FOUR GAMES AT RIO, AND NOT A GOAL IN SIGHT: tales of the expected from our boys and girls

THE REDEEMER: Itumeleng Khune was magnificent
against Brazil in Rio but could not deny Denmark

IN summary: 360 minutes. Plenty of chances. NO GOALS.

Every South African footballer lover feared it would come to this. Four games played by our men’s and women’s teams at the Rio Olympics and still no scorers.

For Banyana Banyana, it comes as no great surprise. With no age restrictions on players, Vera Pauw’s team knew they were on a hiding to nothing, even after the hopeful 1-0 friendly defeat against the world’s No1 ranked women’s side, the USA.

The girls opened with a gritty display against Sweden, ranked 5th in the world. They showed little ambition but it took the classy Swedes an hour to conjure the only goal.

Against China, two or three early chances were missed and they went 1-0 down just before half-time before a long-range effort somehow squirmed past Roxanne Barker to give the world’s most populous nation a 2-0 win.

Next up? Brazil. Goodbye girls.

Owen da Gama’s men, in a competition which allows three over-age players in each U23 squad, can’t really look to world rankings given the format.

But no matter how you look at it, the opening 0-0 draw against hosts Brazil and their Barcelona superstar Neymar was impressive. Again, South Africa knew their limits. But until Mothobi Mvala’s naive red card, it could have gone either way.

Itumeleng Khune, the Bafana Bafana captain and Kaizer Chiefs No1, made three stunning saves, two of them from Neymar, to secure a vital point and hopes were high.

Game two against Denmark, who also drew their opener against Iraq 0-0, started with great optimism. Lebogang Mothiba (who should have done better) and Keagan Dolly (from range) both hit the cross-bar and for long periods, South Africa outplayed their European rivals.

There were saves at both ends, Itumeleng Khune somehow kept one out with his head and Jeppe Holberg made a series of blocks.

But in the 69th minute it was the Danish substitutes, Jacon Bruun Larsen and Robert Skov who confounded South Africa with Skov scoring the first goal in Group A as Tower Mathoho scurried across just too late to stop a devastating concession.

There had been a lot of talk from Da Gama, Dolly and Khune about “not making up the numbers” but in truth South Africa only qualified as third place finishers in Senegal on the back of Jody February’s penalty shoot-out heroics. Perhaps we were too optimistic.

Though not out-played by Brazil or Denmark, South Africa can take a lesson from our northern rivals. Nigeria managed to arrive in Brazil on the day of their opening game but still beat Japan 5-4 and then Sweden 1-0 to qualify for the quarter-finals with something to spare.

South Africa’s chances now look slim. With head-to-head the deciding factor, even a win over Iraq might not be enough in the men’s tournament, which features 16 nations and offers only the top two a route to the knock-out stages.

And Banyana Banyana, in a women’s gathering of 12 teams, cannot even make use of the two best third places on offer.

Still, Thursday night will provide another opportunity for South Africans to bite their nails and pull out their hair. A win over Iraq is imperative. And scoring is no longer an option.

As London 2012's opening ceremony looms, what price Durban 2024?

Lord of the Rings: Durban's Moses Mabhida stadium

AS the hours to London’s top-secret opening ceremony in Stratford tick by, talk of a South African Olympic bid are sure to surface once more as the 30^th Olympic Games gets ready to rumble.

Thoughts will go back to Cape Town’s failed bid for the 2004 games, which eventually went to the Olympians’ spiritual home in Athens. But anybody who has attended a couple of Olympiads will tell you the Mother’s City’s upstart coastal rival Durban is THE perfect Olympic venue – and I can reveal that the International Olympic Committee are eager to put the City of Bananas forward as potential hosts for 2024 or 2028.

But before we get too carried away, let me tell the full story of this potentially disastrous move.

Back in 2009, when I was covering the England cricket tour for the London Evening Standard, I visited the not-quite-complete Moses Mabhida Stadium a couple of days before the Boxing Day Test at Kingsmead.

And there it all was. An Olympics waiting to happen in South Africa. One look at the sparkling new 70,000-capacity football stadium (built with provision for an athletics track if needed), standing barely 400m from the established 60,000-capacity Kings Park rugby stadium wasn’t enough on its own.

