Meet the new athletics powerhouse: South Africa
The Rainbow Nation was among the also-rans on the biggest stage – but not any more. Ben Bloom discovers the secrets of its rise to the top
If Usain Bolt and Mo Farah were the superstars that bestrode last year’s Rio Olympics, there is no doubting which country cast the greatest golden glow.
Wins for Wayde van Niekerk (400metres) and Caster Semenya (800metres), plus silvers for Luvo Manyonga (long jump) and Sunette Viljoen ( javelin), meant South Africa entered uncharted territory. Never before had they achieved four podium finishes at an Olympics; now, at London’s World Championships, the country is targeting a minimum of three golds in addition to other potential medallists.
It is an extraordinary transformation for a nation that went two decades before Rio without a single Olympic athletics gold, and yet the suspicion persists that this success has been achieved despite the leadership at Athletics South Africa, rather than because of it. After years of boardroom squabbles, a revolving door of rudderless leaders and intervention from the world governing body, ASA’S baffling decision to omit more than a dozen athletes from their London World Championships team last week due to what most felt were seemingly arbitrary qualification criteria pushed people over the edge.
“It’s all good when you want to groom talent, but when there’s an opportunity to help the talent grow you shut the door on them,” said 100metres sprinter Akani Simbine, who has broken 10 seconds on eight occasions this year.
Van Niekerk echoed his teammate: “South Africa has so much potential right now and we still having team selection doubts and conflicts. Selection should be our last worry. Guys work too hard for this type of rejection.”
Speak to those with detailed knowledge of athletics in South Africa and it becomes immediately apparent that recent onfield success has nothing to do with ASA, which declined to comment for this article. “The knowledge at the national federation, it’s shocking,” said one coach. Another added: “This proves they know nothing, zip, zero about athletics.”
Instead, the beating heart of the sport in South Africa can be found not in Athletics South Africa’s Johannesburg headquarters, but 50 miles north, at Danie du Toit’s University of Pretoria High Performance Centre (HPC).
When South Africa claimed six medals across all sports at London 2012, with more than half of the country’s athletes on the podium from the HPC. By Rio 2016 it had increased even further, with the HPC producing almost half of the 23 athletes contributing to South Africa’s 10 medals. In the absence of anything resembling a formal centralised ASA plan, Du Toit’s is one of a number of privately funded high-performance centres that have sprung up around the country to fill the void.
Simbine and Manyonga are just two of South Africa’s leading lights to have plied their trade at the facility, while Semenya also began her career there. But it has been no easy ride. South Africa had come away from the 2008 Beijing Olympics with a paltry medal haul of one silver, and HPC coaches were not holding back when asked for their verdict of Du Toit’s facility. “They said the centre would never produce Olympic medals and they said we were a glorified hotel,” says Du Toit.
“So we made them the drivers of the system. Whatever the coach says goes and we made sure we had the most experienced coaches.”
More attention has been devoted to growing expertise in sports science, physiotherapy, nutrition and medical care. “It’s not simply ‘build it and they will come,’” explains South African sports scientist Ross Tucker. “It’s ‘build it, staff it, innovate, improve, develop and then they will come.’ I think of it like you are pushing a boulder up a hill; once you get to the top and you can start pushing it down the other side, you build momentum. Eventually we managed to get to the top of the hill.”
Athletes have also been inspired by their peers. Four years ago Simbine was little more than an irrelevance on the global stage, crashing out of the World Championships 100 metres heats. Two years later he made it no farther than the semi-finals.
However, it is his name that appears more than any other in the 10 fastest 100 metres times this year. Smiling as he considers the reason behind South Africa’s new-found success, Simbine pinpoints a moment that would barely have resonated outside of the country. “It was Anaso [Jobodwana] winning a 200m bronze medal at the 2015 World Champs,” he says. “After that it seemed everybody decided: ‘If Anaso can do it, we also can do it.’ There was a shift in mindset and self-belief.”
Inevitably, the sudden gold rush has invited scepticism.
“At the South African Championships in April we had four guys line up in the 100m final who had all gone sub-10,” Tucker observed. “There aren’t many countries in the world who can do that – I can only think of the USA and Jamaica and they have a history that is 40 years long.
“We have a history that is five or six years long, so what has happened is remarkable. If that level of transformation happened in somewhere like Russia, there would be very serious questions.”
Unlike their fellow African nations Kenya and Ethiopia, who have serious clouds over their almost non-existent anti-doping programmes, South Africa does not appear to suffer from wholesale drugs problems.
But while none of their current crop of high-profile names has ever been associated with cheating, the recent history is not crystal clear. Simon Magakwe, the first South African man to break 10 seconds for 100 metres, has only just returned from a two-year doping ban, while the number of athletes who failed tests in 2012 reached double figures.
At that point, ASA president James Evans admitted that “doping in South African athletics is becoming a serious problem”.
There is no suggestion that the issue has returned, even if Tucker admits it remains “an elephant in the room”. For the time being, however, South Africa’s rivals can only look on with envy and wonder how on earth they close the gap.