She recently completed her first-year exams in sports science at Pretoria University and still trains daily for next year’s athletics season. Caster Semenya (18) isn’t allowing the international furore about her gender to upset her.
“It’s heartbreaking that Caster has had to go through such a traumatic experience but without it the problems with ASA would have gone to the grave,” retired sprinter Geraldine Pillay says. “The drama about Caster has opened the entire can of worms.”
Only when it emerged Leonard Chuene, suspended ASA president, had lied about the gender tests Caster was put through did local athletes decide her humiliation was the final straw.
Every time Nicolene Cronjé recalls the day ASA manager Molatelo Malehopo slapped her in the face repeatedly she knows why she never again wants to appear on the sportsfield in green and gold.
That was the day this athlete, then SA women’s walking champion, realised the big bosses in local athletics cared little about athletes.
Years went by before she finally told her family how in 2002, at the age of 18, at the Junior World Championships in Jamaica, she was assaulted by Malehopo. Chuene threatened her, “If you say one word about this your athletics career is over.”
It’s Chuene and his team’s fault so many SA athletes don’t reach their full potential, Geraldine says. “Leonard is a dictator, like Robert Mugabe.”
Hezekiel Sepeng, silver medallist in the 800 m in the 1996 Olympics, says he wanted to establish an organisation to develop athletes but ASA refused to give him permission or support.
“In a few years our top athletes such as Khotso Mokoena and Mbulaeni Mulaudzi will retire and what will happen then?” Hezekiel says. “There’s not one other South African athlete who can touch them and that’s because ASA still doesn’t develop young talent.”
This lack of support has convinced many athletes that sweating blood for the country simply isn’t worth it.
“I’ll never run for South Africa again,” hurdles athlete Ockert Cilliers says. He qualified for the Olympics last year but was kicked off the team for standing up to ASA.
“It’s no wonder talented young athletes decide they’d rather play rugby or cricket than become athletes because ASA doesn’t look after its athletes.”
