“We’ve had two meetings with the various universities, in order to address how we take athletes from junior to varsity level,” Sam said on Wednesday, at a Games legacy launch in Fourways.
“It’s basically an academy system under the university structures. We want to keep juniors in the system, and the universities will definitely help us if we embrace them and work with their high performance programmes.”
Frank Dick, the former director of coaching for UK Athletics, would act as a consultant between athletes and coaches in the build-up to the Games, while nine-time Major winner Gary Player, who would captain the SA golf team at next year’s Rio Olympics, and former Springbok captain Francois Pienaar, the founder of the Varsity Sport series, would also assist in driving the process forward.
The bid committee for the 2022 Games in Durban, which won a lone race to host the multi-sport spectacle, confirmed earlier this year that R1 billion of the R6.4 billion budget would be spent on athlete preparation.
This would create an expanded version of Sascoc’s Operation Excellence programme, which had come under fire in recent weeks, with elite athletes calling for the national funding and support system to be broadened and restructured.
