South Africa’s fastest man, Akani Simbine, has called for more support to be thrown behind the 4x100m relay team.
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This comes after yet another relay that went wrong with Benjamin Richardson and Clarence Munyai failing in the second baton changeover and bringing South Africa’s final medal hopes on the track at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest to a crashing end.
The team already revealed after their success in the heats that they had had little to no training together as a team – their first practice coming in Hungary itself. There was an ominous sense of déjà vu on Saturday as the SA team involving three of the same runners also failed to get the baton round at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
Simbine reckoned after Saturday night’s disaster that the South Africans had the potential to take gold in Hungary, and he would love for the SA athletics federation to step up, support them, and give them a real shot at glory in 2024.
“If I look at it, personally, I think we would have won this, legit,” he said. “I think we would have won it, so that’s the thing that irks me is that we would have won this thing, or given America a little run for their money.
“But the potential of it is man, it’s winning, next year in Paris we can actually win, we just need time together. I think that’s an important thing because we don’t have time together. We always just come into championships figuring it out here, and then speaking the same thing.
“We are expected to run, we are expected to be at our best, but to train together as a relay team we don’t have camps. So they have to figure that out, and that’s the only key and the only way I feel like we can actually get this thing right because the potential is there.”
First-leg runner Shaun Maswanganyi agreed with Simbine’s sentiments: “It just boils down to not enough preparation coming in. We’re not too mad at ourselves. We know we have the talent, we have the potential, but it’s all about execution and unfortunately today it was not our day.
“I just feel like with a bit more practice, it will build confidence in the whole team and the chemistry… the federation obviously has to get actively involved in that and set up training camps,” added the 22-year-old, who is coached by nine-time Olympic champion Carl Lewis in the USA.
“But I’m not here to point fingers. At the end of the day, we’re athletes, we’re here to compete. If we won, we wouldn’t be mentioning all of these things, but it’s just the reality of sports and we embrace these things… We came out, we put our hearts on the line, we came to perform. We love wearing the green and gold and we always want to put our best foot forward.”