South Africa has world-class athletes and sportsmen. We have world-class stadiums, we’re good enough to host the Rugby World Cup and the Cricket World Cup, and soon the spectacle that is the Soccer World Cup.
What we don’t have are world-class administrators. Year after year, Olympics after Olympics, our administrators let the side down with their pettiness, infighting, lack of vision and general incompetence.
What happens at Sascoc meetings? Are the administrators too busy haggling over who gets the first-class tickets or the bigger Merc to worry about how their development programmes are being run?
Perhaps it doesn’t look like it, but South African sport is in disarray.
The Springboks were lucky to win the final Tri-Nations Test against Australia (but we do every year anyway). Bafana Bafana are rudderless after losing our overpaid Brazilian World Cup-winning coach and being saddled with a lesser Brazilian who apparently can’t win anything for us.
The Proteas may have won a Test series in England but promptly imploded in the one-day series against a team led by a discarded South African.
And let’s not even get into the Olympics scandal. Natalie du Toit, in the Paralympics, has single-handedly bettered the entire medal haul of Team SA.
It’s not a very good time to be a sports fan, is it?
At times like these other countries have dug deep into their government coffers and corporate pockets and invested in building up their teams. We supposedly did that after the last Olympics, while the ludicrously over-the-top fee paid to Carlos Parreira has been shown to be pointless given his resignation and the failure to qualify for the Africa Cup of Nations — you’re telling us two years of work came undone in the last few months? What was he doing?
Our rugby team are the World Champions, not that you’d know it from the abysmal performances this year by the same players. All that’s changed is the coach, and yet the blindingly obvious isn’t fixed. Peter de Villiers is patently out of his depth and it’ll take another humiliating season at the hands of the British and Irish Lions next year before SA Rugby admits it.
You’d expect that the government would be able to bring these administrators to task, but they are too busy playing the same old broken record about representivity to focus on the real issues. Development takes years, needs to be identified at school level and nurtured for years.
If you don’t have players being cultivated through age group and from club to province to regional teams, then insisting players of colour should appear at national level with the correct experience along the way is just sentencing those players to public humiliation and destroying their confidence.
The administrators are the embarrassment. We need to hold them accountable and manage them better to get our money’s worth.