No money, nowhere to train, no hope: What future for our Olympic athletes?

Before this pandemic started kicking all of us in the teeth, Olympic sports in this country were already in trouble. Now, it seems, they’re on a hiding to nothing.

While football, rugby and cricket have done everything they can to regain some sort of normality during the ongoing lockdown, many athletes in smaller codes have been left completely stranded.

Some codes, including swimming, tennis, netball and golf, have been able to at least get things going again with reduced fixtures lists, but others remain locked at a standstill.

Track and field athletes and road runners are fuming, with no real attempt to relaunch domestic athletics just six months out from the Olympic Games, and without competitions, they have no way to prepare sufficiently.

They also have no way to make income from prize money, and their sponsors’ patience must be wearing thin with no return from their investments.

With beaches locked down, surfers are in the same boat. It’s nigh impossible to prepare for the Olympics if they can’t even hit the waves.

Meanwhile, restrictions due to social distancing have prevented mass participation events from taking place, blocking the significant income received from the amateur arms of the various codes, while broadcasters aren’t going to be investing anything in federations if they have nothing to broadcast.

Granted, these restrictions have been implemented by government in an attempt to stop the spread of Covid, and they can’t be blamed for that.

But with many sports already hanging by a thread before the pandemic started, they have now been completely exposed, and it’s becoming harder and harder to see how we’re going to send a team to the Tokyo Olympics (if it takes place).

Shockingly, the national hockey teams have even turned to crowd funding platforms to ensure they have the resources to send squads to Tokyo, with no guarantee that the SA Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc) will be able to back them after wasting much of its resources on legal battles in recent years.

It’s a sad state of affairs, and if the powers that be do not find a solution soon, some codes are going to completely collapse.

We can turn to the pandemic as an excuse, but the reality is that this was a problem before someone in China ate a bat.

What the lockdown has done is stripped multiple codes of the thin veil of security they had, and those which were struggling before the lockdown are now in serious trouble.

And professional athletes in these codes, who don’t know where to turn to save their careers, have every right to be upset. Wouldn’t you be too?

Wesley Botton.

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