The 13 members of the board of the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee sat at the head table at Sascoc’s (SA Sports Confederation and Olypmic Committee) AGM at Olympic House on Saturday.
That board has not changed much for some time, the faces are the same. Athletes come and go, Olympics and Paralympics go by, but administrators hang on.
There have been whispers that there may be change when elections are held in November. Gideon Sam, who replaced Moss Mashishi as president in 2008, has apparently said he would not stand for a third term, wanting to be more involved with the business side of the 2022 Commonwealth Games.
Recently, though, he has been hinting he wants to stay on. One Sascoc insider told me they believe there needs to be a clear-out of the current board to change the scourge of entitlement. The politicking has just begun.
Administrators often change their minds.
On Tuesday, Sam said he had delivered on bringing 10 medals back from Rio, which earned particular scorn from Sunette Viljoen, who tweeted ‘HE delivered? What did he deliver?’
At former sports minister Makhenkesi Stofile’s memorial service in East London, Sam sang a different tune. “How is it possible that a country with 55 million people can go to the Olympics and only come back with 10 medals, tell me how is that possible? This is while a small country like New Zealand, with 4.5 million citizens, gets 18 medals, while a small island such as Jamaica has also won more than we did. Surely that cannot be right,” said Sam and, according to the Daily Dispatch, he got a few laughs for that.
“(Stofile) was instrumental in building structures of sport from the ground in the Eastern Cape and beyond. Today we can go to the Olympics and come back with medals, because of the foundation he had laid for our people. However, structures are now dying and as a result of that, we have very poor administrators in sport.”
And with those last seven words, Sam may just have summed up why South Africa have under-performed at the Olympics since 1992. Sports administration has become less about the athlete and more about the administrator.
When Sam took over in the aftermath of South Africa winning one medal in Beijing 2008, his message was that it was all about the athlete. If the athletes did not perform, then he encouraged South Africans to blame the board of Sascoc.
London, with its promise of 12 medals from the 2012 Games, returned six medals. Rio should and could have been better; as Sam said, in a nation of 55 million it has to be better.
How could it be better? Two things: More money and better administrators.
New Zealand’s success in Rio stems from a nation besotted with sport and from the guidance of the Graham Report into sport. Drawn up in 2000 by John Graham, a former All Blacks manager, it found that there had been a ‘lack of effective co-ordination between government agencies’.
The separate sporting entities were combined to form Sport and Recreation New Zealand. This, a government report in 2005 said, ‘was a clean sheet of paper to rewrite the way sport and recreation were administered in New Zealand’.
Programmes were given a stronger strategic focus with obstacles to engagement identified and overcome. Athletes were ‘carded’ and provided with access to coaches, sports science services and, importantly, coaches.
The report found that the level of government spending in sport and recreation was ‘highly inadequate - certainly not enough to attain the levels of sporting success that as a nation we expect’.
It raised from NZ$3.2 million (R33m) for 2000/01 to NZ$50 million in 2004/05.
South Africa’s funding model is based on the begging bowl. Sascoc said R400m would be needed to prepare the team for Rio. R200m of that was to come from Lotto or the government and the rest was to be sourced from corporate South Africa.
But corporate South Africa is wary of investing in Sascoc.
After South Africa had returned from the 2012 Paralympics, Sam announced at the arrival function for the Paralympic team that Sascoc was financially sound. At a parliamentary portfolio committee on sport hearing in October 2012, Sam backtracked. “No, we don’t have cash. We are battling. It’s just that we didn’t want to create a scene at the airport. It’s not good for our athletes and it’s not good for the country,” reported the Mail and Guardian.
“When you get to that place, you sort of - you know, I mean you are all politicians. Siyazigquma izinto (we cover-up things), we don’t pa ha (reveal) in public. We get together in a corner and talk about these things.”
In June, just before the Rio Games, Sascoc were again battling with cash.
They were given a R70m bailout by the Lotto, which Sam said was vital.
“We were beginning to panic, let me now reveal the truth - and I am happy that we can go to Rio, there was a doubt as to whether any of these board members would be going to Rio.”
The same board members who sat at the head table at Olympic House on Saturday managed to get their trip to Rio. At what cost? On Saturday those same board members would have spoken about things. Others wouldn’t pa ha in public.
Something has to change.
In November, the board will either be full of new blood or the old faces with blood on the floor.
How did Sam put it? “We have very poor administrators in sport.”
Those seven words sound about right.
The 2016 Olympics concluded a week ago and were mostly good-news Games for Team South Africa. But there are plenty oftough decisions to be made before the 2020 Tokyo Olympiad, according to the Independent Media writers who reported on Rio - Independent Media