Grant Shimmin
Bidding for Glory: Why South Africa lost the Olympic and World Cup bids, and how to win next time by Edward Griffiths (Jonathan Ball) Edward Griffiths believes more sports books need to be written by South Africans. “There should be a book on every Springbok rugby tour. There’s a market for it,” he told me recently. It’s not surprising he feels that way, having seen Rainbow Warrior, the autobiography of Francois Pienaar, which he effectively ghost-wrote, chalk up sales of a phenomenal 75 000 copies, two-thirds in English and the remainder in Afrikaans. The 37-year-old former sports editor of the Sunday Times, head of Topsport and chief executive officer of the South African Rugby Football Union is currently busy on his 12th book, about the Springbok captains since 1891. But it’s his 11th that concerns us here and I have to admit to not being entirely convinced that a market exists for it. Griffiths himself describes it as a “book that needed to be written”. Having read it, and it’s a concise, easily read volume of 190 pages after all, Griffiths remains one of the most talented wordsmiths in sports journalism in this country I’m still not convinced. For one thing, he admits he had hoped to spend September writing an account of “how the World Cup was won” and had to “rejig the whole project” after the controversial climax to the football bid in Zurich in July. Quite clearly, the book he hoped to write would have revolved entirely around the soccer bid, which Griffiths was involved in in the fields of “media and strategy”, but the bid’s heartbreaking failure meant it fell neatly in line with the Cape Town Olympic bid, a process which ran its course more than three years ago now. The book comprises an account of both campaigns Griffiths was involved in the Cape Town effort as a bid book editor and in his role as head of Topsport and is particularly strong in portraying the central characters in each bid (Raymond Ackerman, Chris Ball, Irvin Khoza, Danny Jordaan) and in recounting aspects his insider role made him privy to, though a lot of it will be old hat to those who followed the bids closely. He reasons that South Africa will ultimately end up hosting these events and gives tips on how the lessons of past failures should influence future bids. Griffiths’s inside knowledge and unquestioned writing ability make it a good read, but the potential market, three years after the failure of the Cape Town bid, must be small. I enjoyed the book, but then it’s part of my job to follow such issues. I struggled to think of anyone I could give this book to who would particularly want to read it.
If you feel passionate about either issue, though, it’s worth a read.