As somebody who knew Durban well from my four-year stint on the Natal Mercury and Daily News in the early 1980s, having an athletics stadium next to a major venue for the Olympic soccer was just the beginning. It wasn’t hard to pick out the nearby aquatic centre with indoor and outdoor pools and diving facilities and small-scale athletics track, a perfect warm-up venue next to Kings Park.

Barely a mile away on the other side of the perfectly-positioned railway station, there was Kingsmead, like Lord’s in London, begging to be used for archery, handball or show-jumping.

And of course, the walkway to the north beaches from the Moses Mabhida was under construction. Cue sailing, beach volleyball and triathlon along the old Marine Parade. And for rowing and outdoor swimming? Midmar Dam the other side of Pietermaritzburg. Plus an Olympic marathon stretching halfway along the famous Comrades route. We could talk too of the impressive ICC conference centre next to the Hilton Hotel and Kingsmead for table tennis, badminton and other smaller events.

Up on the Berea the old Sugarbowl tennis complex could be remodelled and across the city, Queensmead offered a purpose-built hockey facility begging to be enlarged.

On top of that, the climate in Durban around this time of year is perfect for sport. And the region offers a vast range of accommodation as an established holiday resort, drawing tourists to it’s warm, sub-tropical climate for decades. And we had the brand new King Shaka airport about to open for the World Cup too.

My vision was soon put in to print and picked up by Sunday Tribune journalist Matthew Savides. Excitement was growing before the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and it wasn’t hard to imagine a first African Olympics would follow a the continent’s first tilt at football’s greatest show on earth.

But then came these quotes from veteran British investigative journalist Andrew Jennings, who has written extensively on corruption in the IOC and Fifa: “Nobody can afford the Games. The budgets are always pitched low by local boosters, then soar.

“The only solution is to build an Olympic venue and keep the games there every four years, in the same city. But if that happened, the IOC would have no international clout and their backsides would not be kissed by monarchs, presidents and prime ministers. And there would be no kickbacks from the construction industry.”

Ouch.

The hype nearly developed in to a bid for 2020, but not quite. As the host cities gathered for 2011, government spokesman Jimmy Manyi revealed the cabinet had decided to "prioritise service delivery" over putting up a bid to host the games, which would have cost around R350m.

He explained: "The government decided it was better for the country to consolidate the gains of last year's World Cup for now and focus attention on the delivery of basic services. If any money is going to be spent, it's going to be on basic service delivery."

Though the bid had support from the SA Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc), local tourism, the eThekwini municpality and the KwaZulu-Natal government, there would be no bid.

But when the 123rd International Olympic Committee met in Durban in July, 2011 the gods of Olympus witnessed for themselves Durban’s potential, as did the delegates who flew in later last year for the COP17 climate change conference.

Sascoc president Gideon Sam remains eager to put Durban forward for 2024 and 2028, while President Jacob Zuma is a known supporter.

But before we get too excited, consider this.

Montreal, the Canadian hosts in 1976, are still struggling to overcome their “Olympic legacy” more than 30 years after their bash at the Games. Sydney, hosts to the most successful Olympiad in modern times in 2000, are struggling to keep their Homebush venues in working order. And the cost of Athens 2004 helped Greece to slide in to the financial mire the Hellenic nation is currently failing to deal with.

London, like Sydney, developed the run-down Stratford area for their Olympics. At the moment it’s all smiles. But the costs of hosting a modern Olympics are ridiculous.

Though Durban has the makings of a perfect host city, conservative estimates hover near the R50bn mark if they are to host a successful games.

As Istanbul, Tokyo and Madrid jostle for the right to host 2020, Rio de Janeiro and Brazil are struggling to cope with the upcoming 2014 World Cup, let alone the 2016 Olympics.

The thought of an Olympics in Durban is a truly inspiring one. A major boost for South Africa and the whole continent. But can any nation, given the current global recession, really spend that much money on a sporting event?

Read my first blog on this subject, written in 2009: http://www.nealcollins.co.uk/blog/2009/12/cooks-bland-recipe-for-ton-of-success.html

South Africa's medal-winning schedule for London 2012. Hopefully.

The spear: Sunette Viljoen is a contender in the javelin

After a sensational weekend which saw Ernie Els, Hashim Amla, Dale Steyn, Richard Murray and even Ajax Cape Town hailed as world-beaters around the globe, it's time to turn our attention to the London Olympics.

