The Olympic Games are a bust, but ...
SA stars still have a bundle of hope
Afew months before the London 2012 Olympics, Cameron van der Burgh sat in a Pretoria restaurant and explained exactly how he intended to break the world record and win the 100m breaststroke gold medal. He executed the plan to perfection. For the first 75m of the final Van der Burgh stuck to his strategy, and the rest of the way he had to rely on passion and desire to overcome the excruciating pain of lactic acid and become the first man to break 58.50sec in his event.
That kickstarted an incredible run at the showpiece.
Two days later Chad le Clos beat US legend
Michael Phelps to win the 200m butterfly crown and two days after that the lightweight men’s four stunned the rowing world by claiming gold with a late charge.
At the three previous Games, SA had managed just a single gold, courtesy of the 4x100m freestyle relay in the pool at Athens in 2004. Now suddenly they had three.
Team SA had arrived, and it was no accident.
For three years leading up to 2012, Olympic athletes in SA enjoyed an unprecedented level of funding from Lotto.
The South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc) funded many medal hopefuls and their coaches through the Operation Excellence programme, reserved for those who have made it to the top.
The second aspect of the Lotto funding helped other athletes get to the top, with some national federations such as rowing, canoeing and swimming getting a total of R24m each, spread over the three years up to 2012.
From the moment Le Clos entered the senior ranks in 2009, there was no shortage of money.
Lotto started cutting funding immediately after the London Olympics, but the momentum contributed to Team SA landing 10 medals at Rio de Janeiro in 2016, equalling the nation’s best-ever overall tallies from Antwerp in 1920 and Helsinki in 1952. Operation Excellence claimed half of the Rio medals and could boast a share in a couple of others.
But four years later, Olympic sport in SA is in a funding crisis.
More Lotto cuts have left Sascoc unable to make Operation Excellence payments this year — the longest gap in the programme since the lead-up to Beijing 2008, where SA won a single silver — in the long jump — to equal the nation’s hitherto worst-ever performance, at Berlin in 1936.
Had the Tokyo Olympics not been postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic, Team SA would be competing on the ninth day today without having received a cent of support for the past seven months.
In 2017 Lotto slashed Sascoc’s funding by R100m a year, which meant, absurdly, the department of trade & industry was setting sport policy.
However the issue is not Sascoc, but a proper funding model for high-performance sport.
If the government wants to tighten the taps on Sascoc, that shouldn’t affect athletes.
The individual sports bodies that make up Sascoc, particularly the Olympic codes, will have to push for a solution and they must get the government to play ball.
The principle is simple: the Games happen every four years, and funding for each period needs to be guaranteed and consistent.
Until now, funding has been haphazard. It was easy to overlook this fact in the in the fat years leading up to the London Olympics, but these days both Lotto and the department of sport prefer standalone projects rather than rolling programmes.
But SA needs high-performance programmes, and the country’s top two Olympic coaches say these don’t have to be hugely expensive.
National swimming coach Graham Hill, SA’s most successful Olympic coach with no fewer than five medals, recalls travelling on shoestring budgets in Europe with Terence Parkin, who won an Olympic breaststroke silver at Sydney in 2000, and Charlene Wittstock, who is now Princess of Monaco.
The two would race to win the cash they required to pay for their trips. “I’d say ‘OK guys, we need medals today to pay the hotel bill tomorrow,’ ” Hill says.
Roger Barrow, the driving force behind rowing’s two medals in 2012 and 2016, is happy to do the bulk of his training in SA.
“We have perfect conditions for training in SA — sunshine, warm weather.”
The rowing team’s training camps in Lesotho and Limpopo are free of frills. But salaries for coaches and other medical experts around the team cost money, as does competing overseas.
A two-week sojourn in Europe can cost close to R1m, with the rental of boats alone setting the team back R100,000.
Barrow’s rowing squad system is one of SA’s two genuine high-performance programmes, the other being Neil Powell’s rugby sevens outfit.
Both produce consistent results, although the sevens side is funded wholly by SA Rugby and not Sascoc.
More financial support for other sports could mine medal-rich veins of talent.
“You cannot deliver a factory of athletes without funding,” says Hill.
The country’s most successful Cinderella sport in the past 10 years has been canoeing, with 11 individual world titles in marathon and surfski racing, neither of which are Olympic disciplines.
The sport has produced world-class canoeists such as Hank McGregor, Andy Birkett and, before them, Oscar Chalupsky.
Imagine if there had been a dedicated programme to hone their skills in sprinting, which is on the Olympic roster — Bridgitte Hartley would surely not be SA’s only Games medallist in this event.
In swimming, SA has enjoyed a healthy men’s freestyle sprint tradition.
Apart from the relay success in 2004, the nation has had a representative in the men’s 50m freestyle final at six of the seven Olympics since readmission in 1992, through four different men. Roland Schoeman alone swam in three consecutive finals.
Yet in 2016, SA lacked a strong 100m freestyler to round off a promising medley relay outfit starring Van der Burgh and Le Clos.
High-performance programmes could also be used to boost transformation.
Historically, SA has been strong at distance running and boxing.
It was once awash with talented runners, from 1,500m to the marathon, with the likes of Matthews Temane, Zithulele Sinqe, Johan Fourie and Josia Thugwane, SA’s first black Olympic champion. There is no longer any depth.
Even in the men’s 800m SA has little to show now, following the era of Hezekiel Sepeng and Mbulaeni Mulaudzi, who landed one Olympic silver each.
In the pre-isolation years boxing was SA’s richest source of silverware, but since the readmission to international competition no local boxer has won more than one fight at an Olympics.
Amateur boxing is in a state of collapse, but the country’s professional fighters have been successful in the past 10 years.
There is clearly potential.
There could be other sports worth investing in, like cycling and wrestling. And shouldn’t SA be excelling in shooting events?
There are more than 30 Olympic sports, but not all of them would get funding.
Most high-performance programmes should be able to run at R5m-R7m a year.
Decisions about which programmes to fund would ideally be made by an objective committee, probably made up of coaches and sports scientists.
Sceptics might claim that even limiting funding to a handful of programmes would be unaffordable.
But make no mistake, there is money in sport.
The government’s national sports department has had a budget in excess of R1bn a year for a while now. Even R50m provided from that budget could have a huge impact.
And Lotto also needs to come to the party. The oldtimers from the National Sports Council argue that the Lotto was set up primarily to fund sport, and to date it has done so to the tune of more than R1bn.
Sascoc has received in excess of R750m, the Sports Trust R134m and Athletics SA R124m.
Swimming SA, which has won 14 Olympic medals since readmission, the same as track & field, received almost half of the athletics allocation at R65.2m.
The national table tennis body got more than R50m. SA has not had a single table tennis player competing at the Olympics this millennium so far.
More than a quarter of a century into democracy, SA needs to be looking to win record medal hauls.
Just don’t hold your breath for Tokyo.