EDITORIAL: Olympic debacle starts with Sascoc

It’s easy to blame our Olympic officials, and the government, for the subpar performances SA delivered at the Tokyo Olympics. Partly, this is because they are the villains of this particular piece, as much for their parlous financial management as for their inability to prepare our athletes properly for the event.

Over the weekend, an uproar broke out when SA Sports Confederation & Olympic Committee (Sascoc) acting CEO Ravi Govender told City Press that "we don’t have luxuries such as incentives — as much as athletes deserve it".

This contrasts sharply to the 2016 games in Rio, when R4.2m was divided among the 10 SA medallists — R500,000 for gold, R250,000 for silver and R100,000 for bronze.

But Govender argued that Sascoc had taken 185 athletes to Tokyo at a cost of R16m and had no extra funding available. This plea of poverty isn’t just a snub to our two 2021 medal winners, Tatjana Schoenmaker and Bianca Buitendag, it illustrates that Sascoc is in need of wholesale change.

By contrast, it took two entrepreneurs, EasyEquities’ Carel Nolte and Mike Sharman, founder of MatchKit, less than a day to raise about R190,000 for our only Tokyo stars. More than the money Nolte and Sharman raised, the two shamed Sascoc and, hopefully, sports minister Nathi Mthethwa.

Mthethwa argued last week that "the team which represented SA at the Olympics is not reflective of the demographics of the country".

But that imperative is entirely the province of the chaotic Sascoc, which has been a battleground for internecine fighting and money wasted on litigation for ages. It has manifestly failed to achieve its goal of "promoting and developing high-performance sport" in the country.

Failure at the Olympics — and three medals constitute a failure for Team SA — comes down to a lack of funding and a lack of planning to fix that funding hole. The shortage of money has been obvious since 2017, when SA had to give up hosting the Commonwealth Games. Yet last year’s financials revealed that Sascoc managed to find R2.38m to pay its 12 directors for "allowances". While some of SA’s athletes had to resort to crowdfunding to even make it to Tokyo, Sascoc and government "dignitaries" rarely have to resort to counting the pennies.

Sascoc’s recent financials suggest that the coffers are unlikely to swell enough to make a meaningful difference in time for Paris 2024 either. Its current liabilities outstripped its short-term assets by R7.89m and it reported a deficit (or loss) of R6.2m. It means Sascoc is dependent on handouts from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Paralympic Committee.

The outcome is that Sascoc had to close its high-performance centre that helps prepare athletes for the games, and internal battles may have scared off potential sponsors too.

So much for the money. SA also needs to find and nurture children to take part in sport on a much wider scale. The country needs to own a sport in much the same way Kenya owns long-distance running, or Iran owns wrestling and weightlifting.

Instead, elite schools privately fund rugby and cricket, and private tuition finances swimmers and tennis players. It is only through luck and determination that individuals like Wayde van Niekerk, who had inspirational parents and a dedicated old tannie as a coach, make it through.

Sascoc holds its AGM in November and many South Africans might wish it would vote itself out of existence. That wouldn’t help; SA would be cut off from the IOC.

Sascoc has been a problem child ever since it was born out of the National Olympic Committee of SA, the SA Commonwealth Games Association and the SA Sports Commission. The latter was the government’s foot in the door, so it cannot now escape its responsibility for bringing up the child. The AGM will be an opportunity for honest introspection, and a decent comeback plan.