Though the top-secret opening ceremony (which will, I can reveal, may feature David Beckham as James Bond) is only on Friday, South Africa's campaign gets underway tomorrow with the football girls Banyana Banyana playing Sweden.

Though Banyana are unlikely to create an upset and take a medal, I reckon South Africa has SEVEN big medal chances, most significantly in the pool, though they may yet reach Sports Minister Fikile Mbulula's hoped-for haul of 12.

Below I've listed all the dates when South Africa can expect to claim silverware (bronzeware or even goldware).

With the swimming starting on Saturday, Chad le Clos and Cameron van der Bergh are both ranked in the world's top ten in several different events, with Le Clos likely to reach the final in both medley events (featuring all four strokes) and Van der Bergh strong in the breast-stroke over 100m and 200m.

The athletics doesn't get underway until August 3, with Caster Semenya, Khotso Mokoena, Sunette Viljoen and men’s 4x400m our most likely medalists. Semenya will have to improve significantly on her 800m times so far this year where she falls outside the world's top ten, but she has done this before, peaking out of the blue. She is predicted to win gold by the athletics bible, Track and Field Weekly.

Long-jumper Mokoena, our only medal-winner in Beijing four years ago, is an almost certain finalist, along with javelinist Viljoen and the men's 4x400m team, which might include Oscar "Bladerunner" Pistorius, who ran in the qualifiers when the team won silver at the World Championships. Pistorius, the first amputee to compete in an Olympics, admits "a strong semi-final" is as far as he's going to get in the individual 400m.

Keep an eye out too for LJ Van Zyl, the one-lap relay specialist who is also an outside hope in the men's 400m hurdles.

After his first world triathlon triumph in Hamburg last Saturday, Richard Murray, the 23-year-old from Cape Town, could big news on Tuesday, August 7 when the men take to the water, bike and trainers.

The three big team events (women’s football and men’s and women’ hockey) offer outside hopes too, particularly women's hockey, though all three teams are ranked outside the podium places.

Cycling could be another rich source of valuable metal for South Africa. Mountain-biker Burry Stander, a World Cup winner in Pietermaritzburg last season, is listed on my schedule of potential medal winners below, along with women’s road race contender Ashleigh Moolman and BMX hopeful Sifiso Nhlapo, so unlucky in Beijing.

I'm told Bridgitte Hartley could also medal in K1 500 canoeing among the blazing paddles at Dorney, and the men's coxless lightweight four came second in the last World Cup in Lucerne. There are other outside chances, but I’ve listed all the above below, featuring only Le Clos and Vd Bergh's strongest events. South Africa could also feature in the men's relay finals, Le Clos is entered for a record SEVEN events at the brand new aquadome.

SA medal winning Olympic schedule (* marks medal chance):

Wednesday, 25: Women’s football kicks off tomorrow with Banyana Banyana v Sweden

Friday, 27: Opening ceremony, watch out for Vikings and Romans

Saturday 28: Banyana Banyana second game

*Sunday 29: Women’s road race cycling: Ashleigh Moolman

*Sunday 29: Men’s 100m breast-stroke: Cameron vd Bergh
*Tuesday, 31: Men's 200m Butterfly: Chad Le Clos

*Thursday 2: Rowing: Men's lightweight four: Brittain, Ndlovu, Smith, Thompson
*Friday 3: Men's 100m Butterfly: Chad Le Clos

*Saturday 4: Men’s long jump final: Khotso Mokoena

*Sunday 5: Men’s 100m final: Usain Bolt etc and women’s marathon with strong SA team

*Tuesday 7: Men’s triathlon: Richard Murray

*Thursday 9: Women’s K1 500: Bridgitte Hartley

*Thursday 9: Women’s javelin final, Sunette Viljoen.

*Friday 10: Men’s BMX final: Sifiso Nhlapo

*Friday 10: Men’s 4x400m relay: Oscar Pistorius, Van Zyl, Fredericks, Ofentse Mogawane, Willie de Beer and Shaun de Jager.

Friday 10: Women’s hockey final

Saturday 11: Men’s hockey final

*Saturday 11: Final of women’s 800m: Caster Semenya

*Sunday 12: Men's mountain biking: Burry Stander