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.

Remember the Name: Ronwen Williams

South African football has always been gifted with top quality goalkeepers since the national team was re-admitted into international football in 1992. The country has seen a plethora of great shot stoppers and in young Ronwen Williams, the trend of classy Bafana Bafana number ones is set to continue.

Ronwen Williams: One for the future.

Ronwen was born  on January 21, 1992, a few months before South Africa's first international encounter, where they took on Cameroon in Durban. He is originally from Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape and is a product of the famed Supersport United/Tottenham Hotspurs Academy.

The Supersport United keeper broke into his club's first team during the 2010/11 season after joining the club as a 13 year old in 2005. Since those early days, Williams has made the number 1 jersey at Matsatsantsa his own, displacing the well-travelled and vastly experienced former Bafana 'keeper, Rowen Fernandez out of his position. United coach, Gavin Hunt has shown a lot of faith in young Ronwen who has been described as a natural talent with very good reflexes and a surprisingly calm nature for a young goalkeeper.

Williams won the Hot Young Player of the Year prize at the PSL Awards at the end of his 1st full season in top flight football. He beat off competition from Kaizer Chiefs' highly rated Lucky Baloyi for the accolade. Williams counts Chelsea's Petr Cech as his hero and cites ex Bafana 'keepers Emille Baron and Fernandez as his mentors.

Williams has represented South Africa at under 20 level and has been praised for his high work ethic. The current Bafana goal tender, Itumeleng Khune, who, without doubt, will soon be battling against Williams along with Wayne Sandilands and Moeneeb Josephs for the Bafana no.1 jersey, is noted as saying he is "very impressed with what he has seen of Ronwen.”

Ronwen says of himself: “I’m happy with my performance this season. But I need to improve, I still have weaknesses. Like during the game when we are leading  against Bidvest Wits at the weekend. I rush to release the ball and I must not do that sometimes. But these things come  with experience and I will learn from it game by game.”

Reflex Save: Williams denies Calvin Kadi

Williams produced a Man-of-the-Match performance in their 1-1 draw against  Bidvest Wits recently and was pretty much the reason his team not  losing the match despite playing a sizeable chunk of the game with only 9 men on the pitch. He saved a penalty from Calvin Kadi late in the game  and  made some top class saves which earned United a point.

After his recent performances there have been calls for Ronwen to be included in Gordon Igesund’s plans for the upcoming AFCON tournament on home soil and the qualifiers thereafter. “I’m always ready,” he says.  “I’ve been doing well for my team and if I’m called to play for the country, I will honour that call up. However, a call up to the national may come immediately but if his performances continue, it is certain we will be seeing Ronwen Williams in national colours.

Bafana keepers since 1992:

Mark Anderson (1992-1997: 7 caps)

Steve Crowley (1993-1995: 20 caps)

 Roger de Sa (1993: 1 cap)

Wade du Plessis (1994-1995: 2 caps)

Andre Arendse (1995-2004: 67 caps)

Brian Baloyi (1997-2008: 24 caps)

Simon Gopane (1998: 1 cap)

Hans Vonk (1998-2005: 43 caps)

John Tlale (1999-2002: 8 caps)

Calvin Marlin (2002-2009: 16 caps)

Emile Baron (Debut: 2002- 6 caps)

 Moneeb Josephs (2003-2012: 22 caps)

Wayne Roberts (2003: 1 cap)

Rowen Fernandez (Debut: 2003- 23 caps)

Thabang Radebe (2005: 1 cap)

Itumeleng Khune(2008-2012: 48 caps)

Wayne Sandilands (2011-2012: 2 caps)

The Amazing Story of Ali Dia.

Ali Dia: A legend in his own right

You may have never heard of him and if you had to run a quick Google search on him, what you would find is his name listed as the worst Premiership signing ever but Ali Dia probably has the most fascinating or funny story of all footballers who have played in the English Premiership. Mainly because he isn't a footballer.

Ali Dia dreamed of becoming a pro footballer. So while most footballers dreams come true after countless hours spent on the training ground as kids and a lot of technical and strength training and whatever else it takes to become a pro, all it took for Ali Dia's dream to come true was a very convincing phone call.

See, Ali Dia got a mate of his to ring up then Southampton manager Graeme Souness pretending to an agent. The friend somehow duped Souness into believing that Ali Dia was in fact an accomplished footballer who had scored an impressive amount of goals for PSG in the French League in the previous season and was in fact former Liberian striker George Weah's cousin. Where did they con Souness? The big prize was that Ali Dia, the lethal striker, would available on a free transfer. Souness lapped this story up and Ali Dia was offered a one month contract at the Saints on a trial basis. 

Ali Dia in his one and only game for the Saints

Now at some point in my reckoning, I would think that they would have caught him out at training or something like that. But the lie continued as Ali Dia was scheduled to play in a trial match, but one that had to be cancelled due to a stroke of good fortune (on his side) and a waterlogged pitch. By accounts of former Southampton players who trained with him, Ali Dia was awful, but Souness inexplicably persisted with him. Ali Dia played in his Southampton debut in a Premier League game against Leeds United in 1996. Thirty-three minutes into the game and Saints legend Matt Le Tissier had to be replaced. Enter Ali Dia. To the shock, horror and astonishment of the Southampton players, Souness put his faith in Ali Dia in the number 33 jersey. Twenty minutes later Ali Dia was back on the bench. In that time he proved out on the park that he was hopelessly out of his depth and nothing like what he had been described as in the phone call, at one point he missed a shot at an open goal because of poor ball control. There, in front of a packed stadium at The Dell, Ali Dia showed that he was a fraud. Needless to say, he never played for Southampton or in the Premiership again. Ali Dia went on to play for a few clubs in the lower leagues, never attaining any level of success before quitting and focussing on an academic career.

I cannot imagine how Saints fans feel about being associated with the one of the greatest cons of the professional game. I wonder how Graeme Souness feels about it too. It has the plot of an episode of MTV’s Punk’d, to me it sounds like a funny story of a man who was dared by a drunken mate in a pub to prank Souness and see how far they could go with it. The Southampton fans are known to chant “Ali Dia is a liar” from time to time. Today, I reckon Ali Dia should have a place in sporting folklore. Whatever you think of him, nobody can take away the fact that at one point in his life, Ali Dia was a premiership footballer. He got to live his dream.