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South Africa: Team SA Gives Its Supporters the Slip
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Business Day (Johannesburg)
7 August 2008
Posted to the web 7 August 2008
Johannesburg
THE second most senior South African government official in China, the minister plenipotentiary at the South African embassy in Beijing, Dave Malcomson, was among a large group of people stood up by SA's team at Beijing airport yesterday.
Also waiting in vain for their arrival were SABC TV, ESPN TV and representatives of several South African press organisations . The saga started on Tuesday with an e-mail saying the team would arrive from their training camp on a specific flight, CX146, at 1.55pm at terminal 3.
After much running around and several contradictory messages from airport staff, it was established that the flight was not the correct one.
Hasty calls were fired off to media liaison officer Linda Ferns who then revealed that -- as the flight from Korea was filled almost entirely with South African athletes -- it had been turned into a charter.
Meanwhile, almost two hours had elapsed. Former Australian cricket captain Steve Waugh strolled in with former tennis player Renee Stubbs, and another pop star -- this one from Singapore -- arrived and was mobbed by screaming kids. Polish, Croatian, Ukrainian and Japanese teams filtered through the rigorous Olympic security, and other members of the South African press contingent strolled in. But still no team SA.
Then, at about 4pm, a phone call from Ferns revealed that the team had already arrived at another terminal, had got straight on to a bus and were already on their way to the media village.
"I'm terribly sorry about this," said Ferns, "it is very embarrassing, but this is the first I have heard of it. They didn't even take a train to another terminal. There was a bus waiting for them and they got straight on to it."
A fuming press corps climbed back on the bus for the 40-minute trip back to the main press centre.
"We were just as surprised," the team's chef de mission, Hajeera Kajee, said. "We know that internationally you enter at terminal three, but the Chinese authorities classified our flight as a charter because we had 135 passengers in a 150-seater plane -- so we were diverted through to another terminal.
"We weren't informed about the changes before takeoff. So we were surprised not to see our project team at the airport," Kajee said.
Apart from tennis player Wesley Moodie, who has been withdrawn from the squad with a leg injury, Team SA arrived in the Beijing Athletes Village without any major injuries, according to chief medical officer Dr Shuaib Ismail Manjra.
Perhaps of greatest concern to SA's medal hopes is the condition of long-jumper Khotso Mokoena's knee.
"It's a simple jumpers knee, but he is able to maintain full training and we are giving it attention back at the Daegu camp (in Korea)," Manjra said.
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| Copyright © 2008 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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