life for the better.

“That changed my path in life. I have travelled the world, I have got a beautiful wife, three beautiful kids, a job I love. [I] do what I love to do and get paid for it.”