A few weeks ago the Springbok rugby team swept into the little hamlet of Ceres to shoot a television advertisement for the World Cup, which is apparently happening quite soon. The action was standard stuff, Saving Private Ryan in white shorts, and then they signed some balls, piled into the bus and burnt rubber back to the big smoke.
Why the speedy retreat? It’s possible that somebody suggested a friendly match against the Charlie Hofmeyer High 1st XV, and it was deemed not in the national interest to have a barefoot 17-year-old backline frolic to three tries and a drop-goal against the Boks. Or maybe the titanium rivets holding Corné Krige together needed tweaking and he’d left his ratchet set back in Cape Town.
But it seems far more likely that the lads were sensing a nip in the air. Watch the advertisement closely when it screens, and peeping out from behind Lawrence Sephaka’s bottom you will see barren reddish mountains and green Kouebokke-veld grass: you will not see the snowdrifts, the sleet, the grinding towers of ice that subsequently descended on the town.
As Bob Dylan once croaked, the times they are a-changin’, but all he had to worry about was the invention of flared pants, not global warming and impending ice ages. Science tells us that the increased planetary temperature is caused by Justin Timberlake and cow flatulence (which are really the same thing), combined with McDonald’s wrappers and middle-class apathy wrought by years of moral decay. Or something. Maybe it’s just Justin Timberlake.
Whatever it is, the northern hemisphere has been sizzling while Ceres residents fire up their Snow-Cats to rescue ice-bound postmen at the bottom of the driveway. And if climate change is here to stay, perhaps it’s time to start preparing for a radically altered world.
In 2025 our globe is a very different place, except for Cliff Richard who still looks 60 despite being 135, and sport, like Sir Clifford, has adapted.
Every year motor-sport enthusiasts flock to the Cairo-Berlin rally, where buggies and bikes leave the temperate woodland of North Africa to take on the dunes of Provence, pushing on up the Rhine Canyon, fighting their way through the baking quicksand-infested plains of The Netherlands (watched by nomadic bands of Belgians, offering beads and chocolates in return for water and trinkets) and finally passing under the exotic minarets and shaded markets of the German capital’s Hoffstrasse.
To the north, in the rainforests of Finland, leathery rally drivers nudge their machines through steaming mud and through sluggish rivers choked with creepers and Ukrainian shrimp-fishermen, while away to the east in Mongolia, mild summer afternoons pass to the gentle crack of leather on willow as the Ulan Bator XI bats out a good-natured draw against the Genghis Khan Wanderers.
The southern hemisphere has embraced new sporting opportunities. South Africa rules the rugby roost by default: most of New Zealand and Australia are submerged, and England and France can no longer afford the luxury of making leather balls for sport, using them instead for carrying rainwater and for chewing on when camel meat is in short supply.
Not surprising the charm of the game has waned, and South Africans have found new pastimes. Escarpment skiing is extremely popular, a marvellous two-day event that requires little or no effort as the competitor launches from a standing start in Johannesburg and slowly gathers speed through the Free State and Karoo until he or she plunges into a huge puddle in Cape Town, dehydrated, snow-blind, and madly exhilarated.
Likewise the Durban-to-Pietermaritzburg swim draws thousands of competitors every summer, and television audiences watch enthralled as the last dregs thrash towards the finish line, desperate to reach the Maritzburg docks before the final gun is fired and the shark nets are raised…
Of course there will always be pole-vaulting and sprinting, even if the pole-vaulter lands in a snowdrift and the sprinters need factor-30 sun block for those 9,2 seconds in the sun, but for the rest it will be a case of adapt or die. And at the rate the Springboks adapted out of Ceres, it looks like we’ve already got a head start.