SA set for Olympic overhaul

Funding and selection models for Olympic sporting codes are set to change in preparation for London 2012, the Mail & Guardian has been told.

Unlike with the present dispensation — in which making the qualifying time or distance almost guaranteed an athlete a ticket to the games — the next batch of athletes representing South Africa at the Olympics will satisfy keener scrutiny.

According to a senior South African Sports Confederation Committee (Sascoc) official, who asked not to be named, money will be allocated in a more focused way than is presently the case. Ten sporting codes will be given priority.

‘Of the R500-million we want to take R400-million and allocate it to the codes that we will prioritise. This will help us to excel in these sports. Producing winners takes time and we have to achieve that in the next Olympics. Leaving other sporting codes will upset other people but they have to understand. At the moment we are looking at codes including athletics, swimming, tennis, basketball, fencing, football, hockey and cycling. Come 2012 we will not have as many sports as we had in Beijing,” said the source.

Sascoc president Moss Mashishi said he could only comment on the team’s performance and funding when the team returns from Beijing next week. ‘I think it would be best for us to come back home, make assessments and make calls based on our experience. We have to look at what other countries are doing right that we are not doing,” he said.

The new model will be similar to the one adopted by countries such as Jamaica, Britain and Kenya, which poured resources into their strongest codes, taking to the games only those athletes with a better than average chance of winning a medal.

South Africa’s sports federations receive R500-million in funding every year from the National Lottery. The proposed funding model is set to be a further source of acrimony between Sascoc and the politicians.

Last month Mashishi, in his letter to the parliamentary portfolio committee, said the ‘funding system is inefficient and needs a total overhaul”.

Butana Komphela, the committee chairperson, dismissed this, saying that the sporting federations received enough money but were spending it badly.

This week Komphela was unavailable to comment on the proposed changes. The funding model for sporting codes contains what sporting officials see as obvious flaws. For example, swimming, despite its winning pedigree (the present games excepted) and with about 25 representatives in Beijing, gets less funding than gymnastics, which has one representative — Odette Richard.

Swimming South Africa received R3,8-million from Sascoc, while the the South African Gymnastics Federation got R5-million. Athletics South Africa got R6,2-million.

Norman Arendse, president of Cricket South Africa, agreed with the proposed change and said identifying the strongest sporting codes and improving the infrastructure would help the country’s athletes’ performance.

Arendse said Sascoc could learn a few things from rugby and cricket. ‘Coming back from Beijing, Sascoc must set up a multi-task team comprising sport administrators who have achieved world-class standards in their sporting codes, such as rugby and cricket, to share knowledge. Government and the private sector should also be involved because they cannot just throw money at the problem — it has to be used properly. Sport unites the nation and it is about time government starts taking us seriously,” said Arendse.

He added: ‘The bad performance of our team can be attributed to lack of proper organisation and preparation, lack of facilities and the lack of funding to support our elite athletes in every possible way to ensure that we win medals.

‘We should learn from countries such as Great Britain, the officials of which decided four years back which sporting codes they were strong at and needed to invest more money in. They are good in athletics, rowing and swimming because they identified these codes and focused on them.

‘We have to do the same here — identify our strongest sporting codes and improve the infrastructure of them, because we still sit with the apartheid infrastructure, which is not transformed to meet the demand of the new South Africa. We have enormous talent in the country, which can match the world’s best if taken care of in the correct ways,” said Arendse.

Arendse did not sound optimistic that government will change the way it funds sports’ development.

‘We have been begging government for quite some time to put more money into infrastructure, but they constantly tell us that there are other programmes such as poverty alleviation, unemployment and housing that they have to deal with. Government must make excellence in sport a priority if we want to compete against the world’s best.”