SA sport is not in the most robust health. The exceptions are our professional and amateur golfers and our national rugby and paralympic teams - and to a lesser extent our national cricket team. Otherwise the performances of most SA sports have shown either a progressive fall-off over the past decade or, like hockey, stayed just about unchanged. The most precipitous fall has been in the global ranking of our national soccer team - from 16th to 80th in 12 years.
What is particularly frustrating is that it's not because we lack the communal expertise to be competitive in international sport - the Boks have shown what can be achieved when we apply even a modicum of the professional expertise available to New Zealand, Australian and English rugby. Rather, it's because of our reluctance to use the expertise we already have locally. Or else we choose not to grow that which we lack, or to recruit it internationally. Other countries have no such reluctance; they simply poach the best of our local talent for their exclusive use.
Our reluctance is hard to understand since it is so harmful. Why does our nation consistently fail to implement that which so obviously works in every other country where it has been tried? Are we really so different that what works elsewhere has no hope of success in SA? Or have we finally discounted the importance of what former president Nelson Mandela once called a "national asset" that had to be protected because of the important role it played in nation building?
Our failure is not because we do not spend inordinate time and effort pretending to share the former president's vision. In my career I have contributed to three different government investigations into top-level sport in SA ; the first was in 1981. All have come to essentially the same conclusions. And all failed in the implementation phase. Apparently the forces preventing implementation are insurmountable. But why? Why can South Africans not implement ideas that have been enthusiastically embraced by Britain and Australia, among others?
In the most recent submission to government, my colleague Dr Ross Tucker has presented the most complete plan yet designed to improve our international sporting competitiveness by professionalising all forms of support provided to sporting federations and their athletes.
The focus is to develop coaching as an honourable, knowledge- and skills-driven profession, as is the case in the US, Australia and Britain; to put the best athletes in the care of the best coaches, exercise scientists and sports medicine doctors; and to provide the financial and managerial assistance to federations so that they, too, might be run professionally as businesses, no longer dependent exclusively on the goodwill of tireless volunteers.
The key focus is to infuse SA sport with the intellectual capital necessary to reverse the current stagnation. We do not need more academies, buildings and sports facilities. What we need are clever brains to help direct the physical and mental efforts of our athletes.
The level to which any nation can achieve success in international sport is ultimately determined by its athletes' socioeconomic status. This reality is seldom acknowledged. Sporting success is expensive and access to sporting opportunities will continue to be influenced by factors such as the earning power of the athlete's parents. Thus a nation's success in international sport will always be limited by the size of its middle class, which will also determine how many athletes it can afford to support (employ).
Yet within our local economic constraints there is so much more that can be done for our athletes. What we most lack is the vision. And the fire in the belly.
So what we urgently need to drive this initiative is a team of like-minded people, free of personal egos and undermining agendas, committed only to the development of our nation's sports. Properly funded, first by private enterprise (to show what can be done with relatively little financial input), later by government, that group will quickly produce the outcomes that this and future governments will no longer be able to ignore.
But can it really happen?
It depends only on whether we truly want it.
- Noakes is the Discovery Health professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Cape Town. He received the Order of Mapungubwe Silver for excellence in service to sport and to the science of physical activity from President Kgalema Motlanthe in October 2008
