Many South Africans will have watched the watery but spectacular four-hour opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics on Friday evening. Even more were no doubt watching, and celebrating, as the Blitzboks came from behind to win bronze with a 25-19 victory over Australia in the Rugby Sevens contest on Saturday.
It was an encouraging start for Team SA, after its hugely disappointing outing at the summer Olympics in Tokyo in 2021, when it won just three medals — down from 10 at Rio in 2016. It was particularly exciting because the Blitzboks had been underdogs, qualifying only at the last minute to get to Paris.
This year’s Olympics are themselves particularly exciting after the rather miserable Covid-era event in Tokyo. That event was held as it was in eerily empty stadiums with strict pandemic safety protocols that barred everyone but the athletes, their entourages and the officials from attending, and even required the athletes to put their own medals around their own necks.
Paris is in an important sense a celebration that the pandemic is now behind us. The crowds of fans can gather again and have fun, not to mention watching lesser known sports they might never watch otherwise — and Paris looks to have broken records in terms of ticket sales and tourist numbers. The commercial sponsors (Louis Vuitton included) can pour in the money. The athletes themselves can share their triumphs and tribulations with their families and friends, and have some fun, at least once their contests are done.
The spin on the Olympics is frequently about its ability to foster unity and friendship in a fractured world, and while that stuff warrants more than a pinch of scepticism amid the huge commercial spin-offs, it’s not something to be underrated. With 206 national Olympic committees, plus the Refugee Olympic team, the gathering is the most multilateral of all international events. Even athletes from Russia and Belarus, who were booted out after the invasion of Ukraine, may compete as independents.
More than 11,000 athletes from every part of the world crowd into the Olympic Village and compete with each over these two weeks. At a time of rising geopolitical tensions, when some of the countries they represent are at war or in conflict, that melting pot matters. So too does the role modelling those athletes represent.
Paris can claim some milestones too in that it is only the second city to host the summer Olympics three times (London is the other). It is also the first carbon neutral Olympics. And it’s the first to claim gender parity, with an equal number of women and men participating in events — a far cry from the first Parisian event in 1924, when just 135 of the 3,000 athletes were women.
It was an encouraging start for Team SA, after its hugely disappointing outing at the summer Olympics in Tokyo in 2021
Despite the spectacular opening on the Seine on Friday evening, it’s also claiming to be one of the cheaper Olympics of modern times. Paris budgeted $9.7bn to host the event, which is relatively modest by recent standards, because it could use existing venues for almost all of the sports. But that’s still an eye-watering number, and a reminder that these days only rich countries can afford these mega-events.
The economics of medal-winning at the Olympics is heavily biased towards more prosperous countries too. Here the good news is that as emerging market economies such as China have grown richer, so has their medal tally. Economic studies have found a strong correlation between per capita GDP and the number of Olympic medals won. They’ve also found that the women athletes of countries where women’s participation in the economy is higher win more medals. SA could learn some lessons.
SA has won a respectable number of medals since it was allowed to return to Olympic competition in Barcelona in 1992, but could clearly do much better, given the talent pool we have and the huge popular support there is for sports of all sorts. SA has ended up sending almost 150 athletes to compete in Paris, across 19 sports. But some was very last minute, and looked underfunded.
The Blitzboks got through despite restrictions on their funding which prevented them training abroad, and ironically they owe their success in part to the Australians themselves, who came to SA to train with them. Other athletes generally have to fund their own training, or get corporate sponsors, even if the SA Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc) pays for travel and rewards them for medals.
Sport is a unifier for an often fractured SA, and we love to win internationally, in any sport. We urge new sports minister Gayton McKenzie to take a close look at the allocation of resources and at Sascoc, and to review how SA might lift its performance into the future.
Meanwhile, we wish our athletes all the best of good luck. We are sure they will make SA proud in Paris.
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