Julian Drew
At the colourful and emotional send-off for the South African Olympic team last Sunday, the Olympic oath was read on behalf of the team by modern pentathlete Claud Cloete.
While it is true that Cloete is only in the team courtesy of a wild card granted to athletes from developing countries to ensure universality at the Games, he is far from being an “Olympic tourist” like many of the team who went to Barcelona.
There are those who think Cloete is there merely to add a bit of colour to a largely white affair, but in truth he has a far better chance of doing well than many of the 87-strong squad.
The sport of modern pentathlon owes its existence to the founder of the modern Olympic Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, whose wish to introduce a sport which could determine the best all-round athlete was finally granted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1911.
The sport consists of shooting, fencing, swimming, riding and running and, for the first time in Atlanta, will follow the original intentions of De Coubertin, who wanted all the events to take place on the same day.
Prior to 1994 the events took place over five days. This, coupled with the inherent costs of competing in disciplines like shooting, fencing and horse riding which restrict participation in the sport to mainly military personnel, led to a growing feeling within the IOC that modern pentathlon no longer met the requirements of the modern sporting environment.
The difficulties of taking part in the sport are illustrated in South Africa by the fact that only about 15 people compete in modern pentathlon but that is still more than the number of female archers in South Africa, a sport which has three participants in Atlanta.
Although Cloete has limited international experience and has been in the sport on and off for only four and a half years, he is indeed a remarkable talent. The only reason he booked his own passage to the Games was because he drew petulant horses in his Olympic qualifying competitions.
“The riding is the one element in modern pentathlon where anything can happen, even to the top athletes. Everyone is aware of that,” says Cloete.
Yet fencing and shooting are crucial to a good overall score and these are Cloete’s forte. In Seoul in April Cloete scored 4 685 points from his other four events and had he drawn a co-operative horse and had a reasonable round of 1 000 points he would have scored 5 685 points.
Cloete still had another chance at the last of the three Olympic qualifying tournaments in Rome in May but again his equine companion left much to be desired. “It was like a turbo-charged Ferrari,” says Cloete.
The horse threw him twice and he earned no points for the riding. Cloete is optimistic about Atlanta, though, and believes that the standard of horses will be higher and more consistent there, making it less of a lottery.
Atlanta will be the 26-year-old Cloete’s first Olympics, but he has competed at two world championships. He must have some idea of what to expect in the cauldron of Olympic competition after attending the Barcelona games as a member of Nocsa’s development squad.
In Barcelona, there were 64 competitors but this time there are only 32 with qualification being tougher than ever.
Only one of the Barcelona medallists made it — Russia’s bronze medallist Edouard Zenovka, who claimed the last qualifying place in Rome by just three points.
That nobody dominates modern pentathlon shows how difficult it is to be consistent in all five disciplines on the day with the odds increased by the luck of the draw in the riding event.
But, says Cloete: “Fencing is the most important part of the pentathlon and it is something I’m really looking forward to. You need to attack and be very aggressive in fencing and that’s my trump card.”
Shooting, too, is a strong point for Cloete: he won both these events at the Olympic qualifier in Seoul out of a field of 45.
Cloete came into the sport after being spotted at a run-and-swim biathlon in Cape Town at the end of 1991 by Mark Wiley, now a National Party senator and president of the Western Cape Modern Pentathlon Association. This year, Cloete relocated to Pretoria to train full-time under Paul Hentschel, a fencing master at Tukkies University.
“From his results in Seoul,” says Hentschel, I would say his potential is as high as any competitor in the world right now. He has a definite advantage over many of his opponents because of his ability to explode. He can concentrate his power and let it all go at any chosen moment.”
Should Cloete time his explosions to perfection in Atlanta — and if the gods overlooking proceedings from Mount Olympus send him a winged Pegasus rather than a turbo-charged “Ferrari” — this wild card might exceed his wildest dreams on July 30.