With 100 days to go until the London Olympics begins with an opening ceremony put on by Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle, many of the various actors in the South African team are auditioning for roles on the big stage, hoping to change their fortunes from the rags of 2008 to riches in 2012.
At an estimated £80 million (about R626m), the opening and closing ceremonies of the London Games will have had more money spent on them than the South African team put together. Gideon Sam, South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee president, wouldn’t mind having Boyle’s budget to play with.
As it is, he and Sascoc CEO Tubby Reddy had to go to Parliament in February to play a political game of “Who wants to be a millionaire”, asking for R50 million to top up the Olympic coffers.
Sam did make the very good point that Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan did not mention the little fact that South Africa would be sending athletes to London in his Budget speech. Gordhan’s speech, which, while not Hemingway-esque in its prose, could have been called “For whom the road tolls” if you were a Gautenger, and indicated that Parliament might have a little financial sport fatigue after the 2010 World Cup.
South Africa is expected to send a cast of about 100 athletes to London, a number that increased considerably after the women’s football and hockey teams qualified. Should the men’s hockey team do the same thing in Japan later this month, then that number could go up.
It has been a Sascoc and Sam mantra that there will be no passengers at the Olympics or the Paralympics, which, in essence, should mean that every single one of the athletes or teams that attend the games should be in with a shout of bringing home a medal.
That, though, will not be the case for many. Hope springs eternal in Sascoc and Athletics South Africa, whose CEO, Frik Vermaak, told the SABC recently that the more athletes sent over to London the better – except that he wasn’t going to go out on a limb on a medal count either.
“To predict anything is a very tough question; however, we are confident that our athletes will perform. We feel that our athletes should reach at least the finals and you know when you are in a final you are competing, so if we send a team of 15 to 20 athletes a big chunk of them will be in the finals and competing very hard for the medals.”
There are now a handful of people who have qualified for the athletics team, three of them having made their second qualifying time or distances at the national championships in Port Elizabeth this past weekend. None of them, though, are real chances for a medal.
Decathlete Willem Coertzen picked up 8 244 points, breaking his SA record and going past the Olympic qualifying level of 8 200.
Cornel Fredericks defended his SA 400m hurdles title by beating LJ van Zyl, who took bronze in the world championships in Daegu last year and who has already qualified for the 400m hurdles with a time of 48.91 seconds.
Van Zyl has been struggling with an injury. Sunette Viljoen, the gold medal winner at the Melbourne and Delhi Commonwealth Games, grabbed her spot with a throw of 61.15m, just over the 61m required.
Former 800m world champion Caster Semenya was almost three seconds shy of the qualifying time for the Olympics, but she showed little fear that she would not dip under 1:59.90 before the final team is named.
Oscar Pistorius is still confident he can run the 400m qualifying time again this season and qualify for the Olympics as well as the Paralympics.
At the time of going to press, four swimmers had put their names on the Olympic team shortlist at the trials being held in Durban this week. That will have increased by the time you read this.
In Europe, mountain bike star Burry Stander continued his run of good form in the UCI World Cup, finishing fourth after his second place in Pietermaritzburg, the opening leg of the World Cup, and his victory at the Absa Cape Epic.
Sifiso Nhlapo, who was a medal chance in Beijing, is still building towards form this year on the UCI World Cup BMX circuit. He reached the quarters of the World Cup at the weekend, but finished sixth in his race. He is still hoping to improve his form, but is some way off the level he was at in 2008. Still, hope, as I may have mentioned before, springs eternal.
So, where will the medals come from, the 12 that Sam spoke of when he took over as president? Reddy has targeted “swimming, athletics, and maybe cycling, canoeing and rowing”. That’s fair enough, although I can see South Africa coming home with five medals, perhaps seven or eight at a push.
The first Olympic and Paralympic teams will be named in June, and the final Olympic squad early in July. 8 P14