Olympic swimmers fear load-shedding could pour cold water on medal hopes

Load-shedding is the biggest danger to the medal aspirations of South Africa’s swimmers in the build-up to the Paris Olympics later this year, especially with autumn and winter looming.

Coach Rocco Meiring sounded the warning on the national team’s return on Monday from the world championships in Doha.

Swimming has been South Africa’s most successful Olympic sport since readmission at Barcelona 1992 and is expected to form the bedrock of Team South Africa’s haul at the showpiece from July 27 to August 11 — the class of 2024 arguably boasts the greatest depth with the likes of Tokyo breaststroke queen Tatjana Schoenmaker, backstroker Pieter Coetzé, double Commonwealth Games champion Lara van Niekerk, Kaylene Corbett and Matthew Sates. 

“As it stands now, the Olympic team is not assured of a facility to prepare for the Olympics,” said Meiring, who trains most of the South African squad at the University of Pretoria, including Schoenmaker and Coetzé, who won the team’s only medal in Qatar.

The open-air Tuks pool needs to be heated so the water is warm enough for swimmers to train in comfortably. If it’s too cold, the swimmers can’t execute their strokes effectively.

“The question is how will we be affected by load-shedding? The athletes cannot prepare in cold water,” Meiring told a press conference at OR Tambo Airport.

“So if you ask me what I need, before I need any fancy sports science or biomechanics or whatever, we need a generator.”

Meiring said last year a generator was rented for R271,000 a month, excluding fuel costs. “None of our formal structures footed the bill,” he added.

Without a generator in 2022, while preparing for the Commonwealth Games, the squad had to search for a warm pool to train in. “We ended up trekking around Pretoria like Israelites lost in the desert, finding little holes in school pools that we could use,” said Meiring.

In 2021, three weeks before the Tokyo Games, a generator was hired again.

“Every time I raise this, nobody owns it,” said Meiring. “So unless somebody takes ownership and spends the money in the right way, we go in with one hand tied behind our back. We brought them this far. We are now going into winter.

“This year, everybody's looking the other way. So far. And we are in February, and we are at stage 6 load-shedding.

“That’s the elephant nobody talks about.”

Van Niekerk also trains in an outdoor pool in Pretoria under coach Eugene da Ponte and they have the same concerns.

Last year she ended up moving to a 25m pool to prepare for the world championships in an Olympic-sized 50m pool.

Swimming South Africa president Alan Fritz said they had two options to address the situation.

“We can ask [sports] minister Zizi Kodwa, through his office, to speak to the minister of electricity and the minister of mineral resources and energy to exempt at least two areas in our country for swimming pools.

“That is doable,” he said, adding the second area would be either the pool in Gqeberha, where the Olympic trials will be held in April, or Durban.

“If we have to create a central environment and a bubble for the athletes to train, we must do that.

“The second [option] is to find the money to buy two generators. I suggest you're going to need about five to six million [rand] to do that, and we will put that forward to the Lotto and to the ministry.”