Almost 20 years ago, I heard Andy Irvine talk at the Wanderers. The former British Lions fullback was mesmerising.

Through the years I’ve heard many other outstanding sportsmen. Among them was Ashwin Willemse, who two years ago wowed the crowd at the SA Rugby awards with a magnificent speech.

Last night, Ernst van Dyk, in conversation with David O’Sullivan, joined the club while regaling the audience at the SAB Media Awards. Appropriately enough, it was also at the Wanderers.

Van Dyk, a champion wheelchair racer, has competed professionally for 23 years and if he is showing no signs of slowing down, in either sense, he ought to give thought to taking his talk show on the road. He’s that good.

He’s a beast in the world of wheelchair racing and has won the Boston Marathon 10 times, and also New York, Paris and London. Van Dyk has competed at six Paralympics and will be gunning for a seventh in Rio when he will be aiming for gold in the road race, time trial and marathon events. He’s a real gem and a supreme example of sporting excellence.

Mixing in homespun philosophy with self-deprecating humour, he had the audience so spellbound he received three job offers afterwards.

The irony is that he was able to tell his story at all. When Van Dyk was born in Ceres 42 years ago, the doctor told his parents he had never delivered a baby as deformed as he. He suggested they send him to an institution and forget about him. Thankfully, they thought differently.

His views on technology, rivals and his many races were fascinating and inevitably talk shifted to another high-profile disabled sportsman: Oscar Pistorius.

Van Dyk is bemused by the public’s fascination with the disgraced athlete, not least their habit of making role models of sportsmen. “I’m not sure why people do that. A guy might be good kicking a ball, but don’t say to my daughter to be like him. Role models are engineers, nurses, surgeons . . . don’t make me a role model because I can push a wheelchair fast.”

Given the overwhelming evidence that many sportsmen have feet of clay, it was a salutary lesson from a man who deserves to be lauded at every turn.

Kevin Pietersen is a sod.

He’s broken every rule in the book, got up the noses of antagonists all over the planet and treated teammates abominably. Sure he can wield a cricket bat with a rare ferocity, but he’s a jerk.

This is a line I’ve peddled in recent years, but, damn, I’m going to have to sing a new tune.

I’ve come around to “KP”. I might – and it hurts admitting this – actually like him.

I haven’t changed. But Pietersen has.

He’s been on a slow-burn charm offensive in recent months, chiefly during the recent Ram Slam Twenty 20 where he put the Dolphins into orbit with some splendid batting. Bowlers might have dreaded him, but he couldn’t have been more accommodating to fans or his hosts.

He earned every cent, ending as top scorer with 364 runs, including a pair of centuries and another pair of 50s. No messing about, no sir.

This came on the back of his open support for the Springboks during the Rugby World Cup, his love-in with one-time enemy Graeme Smith and his involvement in the Cricket Sixes in Johannesburg.

He turned up at the Gary Player Invitational at Sun City last week and was a genial, popular guest. Inevitably he was in the news for tweeting his thoughts about the state of English cricket, but that said more about the absurd appetite of the UK media for a “KP” angle than it did about the content of his tweets. He’s never been backward in coming forward.

It wasn’t always so. Pietersen used to be the darling of the UK cricket establishment, bringing a flamboyance to the crease not unlike another maverick in the form of Ian Botham. His eccentricities were indulged because of what he brought to the game, but the Pietersen magic went sour after the publication of his book last year

He used it to settle old scores and irrevocably damaged his chances of being welcomed back into the England dressing room.

You could take the boy out of South Africa, but you couldn’t take South Africa out of the boy, as the “Blackberry incident” of 2012 proved. He was suspended for the third Test against South Africa after it emerged he had been sending messages to the Proteas, one of which claimed Andrew Strauss was behaving like a “doos”.

Proof of Pietersen’s volte face can be found in his curious friendship with Smith, who once called him an “absolute muppet” for comments made during England’s tour of SA 10 years ago.

Pietersen was hard to love. In his first book he said he was left out of the Natal side in 2000 because of quotas.

“The system is bullshit. It created an artificial team and that will never do anything to encourage the racial integration of cricket in South Africa,” he wrote.

The remarks got Smith’s back up and he was quoted as saying he had no time for his countryman.

