Gideon Sam reflects on messy end at Sascoc

Leaving with a cloud hanging over his head, Sascoc boss says the past decade at the helm has been ‘sweet and sour’

Outgoing SA Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc) president Gideon Sam this week recalled with a laugh his first days at the helm when someone asked if the local Olympic governing body was a flour-making company.

Bizarrely, Sam said this confusion counted as one of his highlights in nearly a decade leading Sascoc.

“I’ll never forget that day in 2008 when someone in a packed hall in Mpumalanga said: ‘We thought Sascoc was a flour company all along.’ That’s when we established the nine provincial sports confederations to at least have provincial Sascocs,” said Sam in a frank interview with City Press this week.

It is the final countdown to the end of his time at Olympic House – he steps down from his post at the end of the year, in accordance with the federation’s age limit for a seat on the Sascoc board, which is 70.

This is a rather unfamiliar exit considering that Sam’s departure comes way before the end of the ongoing Olympics cycle, which means he is also not going to board Team SA’s plane to next year’s Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan.

Also marking a not-to-so happy exit for Sam is that he leaves after a year during which Sascoc was subjected to a ministerial inquiry over governance issues amid allegations of financial irregularities and maladministration.

Arguably one of the most vilified sports administrators in the country, the Cape Town-born Sam aptly described his time at Sascoc as “sweet and sour”.

“If you look across the country, which organisation does not get investigated or looked into? It’s a normal process within our South African context,” he said.

“So Sascoc is not immune [to this interrogation]. There is no doubt in my mind that the first eight years were good and, as they say in the Bible, those were the fat years.”

Sam said cracks in the relationship among fellow board members emerged in the build-up to the 2016 Sascoc elective conference, including the much-publicised fallout with chief executive Tubby Reddy.

“People on the floor didn’t speak with one voice. We went to the 2016 election divided. There were two factions – one for Hajera Kajee [Sam’s long-time vice-president] and the other for me ... that was the beginning of a divided board. Going into the third quadrennial [next year] was not that easy. And the [ministerial] inquiry came.”

Sam said he had developed a thick skin over the years and claimed that the divisions led to some interpreting his leadership style as dictatorial, the same line that the ministerial inquiry highlighted in its final report.

However, he maintained that he was firm in his approach and was never one “to impress the general assembly”.

“That’s bad administration to please people, but, with consensus, you go far. I don’t see that as dictatorship. I was a headmaster and a rugby manager in the olden days. My colleagues at the school used to tell the players not to ‘mess with this short man’ because they knew I would go hard on them if they were to lose games with stupidity,” chuckled Sam, whose middle name is Napoleon, after French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

There are already changes happening in Sascoc’s leadership, some of which were effected during the federation’s annual general meeting last Saturday.

The federation held a special election to vote in the first vice-president Barry Hendricks and a board member Cecilia Molokwane after the respective former incumbents, Kajee and Les Williams, retired.

Addressing his last annual general meeting in charge, Sam said he had suggested to the general assembly that they hold an early general election that would see a new board take office under a new president.

“Some asked me to stay on, but I have served my time. The date for the elections has been set for March 28 and the new board must take over until to the 2024 Paris Olympics,” he said.

Sam maintained that the latter part of his incumbency was made difficult by budget cuts and lack of adequate sponsorship. He leaves Sascoc at a time when the federation is in desperate need of at least R50 million to deliver Team SA to the Tokyo Olympics next July.

Sam said there were guarantees of support from the sports department as well as the SA National Lottery, but both parties set conditions that they would only release funding provided Sascoc implemented some of the recommendations that came out of the ministerial inquiry.

Team SA received nearly R100 million for the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics in London, and about R70 million for the Games in Brazil three years ago.

The team secured six medals at the London Olympics – half of their target – while they achieved their objective of 10 at Rio 2016.

Despite the hardships, Sam said he would look back at these achievements as some of his highlights at the helm because he had put his head on the block by publicly declaring the number of medals Team SA was aiming for at the past two Olympics.

He said that he would not be lost to sport as he was already training aspiring young administrators in his home province of the Eastern Cape. As a parting shot, Sam said he would let the people judge how he fared while at the helm of the country’s biggest sports umbrella body.

	Daniel Mothowagae Deputy sports editor City Press p: +27 11 713 9587 w: www.citypress.co.za  e: Daniel.Mothowagae@citypress.co.za
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