Superb training facilities and southern hospitality at the LaGrange camp will help the South African team acclimatise before Atlanta, writes Julian Drew
WHEN South Africa went to Barcelona for the 1992 Olympic Games it was a hastily assembled and rather under-prepared team that marched into the Montjuic Stadium. On July 19 it will be an entirely different story for the 87 athletes who take part in the opening ceremony of the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta.
Most of them have benefitted from the National Olympic Committee of South Africa’s (Nocsa) Operation Excellence which has given them financial support for training and competition as well as scientific and medical assistance. Of equal importance in their preparation, however, will be the acclimatisation camp the team will attend in LaGrange, a small town with a population of 26 000, 100km south west of Atlanta.
When the team leaves on Sunday it will go to LaGrange for two weeks before moving into the Olympic Village on August 15. It will be in this former textile town at the centre of the cotton farming industry that South Africa’s Olympians will undergo their final preparations for the Games and get used to the stifling heat and humidity of Georgia which is likely to play a big role in the outcome of many Olympic events.
South Africa will not be alone in LaGrange, for it is in heavy demand as a pre-Olympic training site. The Olympic teams of Mauritius, Mozambique, the Seychelles, Swaziland, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Surinam and the Czech Republic will also be based there as will certain sports codes from Brazil, France and Holland.
It is such a popular destination because of its superb facilities and the well publicised training camp which has been up and running in the town since 1992. The “I train in LaGrange” programme was set up by American coach Ron Davis at the LaGrange College to help African athletes prepare for the Atlanta Olympics and is based on a similar programme in which he was involved prior to the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
It has become so successful that it has been officially recognised by the International Olympic Cornmittee as one of its Olympic Solidarity centres. The sports infrastructure at the college includes two synthetic running tracks, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, weight training facilities, full medical support and training venues for most other Olympic sports.
“If God were to choose a place to train his angels it would be in LaGrange,” was the eloquent opinion of the South African Olympic athletics coach, Wilf Paish, after a reconnaissance visit earlier in the year.
“The whole LaGrange community is excited about the South African team coming to prepare for the Games and they have been busy forming committees to ensure that the team is well received and has a positive experience prior to moving into the Olympic Village,” says Davis. “We have set up a communications centre so that the athletes can phone home and a social centre for relaxation. We’ve also been in touch with the South African nutritionists to ensure that we have all the kinds of food that South Africans are used to,” says Davis.
So organised is LaGrange that it has become a role model for other venues preparing to host Olympic athletes before the Games. “We’re the most experienced programme in Georgia right now because since March 1992 the LaGrange community has been exposed to athletes coming to train here from different parts of the world. We feel we have an advantage over all the other communities who are busy establishing similar programmes and in fact we have been getting a stream of calls from around Georgia asking what to do to prepare for other teams who will be coming to train before the Olympics,” says Davis.
The emphasis on Africa at LaGrange and Davis’s involvement there comes from his long time association with the continent. Davis was a top- class athlete himself who missed out on his own shot at Olympic glory when he hit a barrier and fell in the steeplechase at the US Olympic Trials of 1964. He received some consolation from being chosen as one of 10 American athletes to tour Africa after the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
“We visited many countries in Africa and my experience was so positive that I decided I’d like to return someday and make a contribution to African athletics, ” recalls Davis. After studying at San Jose State College in the early 1960s, Davis returned there in 1968 as an assistant track coach. Those were heady times at San Jose. Athletes from the college won four gold medals and set four world records at the Mexico City Olympics.
It was also a time of political consciousness. One of the San Jose athletes, Harry Edwards, tried to organise a black boycott of the US Olympic team. It never happened but many of the black athletes formed an organisation called the Olympic Project for Human Rights to highlight the treatment of black people in America.
That led to the famous black-gloved, clenched-fist protest of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who were both form San Jose, at the 200m medal ceremony. Davis became a close friend of another of those Olympians, 400m champion Lee Evans, who had also been to Africa and liked what he saw.
In 1973 the two of them were offered posts as national coaches in Nigeria and by the 1978 All Africa Games in Algeria their work was beginning to pay dividends. “We were the first country to offficially beat Kenya at track and field. We won more medals than Kenya and beat them by 68 points to 63,” remembers Davis.
After that the offers poured in and Davis went to Tanzania with explicit instructions to bring back the country’s first Olympic medal from the forthcoming Moscow Olympics in 1980. He achieved that through former 1 500m world record holder, Filbert Bayi, who moved up to the 3 000m steeplechase and took the silver medal behind Poland’s Bronislaw Malinowski.
A visit to Maputo convinced him to go and help the cause in Mozambique in 1981 but he had already seen enough of conditions throughout Africa to know that African athletes were at a big disadvantage compared with their counterparts in the First World.
“During the time I was training Filbert Bayi in Tanzania I realised that he didn’t have the opportunity to do highly technical training like Coe, Ovett and Walker who were his main rivals at the time. We didn’t have weights or decent facilities and when I went to Mozambique things were even worse,” says Davis.
He began to think about setting up a training camp with proper facilities to help African athletes prepare for major competitions and, as luck would have it, in 1983 one of his Tanzanian athletes ended up staying with Andrew Young who was then the mayor of Atlanta. “I started communicating with Andrew Young and I discussed some of the problems we were facing in Africa.
“When I was back in the States on holiday Andrew Young asked me to pay him a visit in Atlanta and I ended up having discussions with various city offficials on how we could arrange a training camp for African athletes to come to Atlanta prior to the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
“Andrew Young agreed straight away to assist in any way possible so on my way back to Africa I stopped off in London to see Sam Ramsamy and we drew up a plan together for the training camp,” says Davis who knew Ramsamy from his days as coach of Nigeria and the African boycott of the 1978 Commonwealth Games.
Eighty athletes from 10 African countries as well as Panama and Pakistan attended the training camp and it proved to be such a success that when Atlanta started bidding for the 1996 Olympics they vowed to set up a similar training camp to assist African athletes. Atlanta’s dream became a reality and Davis was brought back from Mauritius in 1991 to start the groundwork for the current success story at LaGrange. The first athletes were recruited on to the programme in 1992 and in 1994 the IOC sent some of its Olympic Solidarity Atlanta `96 athletes to LaGrange and they were followed last year by a number of athletes from the Olympic Solidarity Youth Programme.
There are now 21 Olympic Solidarity athletes at LaGrange, more than at any other centre in the world, as well as many other athletes from around the globe who are sponsored by local companies and the LaGrange community.
Among them is a face that will be familiar to many South Africans. Tina Paulino of Mozambique campaigned on local tracks for two years before going to LaGrange last year and she will be only too happy to show the South Africans around when they arrive on Monday.