Olympic delay could help SA push ‘golden curtain’ eastward
● With the 2020 Olympics delayed for a year, SA will have the chance to shift its golden curtain that has descended the globe at 24.938 degrees east for the past 68 years.
That is the longitude on which Helsinki lies, where SA’s first two women Olympic champions were crowned back in 1952. Highjumper Esther Brand and then swimmer Joan Harrison won the nation’s only gold medals that year, and no South African has ascended to the top of a Games podium any further east of that.
SA has failed on three ventures to the east; four bronze medals at Melbourne 1956; two silver and three bronze at Sydney 2000 and one silver at Beijing 2008.
No South African was likely to win gold in Tokyo if the Games had kicked off as planned on July 25. Nobody had been ranked No 1 in the world since 2017.
Ahead of Rio 2016, Wayde van Niekerk and Caster Semenya were certainties; this time around there are only maybes and hopefuls. The extra 12 months help.
Already the rowers are using the lockdown to keep up the momentum of hard training. National coach Roger Barrow set up an online training room so the rowers can work out at the same time.
“We’ve got to carry on training quite firmly,” said Barrow. “We’ve created a virtual room where all the athletes will log in every morning and we will still train as a squad for as many of our sessions as possible ... Ergo sessions, weight sessions, yoga sessions.”
Data from heart-rate pods worn by rowers is transmitted to coaches.
The postponement also assists those lower down the pecking order, like SA’s amateur boxers.
Their collapsed administration failed to hold proper trials and get them to the African qualifying tournament.
New interim president of the SA National Boxing Organisation (Sanabo), Siya Mkwalo, said the SA championships, set for early July, would be used for selection for a world qualifying tournament.
There is speculation that dopers will juice up unfettered because there can be no testing during the lockdown, but SA Institute of Dope-Free Sport (Saids) CEO Khalid Galant warned it wouldn’t be so easy.
“If they’re doping we will see it in their biological profiles, we’ll see the anomalies.”
Local administrators also have time to secure more funding for SA’s Olympic stars. That is not negotiable, not if SA is to shift its golden curtain nearly 8,000km eastwards into the Pacific next year.