“I’m patriotic about my country, and that’s why I don’t like Kevin Pietersen. The only reason that Kevin and I have never had a relationship is because he slated South Africa. It was his decision to leave and that’s fine, but why does he spend so much time slating our country?”

It’s fair to say the two have patched up their differences. In May, Smith was first in line hammering England for their refusal to select Strauss (who had just smashed 355 in a county game).

Smith’s tweet: “I see the head boy is making English cricket the laughing stock again! #StraussLogic”

Happily, Pietersen and Smith have both grown up and seem to have developed a genuine friendship.

In the wake of his Durban sojourn I even read a couple of pieces speculating about Pietersen playing for South Africa and showing England just what they are missing.

It’s a romantic, fanciful thought, but Pietersen is now strictly a gun-for-hire. Deep down he knows his England career is over.

It’s a pity because the new-look, mellower Pietersen is winning friends everywhere he goes.

The hard edge is gone. It’s hard not to like the new version, especially as he still bats like a demon. Good on him. – © Sunday Tribune

 

 

These are grim days for world sport.

International athletics resembles a swampland in the wake of damaging claims about doping cover-ups and general malfeasance, potentially rendering the Rio Olympics a farce.

All this, of course, mere months after the lid was lifted on world football’s toxic machinations which stretched all the way to South Africa and far beyond.

Little of this should shock. The Tour de France scandal inured many of us to the cold realities of modern sport. Years before, the Salt Lake City scandal, with bribery and dirt-peddling at its core, also confirmed suspicion of the way international sport often works.

Flamboyant Lalit Modi, who used to sashay through South Africa, was thrown out of Indian cricket for life and Allen Stanford, the shaky financier, is doing 110 years in jail for massive fraud. Hansie Cronje, of course, exposed cricket’s murky underworld in a manner never seen before or since.

Few major administrations have been untouched.

What makes this latest scandal potentially the worst of all is how complicit the executives appear to have been. Although the Russians are on the defensive, denying everything, there’s dirt everywhere you look. They’ve run out of carpet to sweep it under, rendering their denials laughable.

Lamine Diack, the former head of the IAAF, has been arrested on suspicion of corruption with claims that he both took cash and turned a blind eye to positive dope tests. And to think, one of the London Olympics’ rallying calls was that it would be the cleanest Olympics ever. The IAAF is said to have allowed 10 athletes with “unexplained and highly suspicious” blood profiles to compete.

One by one the miscreants are being run out of town.

All of this has fallen into the lap of Sebastian Coe, one-time blue-eyed boy of athletics, who now presides over the IAAF. When the air around his sport began to smell, his response was to utter a “declaration of war” against those pointing fingers. It was poor judgment on his part and he is reminded of this at every turn.

The problem for athletics is that the next Olympics are around the corner. The IAAF is under great pressure to suspend Russia until it sorts its nonsense out. Right now, the Russians are in a state of denial from Vladimir Putin down. They are playing the victim when the facts are compelling and ugly. Even if half the allegations are true, this would represent the biggest state-sponsored doping programme since East Germany in the 1970s.

The problem for athletics is that Russia is one of the powerhouses of the sport. It routinely finishes in the top three at Olympic Games and, naturally, carries heavy political clout. This shouldn’t matter, but in sport influence and patronage are the common currency. The IAAF surely knows what it must do, but fears the ramifications would reverberate from Red Square to every corner of the world.

Too bad. Anything less than a suspension of the Russians would be affirmation that the IAAF panders to the political elite. Even Russian anti-doping officials have been held up as frauds, rendering the country’s entire athletics system a sham.

If the IAAF takes a soft line, the Rio Olympics could be irredeemably polluted by suspicion. It’s one thing when athletes dope, quite another when they do so with the complicity of their federation. Sport becomes a farce in such circumstances, with integrity and good standing thrown to the wind.

The corollary of all this is that you no longer know what, or who, to believe. We see astonishing performances in track and field on a weekly basis, but can we really be sure what we are seeing?

Cricket still throws up mysterious results. South African soccer doesn’t seem to want to get its hands dirty over match-fixing claims involving the national team. The list of SA athletes suspended for doping infractions in the past year runs to seven pages, according to the SA Institute for Drug-Free Sport.

The IAAF must show the way by taking the kid gloves off. Statements mean nothing without action. Hot air needs to be replaced by sharp action.

This is the crossroads. Condemnation or commendation awaits. – © Sunday Tribune