Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 123, October 2019 | Page 31

OPINION international season, i.e. May to September. But now she will miss provincial cross country league races, and will not be selected for the provincial team because she has not run enough races to qualify. The Cross Country Commission will only look at their own events, because they are separate from track & field, so she misses the national cross country championships, as well as the chance of selection for the national cross country team. Should she have turned down selection for the track team if her main aim was the cross country one? I know of a case where an elite distance woman was not selected for a provincial track team because she had not run enough league races, so she missed the national championships. She had not run them because she was trying to make the national cross country team for the World Champs, which were during the SA Track & Field season (March). It is quickly evident that this is a mess. Athletes are confronted with difficult, if not impossible, decisions to make, and eventually they will go where the money is: On the overseas road circuit, or the ultras in SA. They may really want to do cross country and track, but the divided system will defeat them. road running had maintained a savings account, “just in case.” When the staff were merged into one office, there was still the administrative distinction that “road running administers the licence numbers.” It made no sense, because the staff were employed by the provincial association, not its divisions, but the old mentality persisted. Even when the staff were willing to buy into a new system, the administrators would not. And that is what we have to this day, and what is doing serious damage to the sport of athletics in this country. Today, Athletics South Africa is still modelled on the three-pillar system of the SAAAU. It has three commissions, Track & Field, Cross Country and Road Running. Although they are constitutionally part of the same organisation and don’t have their own bank accounts, they still run their ‘divisions’ as if they are autonomous. Their constitution even has the three listed in logos on the cover page, as if they were still the three pillars. In most provinces, or at least those that still cater for track & field (and in some cases cross country), the same applies. Fixture lists are still drawn up in isolation, and recently WPA was still listing track & field fixtures separately from road running. So why is this a bad thing? One just needs to ask why the IAAF did not adopt a three-pillar system, if it is such a good thing. The simple answer is the obvious fragmentation of the sport, with the inevitable conflicts that this creates. I will explain what I mean by this, then show how athletics in South Africa is no longer, in reality, the sport practiced internationally. Difficult Choices The first problem is how to categorise the participants and the events. Let’s start from the viewpoint of an elite female athlete. She excels on the track over 5000m and 10,000m, and during the cross country season, she also does that discipline, where the standard distance is 10km. Then she also does a few road races, concentrating on 10km and 21.1km. She’s equally good at all of these events, because there are substantial similarities. So what is she? A track, cross country or road athlete? If the sport was properly co-ordinated, that would not make a difference, but I’ll show how it does. To do so, I’ll give some actual examples. A few years ago, Western Province held their half marathon championships in Strand. A few kilometres away in Stellenbosch, the SA Track & Field Championships were being held, where the 10,000m was one of the events. So, does our athlete do the half marathon or the 10,000m? It comes down to a choice between a national medal, or prize money at the road race. Both events are weakened because no- one realised that there was a clash. Then it is a regular occurrence that a 10km road race with big prize money is held in the morning and a track meeting, with a 5000m or 10,000m race, is held in the afternoon. Which does our athlete do? What does she do when the provincial 10km road champs are in the morning, and the 10,000m track champs are in the afternoon? Next, our athlete is selected for a national track team to take part during the main Dwindling Numbers The demise of track & field (and cross country) is another story for another time, but we can accept that it is a part of the sport that is dying in this country. Yes, we still send athletes to the World Championships, but the numbers are getting less and the disciplines fewer. Also, there are hardly any senior female track & field athletes left. Now, before there is a knee-jerk reaction to tell me I am talking nonsense – after all, schools athletics is still strong, isn’t it? – ask yourself how many ASA regions (or provinces, as they are still called) host senior track & field championships? And how many host senior cross country championships? If the regions don’t care about holding competitions for senior athletes, how long will it be before no-one is doing track & field anymore? Take away the universities, and how many clubs still cater for track & field at the senior level? Take away the schools, and what else is left? So why has this happened? Because under the three-pillar system, we look at the sport in silos. If road running is strong, then at least something is working. That is the current thinking. Cross country is seen as the development arm of the sport, with the intention that cross country runners eventually move over to the road. When I was president of ASA, I was presented with a development plan by someone who was excited that he had the answer to improving performance in athletics. His entire thinking was to use cross country as the base for all athletics development. When I asked him how we would develop hammer throwers or pole vaulters from cross country, he looked at me blankly. Instead of having a plan to develop the sport of athletics, he had a plan to develop distance running, and ultimately road running, not athletics as a whole. Square Pegs, Round Holes This mentality that the sport is divided into distinct parts, instead of being one, has had other, bizarre consequences. It started with race walking: Because it did not fit neatly into the three pillars, it was shoved into one. So, for a long time in South Africa, race walking was placed under track & field, but race walking, in its pure form, takes place outside of a stadium. Track & field, nearly exclusively, takes place inside a stadium. Fortunately, for the most part, race walking is recognised on its own and not part of track & field, so that anomaly has generally been corrected. Then we had the development of trail running, and that really blew the system apart. Administrators like to control everything, and they don’t like change. When trail running came along and started to grow, the three-pillar system administrators did not know what to do. To begin with, they called it Trial Running – it was clear they didn’t have a clue that it was running on trails, because they had never heard of a trail before. They quickly learnt that this new thing was not done in a stadium, and wasn’t walking. It also wasn’t done on a road. So, if it wasn’t track & field, and it wasn’t road running, it had to be cross country! Only, it isn’t. Trail running is mostly single track running, and mostly on mountainous terrain (although not exclusively), while cross country is on a lapped course, which is wide enough 31