Martin Gillingham
South Africa’s athletics selectors have performed a remarkable volte face and secretly invited top 400m runner Arnaud Malherbe to join the team in Edmonton.
Last week’s Mail & Guardian reported that South Africa would be travelling to Canada without a specialist relay squad. The men’s 4x400m quartet is one of South Africa’s few realistic medal chances but when the official team was announced on July 21 just three specialist one-lap runners were included.
In a heated interview 11 days ago, this writer was told by Athletics South Africa (ASA) chief executive Banele Sindani that Malherbe would not be going to the world championships and that “you can write what you want because I don’t care”.
But it seems that within hours of the interview Sindani started laying the foundations for Malherbe’s late inclusion. Malherbe, whose anchor leg at the last world championships in Seville two years ago was the fastest relay leg by a South African, has revealed that he received a cellphone message last Wednesday from ASA official Richard Stander, inviting him to join the squad. The following day Malherbe and Sindani had a secret meeting at ASA’s headquarters in Houghton. “Banele told me that I should have been in the team from the start,” he said.
Despite several days of disappointment, throughout which he didn’t train and became resigned to missing his first global championships since the 1993 world championships, Malherbe accepted Sindani’s olive branch. He goes to Edmonton purely as a member of the relay squad. Hendrick Mokganyetsi, Marcus la Grange and Adriaan Botha have already been selected for the individual 400m. “I’m happy about that,” Malherbe says. “If they’d asked me to do the individual event then I wouldn’t have been ready.”
It is a measure of the paranoia within the corridors of athletics power that a veil of secrecy continues to hang over Malherbe’s inclusion. Both he and the fifth-ranked South African 400m runner Jopie van Oudtshoorn, who is also a late inclusion for the relay, flew out of Johannesburg on Monday night without their additions to the team having been announced. Stander, the man who made the telephone call to Malherbe, is the most confused of all. He says: “If there are two new members of the team, then that’s your perception.”
Stander has also disclosed that reigning Olympic 400m hurdles bronze medallist Llewellyn Herbert has been summoned by ASA to attend a fitness test in Edmonton to assess whether he has recovered from the hamstring injury that has kept him out of competition since the South African domestic season. Herbert had been preparing in Los Angeles and was hoping to stay there until Saturday. The first round of the men’s 400m hurdles takes place on Tuesday evening (South African time).
ENDS