Transforming SA sport still remains tardy

It’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking everything’s ok.

It’s a lot harder to front up to harsh realities which don’t present the images we’d like to see.

Of course, it’s a relatively simplistic approach to look at the make-up of national teams in order to determine whether sports have achieved transformation in a united South Africa.

But it’s about as good a barometer as we’ve got.

While the Eminent Persons Group on Transformation is working with federations to set and monitor targets across all levels of amateur and professional sport, it is unclear how much of the required information is gathered and how accurate the statistics have been in the annual EPG reports.

However, a glance at most national teams does expose an uncomfortable reality.

It’s not that there hasn’t been active transformation over the years, but it has been demonstrably slow.

In 1992, after returning from readmission, there were no black players in the SA cricket team that reached the World Cup semifinals, and three years later there was only one black player in the Springbok team and no players of colour in the Proteas netball team that competed in the World Cup finals.

Nearly three decades later, there were seven players of colour in the 23-man Springbok team (or a total of 30%) that turned out in last year’s Rugby World Cup final.

At the 2019 Cricket World Cup there were eight black players in the 16-man Proteas squad (50%) and at the Netball World Cup there were four players of colour in the 12-member squad (33%).

Elsewhere, of the 14 medals achieved by SA athletes in individual disciplines at the Olympic Games between 2008 and 2016, only five

(36%) have been earned by athletes of colour.

Similarly, in other codes, where are all the black golfers, hockey players, tennis stars and swimmers?

We can turn all the blind eyes we want, but in almost every sport, South Africa is still struggling to deliver 50% black representation in national teams.

As uncomfortable as it may be to address, we can’t keep hoping that equal opportunity will simply present itself to us wrapped and tied in a bow.

To transform South African sport, we still have a long way to go and a lot of work to do.

We can fool ourselves all we want. Numbers don’t lie.