SA Athletes Paying The Price of Egos and Free Overseas Trips

At the 2012 Olympic Games in London, South Africa had a 20 year old sprinter in the final of the 200m sprint event, lining up alongside the likes of Usain Bolt, Yohan Blake, Christophe Lemaitre, Wallace Spearmon and Warren Weir. He only came in 8^th place that day but, with all things equal, it’s not hard to imagine that young man winning a medal at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro. However, because of boardroom bungles, Anaso Jobodwana could be in the colours of the USA and not the green and gold South African vest and I would cheer loudly for him!

This past weekend, Athletics South Africa was suspended as a member the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (SASCOC) with immediate effect. It’s all a dirty affair. It is no secret that ASA has not been the best run organisation in recent years. In fact just over 2 months ago, its board incurred its first suspension by ASA owing to financial problems and infighting which led to an attempt by board members to impeach ASA president James Evans, which was later, ruled unconstitutional.

Now depending on what else you might have read on the situation and who you choose to believe you might be inclined to take the side of Sascoc as news came to light over the past few days that ASA is running out of funds, so says Zola Majavu, a well respected advocate who was appointed by ASA as an administrator. He was summarily dismissed after the decision that Sascoc made and has had undisclosed criminal charges lain against him by the ASA president. However ASA still has the support of the IAAF. Gideon Sam has been displeased with the IAAF’s stance and has likened it to Sascoc’s legitimacy as the sports authority in South Africa being denied. In other sections of the media, Sam, along with Sascoc, has been labelled as bully on a power trip. Graeme Joffe, a popular sports journalist formerly with CNN & a fierce critic of Sascoc and its leaders has called this suspension a ploy by Sam to have his cronies elected to the ASA board. So far, for my mind, this smells like a pair of 12 year olds sitting in a hostel dorm room counting who of the two has more pubic hairs. It would be very comical except that this seemingly petty squabble involves adults.

And what of the athletes, the most important entity in this whole equation? Almost no mention has been made of them. Well they, along with the organisation and its board, are suspended too. Sascoc has really gone all out to prove what a mighty force they are by proclaiming that no ASA athletes will be included in future Team South Africa squads for the Commonwealth Youth Games, Commonwealth Games, Anoca Youth Games, All Africa Games, Olympic Youth Games, Olympic Games and the World Student Games in which Jobodwana was due to participate in 9 days’ time. Sascoc has also cut funding and support for ASA athletes who were identified as potential medal hopefuls like Sunette Viljoen and Godfrey Mokoena by Sascoc's Operation Excellence (Opex) programme. Since when did any of our athletes represent ASA and not South Africa?

When athletes have to suffer at the hands of the administrators who are supposed to be protecting their best interests, such as in this case, it becomes clear that sporting matters have been thrown out the window and all that is at stake are egos, expense accounts, free overseas trips and the like. Self interest is at stake and it’s hindering South African athletes quite possibly for many years to come. Our athletes cannot improve or become world beaters with consistently competing in international events or getting funds for costly resources and training. And what is to motivate youngsters to take up track and field seriously when no South African athletes get to compete against the best because of the suits?

If this was an athletics matter, Sascoc would suspend the ASA board and take away their funding but continue to help the athletes. They say the suspension could be over in a couple of months but what damage would have been done by then? What will Jobodwana think of when someone from the US athletics body promises him near unlimited funding, facilities and every resource he needs in order to compete for them? Will he be thinking loyalty or will he be thinking about a great opportunity to become the best in the world? If I saw him at the next Olympics with the letters U-S-A across his chest, I would be happy for him and I wouldn’t find fault with his decision, would you?

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Mawande Mateza

Follow me on Twitter @Mawandinho

Side note: Anaso Jobodwana completed his second year at Jackson State University in Oxford, Mississippi in May this year. He ran a best time of 20.13 in the 200m this year and placed fourth in the NCAA National Championships. He also ran a best time of 10.10 in the 100m.

Len Tau & Jan Mashiani: SA Sporting History's Forgotten Men

The names of Len Tau and Jan Mashiani ought to be familiar with most South Africans; after all they were a part of the country’s 1^st ever representatives at Olympic Games when they participated at the 3^rd Olympiad in St Louis in 1904 and indeed were the continent’s first black athletes to compete at the Games. However their story is not celebrated; no facilities, awards or scholarships are named in their honour and most of what you would find on the net and what you would read about them is a little obscure. 

Background

In 1904, the city of St Louis in the United States hosted the World’s Fair, a celebration of all the different peoples of the globe. Tau and Mashiani were in St Louis as labourers of General Piet Cronje who held a Boer exhibit and a stage play at the Fair. Due to this event’s popularity, interest in the Olympics fell by the way side and only athletes from 13 countries competed n the Games. To avoid disaster and meager attendance, organizers of the Olympics opened up the event and invited everybody to participate which is how Tau and Mashiani were allowed to compete. 

