With javelin star Tom Petranoff helping them, South Africa’s disabled athletes are leading the way in throwing events, writes Julian Drew
SOUTH AFRICA’S most successful group of international sportsmen and women will hold their national championships at Pilditch Stadium in Pretoria this weekend, and with places in the team for the Paralympics in Atlanta on the line, the competition is expected to be of an extremely high standard.
The occasion is the South African athletics championships for the physically disabled. Many of those who will be competing were among the 29 athletes who went to the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) world athletics championships in Berlin in 1994. That team returned with a total of 19 medals, eight of them gold, and four world records, which gives an indication of the high level at which South Africa’s disabled sports stars compete.
South Africa has been allocated 14 places so far for athletics at the Atlanta Paralympics based on the performances and rankings of our athletes. All these performances are achieved overseas, however, because unfortunately there are no internationally accredited judges in South Africa to ratify marks in line with IPC requirements.
This is a direct result of the sports boycott era but plans are being made to rectify the situation. This weekend the IPC is sending one of its technical delegates who will be able to perform the necessary tasks if any records are broken and will investigate awarding international accreditation to those local officials who warrant it.
With the current form of some of the athletes it is not a case of if records are broken but rather when. At a meeting in Pretoria on March 2 Fanie Lombaard broke the discus world record for his disability category with all six of his throws. Alas it couldn’t be ratified but on Friday night he must surely claim the mark as his own.
Many of South Africa’s medal contenders at the Paralympics, which take place 11 days after the Olympics using the same facilities, are in throwing events and one of the people who should be given credit for this is former javelin world record holder Tom Petranoff.
He has now given up his athletics career despite throwing well over the Olympic qualifying distance of 80m in the javelin in training this year.
He says there is too much politics in athletics at the moment and he would rather devote his time to people who appreciate what he is doing. ”Tom started helping me about nine months ago and at the beginning he had a big impact from a motivational point of view, but later on the distances started coming through as well,” says Lombaard. He played rugby as a wing for Northern Transvaal in 1992 and 1993 before a training accident curtailed his career after he landed awkwardly on his leg and it buckled.
”My knee was Iying on the ground at ninety degrees to my leg and I knew then that my rugby-playing days were over. The ambulance took so long to come and my main artery was severed so I ended up having to have my leg amputated at the knee,” says Lombaard. He says as a disabled person you can either be a fighter or a fader and he started doing sport almost straight away.
”I didn’t expect to be a top disabled athlete but in disabled sport there are no boundaries, just challenges. It’s all in the mind,” says Lombaard. In Berlin he won three gold medals and broke two world records in the shot, discus and javelin and that was before Petranoff got hold of him!
”It’s great having Tom because he uses exactly the same techniques as for able bodied athletes which a lot of coaches for disabled athletes don’t do. The results speak for themselves,” claims Lombaard. He hadn’t even thrown a discus for two months when he went beyond the world record six times in Pretoria but Petranoff’s javelin coaching seems to have rubbed off on all his events.
”I knew he would improve in the discus because of his javelin technique. He’s learnt to release the implement from a higher position in the javelin and now he does the same with the discus.” says Petranoff.
After this weekend’s championships a squad of 25 athletes will be chosen for a two-day training camp under Petranoff and the team for Atlanta is expected to be selected by the end of April.
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