The buildup to the sporting event of the year, the Beijing Olympic Games, was hijacked by the question of whether the teams we have representing South Africa are black enough.

iafrica's Zunaid Ismael wonders if transformation in sports still needs to be pursued in South Africa.

Quotas. Transformation. Two words that South African sports fans loathe. Yet time and again, and seemingly whenever it happens to be a World Cup or Olympic year, the question as to whether the teams we have representing South Africa are black enough always seems to pop up. This year being an Olympic year, is no different.

This time around a certain Mr. Butana Komphela, the chairperson of Parliament’s portfolio committee for sports and recreation, was not satisfied with the racial make-up of the South African men’s hockey squad that is being sent to the Olympic Games. Komphela was proposing that the hockey side have a 50-50 split along racial lines, which would have forced the squad to have been re-selected. Happily, a compromise was reached between the South African Hockey Association and SA’s Olympic governing body, the South African Sports Confederation Committee (Sascoc) whereby the 50-50 split would not be required for either of the hockey sides representing South Africa at the Beijing Olympics.

Of course, rugby fans will remember Komphela threatening to prevent the Springboks from going to the 2007 Rugby World Cup (by having Home Affairs cancel their passports) because he was unhappy with the number of black players on the World Cup squad. Komphela also recently hit the headlines for saying that Sascoc was run by whites and Indians who did not understand transformation.

But is transformation still needed in South African sports? Following South Africa’s triumph at the Rugby World Cup in 2007, the country’s president Thabo Mbkei and the Minister of Sports Makhenkesi Stofile both conceded that racial quotas were not the way forward. They also went a step further and ruled out racial quotas for future national squads.

But is it time for quotas to be rescinded? Has it been enforced long enough to undo the decades of forced segregated sporting practices that were seen under Apartheid? We’d be naïve to think so.

Yet the idea of having quotas in any sporting side seems to go against the notion of sporting excellence, which is what any national side, in essence, is. A national side is ideally comprised of the best players in their respective positions, with the idea being that they would be highly competitive and thus stand a better chance of defeating their opposition.

If black players were automatic choices to fill the slots available then we would not have to listen to Komphela making ridiculous threats, but the fact remains that world-class black South African athletes/sportsmen are in short supply, so our national sporting sides will be subjected to quotas until the imbalance is corrected.

How does one then go about a task as challenging as this? For me, the focus should be on developing an ever-broadening pool of black players with the necessary skills and talents that national sides can call on. Development, though, takes time. There is no quick fix to correcting 40 years of sporting injustice, not if South Africa wants to retain the semblance of sporting excellence that our athletes have worked hard for, since readmission into the sporting world in the early nineties.

For transformation to happen at the rapid pace that the government seems to be insisting on, it needs to deliver on its mandate to uplift its people. Resources and equipment that are still scarce in township schools need to be provided. Kids need to be encouraged to participate in sports, while those show talent need to be developed and nurtured to become the next South African Olympic gold medalists we’ll still be talking about years after their Olympic heroics.

Here’s a salute to the day that sports quotas become a thing of the past.

Has Zunaid completely missed the point? Email sport@metropolis.co.za or leave your comments below!