Marathon

Len Tau (left) and Jan Mashiani (right)

Tau and Mashiani competed in the marathon event and finished 9^th and 13^th respectively on a scorching hot day in St Louis were half of the runners didn’t complete the race.  Records say it was a comical race; the race was won by Thomas Hicks of America in the slowest time ever recorded for the marathon at the Olympic, a record that still stands today. Hicks was fed egg whites and brandy during the race to keep his energy levels and stamina up and it widely told that Tau would have finished the race in a quicker time and finished higher placed had he not been chased by a dog which forced him to stray off the curse for several miles.  

Legacy

Tau who is recorded in some history books as Lentauw, Len Taw or Len Taunyane and Mashiani who is also referred to as Yamasian didn’t return to the country triumphantly or to any sort of rousing welcome as is the norm with our athletes and sports teams today. I was a little saddened to see that most the records and re-tellings of this almost unlikely story are from overseas stories. It seems as though history has tucked away the story these two men and in a land where we celebrate the modern heroes  legends of folklore are forgotten.

What happened, Jacques Freitag?

He is one of only eight athletes to have won IAAF world athletics championships at youth, junior and senior level. He is in good company too. That list of eight includes Usain Bolt, Veronica Campbell-Brown and Yelena Isinbayeva, amongst others. But how did it come to be that the man who became world champion at the age of 21 would find himself on the wrong side of the law 9 years later and without any further distinction in his career? 

Forsbury Flop: Jacque Freitag. Half Fulfilled Potential.

I remember the hype around Jacques Freitag when he won gold at the World Athletics Championships in Paris in 2003. He was supposed to be the next great South African sports star, an equal to Hestrie Cloete the South African female high jumper the two-time women’s high jump world champion who had also won gold in Paris that year. I remember thinking that he would turn out to be the next South African Olympian to win a gold medal. In 2004 he had to withdraw from the South African track and field team to participate at the Athens Olympics because of a recurring ankle injury and at the time was quoted as saying: "I've decided to go for the long-term plan. The ligament is totally shredded and needs to be replaced. I'm still young, turning 22 this year, so I should have at least two more Olympic Games in me." But that wasn’t to be as he never featured in either of the Games in Beijing or London.

Ivan Ukhov won the men’s High Jump event at this year’s Olympic Games in London with a leap of 2, 38 metres, which incidentally is Jacques Freitag’s personal best leap, a mark he cleared in 2005. Since that year, Freitag virtually disappeared from the South African sporting landscape. 

He had a run in with the law in 2006 after he and a friend allegedly assaulted a 17 year old schoolboy. 

Freitag never returned to his supreme best. He did try to make a comeback from injury but in 2009 retired from the sport following more surgeries to his damaged ankle. Soon after retiring, Freitag established an academy for jumpers in partnership with the High Performance Centre in Pretoria and unsuccessfully attempted comebacks in 2010 and in 2011 but the giant athlete was reduced to only a shadow of his former self. His best jump in 2010 was a dismal 2, 05 metres.

This past weekend, Freitag was arrested and remanded in custody by Police in Pretoria for the possession of the drug Cat (methcathinone). 

I don’t know if anything infuriates me in sport more than stories of incredibly talented athletes who only half fulfil their potential, whether it is through, injury, injustices or indeed their own actions. I can’t speak for Jacques Freitag and I don’t know what all the circumstances that led to him being bust for drug possession or the circumstances around his failed career were. It is a difficult thing to say, but at the end of the day that is what we have to deal with, the fact that despite all his talent and early achievements, Jacques Freitag was a bright talent with an even brighter career that never was.

Bittersweet Victory: SA's biggest Olympic blunder.

The 1936 Berlin Olympics will most likely be remembered most for Afro-American sprinter Jesse Owens sticking his middle finger in the eye of German dictator, Adolf Hitler.  Okay, well he didn’t really, but he may as well have. The dominant display of his athletic prowess earned him four gold medals at the Games, shattering Hitler’s myth on the superiority of the Aryan race.  

South Africa also has an interesting story from those games which involves lightweight boxer Thomas Hamilton-Brown. It is quite an outrageous story actually. Very little is written on Hamilton-Brown apart from that he was born in Cape Town in 1916 and is still alive today.  His name is not echoed in the same breath as any of the champions of the 1936 games but rather mentioned either humorously or in ignominy.

In a feat that can only be rivalled by THAT Bafana Bafana celebration, the South African took on Chile’s Carlos Lillo in the first round of the boxing competition. The bout ended with the winner being decided on points. Lillo was declared the winner on a split decision. Hamilton-Brown, being the bad loser that any other boxer is, went out on a binge after that contest. After a loss like that, ordinarily you would think he’d go out and get hammered on cheap liquor like some of the athletes did at this year’s Olympics, but that wasn’t so. Hamilton-Brown went Benni McCarthy that night, found his solace in food and ate his way through his disappointment at losing and gained 5 pounds in one sitting.

The next morning it was discovered that one of the judges in that lost bout against Lillo inadvertently switched his scores around. The mistake was rectified and Hamilton-Brown was declared the actual winner. Unfortunately for him because of his food glut the night before he was unable to shed any of the excess 5 pounds he had gained before the weigh in of his second round fight and was disqualified.