Cape Town - Olympians Ian Thorpe and Greg Searle as well as South African sportsmen Achmat Hassiem and Glen Thompson on Tuesday opened up about having to juggle public expectations while serving as role models and maintaining their own individual identities.
“There is an overwhelming side of being a role model. It is very easy to lose yourself,” said Olympian Ian Thorpe during a panel discussion at the 2015 World Sports Values Summit for Peace and Development in Cape Town.
“You are trying to be the best person for everyone else instead of just being the best you.”
Thorpe said the fallibility of sports stars needed to be showcased along with their performance in their codes as it was more realistic and made them more accessible to the public.
“We have supersized everything,” said Thorpe, “We have supermodels and superstar athletes and I think we have to come back to a more accessible reality.”
Warped reality in sports was not limited to sports personalities, according to South African stand up paddle boarding title holder Glen Thompson. Thompson found that the images used to inspire participation in sports, such as surfing, created false hope.
Here, he spoke specifically about surfing and the use of black men and women in images related to the sport.
“The idea of a role model has to be moderated,” said Thompson, also a surf historian and part of the non profit Waves of Change, an organisation which sees surfing as a means to end the cycle of violence on the Cape Flats.
Thompson said the “Africanisation” of surfing created an often unattainable goal for black surfers that they would become professionals. He called it the “commercialisation of transformation” where individuals from previously disadvantaged backgrounds were being exploited.
Discussing his work in the previously disadvantaged community of Strandfontein Village, paralympian Achmat Hassiem said that often being a role model simply meant finding out how someone was doing and giving them a positive distraction.
“A lot of youngsters will hang around on street corners and I’ll go and sit between them and ask them if they’d like to go kick a ball or learn how to swim,” said Hassiem.
Hassiem said, growing up, he looked up to various sportspeople as inspiration, shaping his understanding of the responsibility they all had to their supporters.
Explaining just how much influence sportspeople had, Hassiem referred to his admiration of Thorpe, Australia’s most successful swimmer.
“I remember when Ian wore a full body swimsuit,” said Hassiem.
“We all thought that if we could get a full body swimsuit, we would break world records.”
“Of course, it wasn’t that easy,” joked Hassiem.
African News Agency