Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 123, October 2019 | Page 30

OPINION
Three Pillars
Not Holding the Roof Up
In the previous edition, Former ASA President James Evans wrote about how, 25 years after the adoption of the new
constitutional era in South Africa, athletics still clings to old and seemingly irrelevant ‘provincial’ boundaries. This month, he
touches on another remnant of the past era that the sport still holds onto, the so-called three-pillar system.
I
n the days when South African sport was isolated, athletics was one of the
few sports which bucked the trend of racial exclusion. The sport was divided
between the SACOS-aligned South African Athletics Board (SAAB) and the
‘establishment’ South African Amateur Athletics Union (SAAAU), and under the
leadership of Charles Nieuwoudt, the SAAAU pushed the apartheid government
to allow all races to take part in athletics events together. But that is a story for a
different time. More could, and should, have been done.
What the SAAAU, which was suspended from the IAAF due to apartheid, also
did was to create the ‘three-pillar’ system of athletics. What this meant was that
track & field, cross country and road running set up their own semi-independent
associations, which then affiliated to the SAAAU. This was followed in all the
provinces, which likewise had three separate associations. This meant separate
administrations, with their own staff and bank accounts.
Heyday for Track
Track & field was where the money was, because it had TV coverage and it had
sponsors – after all, it was filling the stadia. Road running had sponsors for the
big events, like Comrades and Two Oceans, as well as TV coverage, but those big
events were few and far between, and by current standards, they were still actually
quite small. The average club road race in the big centres was lucky to attract
500 entrants. However, road running’s expenses were low, and they built up their
reserves.
Internationally, the sport had not gone this route. The IAAF – then the International
Amateur Athletics Federation – was one sport. As now, it had separate
commissions to deal with different aspects. For example there is an IAAF Cross
Country Commission and an IAAF Road Running Commission, but they are
advisory bodies that can only make recommendations to the IAAF Council and the
IAAF Congress. They aren’t autonomous bodies. Importantly, the IAAF does not
have a Track & Field Commission.
Recommendation Ignored
At the end of the apartheid era and with the unification of sport in South
Africa – although it can never truly be claimed that sport was unified, since
SAAB and SACOS were not part of the process – Mervyn King was asked to
chair a commission of enquiry into athletics. This commission made several
recommendations, including that the sport be transformed from the three-pillar
system into one sport. Not only did it take many years for that to actually happen
on a theoretical level, but on a practical level it never has.
I can speak from my own experience with Western Province. Even though the
King Commission made its recommendations in the mid-1990s, by the early
2000s Western Province still had separate divisions with their own offices and
staff, and their own bank accounts. Even when the bank accounts were eventually
merged, and the separate offices combined into one, it became known later that
30
ISSUE 124 OCTOBER 2019 / www.modernathlete.co.za
In those days, track & field was the glamour part of the sport, with regular meets
that filled stadia, while cross country was also a prestigious part of the sport. By
contrast, road running was by far the smallest of the three ‘pillars.’ It was not a
mass participation sport yet, apart from a few exceptions, and was performance-
based – 70 minutes was regarded as ample time for the cut-off of a 10km race.