Grant Shimmin
February 24 2001 may well turn out to be a red letter day in the history of South African sport.
That’s the day that the quadrennial meeting of the National Olympic Committee of South Africa (Nocsa) takes place and it could, given the goings-on this week, conceivably be the day Sam Ramsamy is voted out of power as its president.
Certainly, it is clear that there are elements within Nocsa, a body made up of the national federations of the sporting codes that are part of the Olympic Games, both summer and winter, who would like to see the back of the diminutive former schoolteacher from Durban. Given the willingness of outspoken Minister of Sport and Recreation Ngconde Balfour to shoot from the hip in his criticism of Ramsamy this week, they may well be emboldened to present a united challenge to his leadership, although one has to wonder who the right man or woman to replace him in the Olympic hot seat might be.
The war of words between the minister and the official stems from Balfour’s decision to call a sporting summit in Sandton next Monday, aimed at initiating the process of putting together a concerted blueprint for South African sport. Ramsamy has claimed that Nocsa already has such a process going, with a view to improving on the Sydney performance through careful analysis of what went wrong in Australia.
At the heart of the problem seems to be the contention that Nocsa is essentially answerable first and foremost to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), a standpoint that flies in the face of the widely held view that South Africa’s Olympic team, like its rugby, cricket, soccer, hockey and all other national teams, belongs to the people of South Africa. That is clearly the direction Balfour is coming from and has led to his accusations against Ramsamy of being “a divisive influence in South African sport” and running Nocsa for “his own selfish interests”.
The minister appears to envisage a grand plan plotting the way forward for all sport in the country, a scenario that would see Nocsa fitting in as just one small part of a greater whole, which is a logical aim. After all, every four-year cycle, ending with an Olympiad, also includes a Commonwealth Games and an All Africa Games, sporting gatherings that draw largely on the same codes, although the Commonwealth Games typically include some that are not part of either of the others.
Certainly the major sports swimming and athletics are part of all three and there seems no reason why the bodies that administer our national efforts at those gatherings should not be drawn into some kind of synchronisation that would ultimately improve results at each of the events.
The summit aside, though, Nocsa, and Ramsamy as president, have some tough questions to answer between now and February, most notably exactly how the money they received from their eight major sponsors to prepare the team for Sydney was spent.
By now Balfour’s assertion that Ramsamy had taken “buddies and wives” to the Games with money that should have been spent on athletes is old hat. It followed a newspaper article last month alleging that Nocsa had offered presidents or secretary generals of member federations five-day trips to the Games.
That Nocsa chose to respond by having its own secretary general, Dan Moyo, admit that Balfour, his private secretary and other highly placed sports officials had had their own trips to Sydney paid for may have been calculated to embarrass Balfour, but the minister doesn’t seem to be a man who embarrasses easily.
While Balfour’s trip should have been paid for by his own department, the fact remains that Balfour’s accusations are out there and they certainly stretch further than the five people mentioned by Moyo.
It’s not clear how many administrators took up the offer of trips from Nocsa, although I certainly saw at least one head of a national federation that had no athletes in the South African team in the travelling party’s “clubhouse” in Sydney during the games.
What is abundantly clear is that trips to Sydney didn’t come cheap. Packages booked through the official agents in South Africa, Sportsworld, including economy class flights and five nights’ accommodation in a tourist class hotel, cost in the region of R22?500 a person sharing.
Ramsamy has made the point this week that it is not his style to debate sensitive issues in public and that he wishes to discuss Balfour’s accusations privately. Unfortunately for him, in the interests of transparency he now has no choice but to make public, as soon as possible, detailed records of exactly how Nocsa spent the money all R40-million of it sponsors had paid out in the interests of making the Sydney team successful.
One sensitive issue that certainly hasn’t gone away is the exclusion of the men’s hockey team from the Sydney party, which has already resulted in a spate of retirements of world-class players. Ramsamy needs to make it clear who Nocsa had consulted in making its highly contentious decision, given that it claimed to have “consulted widely” at home and abroad. He travelled to Brazil to fight the hockey team’s efforts to get a pass to Sydney and it is unlikely he paid for that jaunt himself.
We’ve yet to hear anything. Ramsamy, who dismissively pronounced on the games team’s return that it was a good thing the hockey side hadn’t been taken because “they wouldn’t have done well at all” a claim apparently based on the poor finish of the women’s team owes the public a proper explanation of that decision, which he refused to overturn despite Balfour’s requests and spent a good deal of Nocsa funds defending.
Until he gives one, the belief that there was something sinister underlying the decision and the suspicion that no consultation actually took place will persist. And that could cost him when it counts most, in February. If he is voted out, South Africa could have its sole IOC member not representing anyone.