The first time I saw Jacob Zuma in a sports setting he giggled. It sounded very much like his gallows cackle on Wednesday night when he gave into the inevitable and skulked and sulked out of office. It was October 2000 at the Paralympics in Sydney. Zuma, then deputy president, was visiting the Ekhaya centre, the hospitality area set up at the Novotel Hotel in Homebush, the closest hotel to the Olympic Stadium. Those were the days when SA’s Olympic body had money or, if it didn’t, it had the clout to get a government department to pay for a place to entertain VIPs and to show off South African tourism. For the Sydney Olympics, it rented a restaurant in Darling Harbour in the centre of the city for SA House. In Athens, it took over the Emmantina Hotel in Glyfada, the seaside suburb called the Hellenic Hamptons.

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