The SA rowing squad is in a critical race against time as government departments prepare to remove the water hyacinth that has overrun the Roodeplaat Dam near Pretoria.
The rowers are now at Katse Dam in Lesotho on a high-altitude training camp until the end of the year, but the big question is whether they will be able to return to training at Roodeplaat as planned early in the new year.
Lawrence Brittain, a silver medallist at Rio 2016, is seeking more success in the men's pair at the Tokyo Olympics next year, with two more crews, the lightweight women's double sculls and men's four, preparing for a qualifying regatta in May.
Most successful Olympic sport
Rowing is arguably SA's most successful Olympic sport programme with three medals from the past four Games.
It's the only sport outside of athletics and swimming to have won more than one Olympic gong since SA's readmission in 1992. They've produced Olympic and world champions.
Roodeplaat, with a 2km racing course and a 6km stretch of water for distance training, has been the base through it all.
Rowing SA (RowSA) president Sean Kerr said he had been in negotiations with the department of environment, forestry and fisheries, which in turn was dealing with water and sanitation, but he didn't know when work would begin.
The departments couldn't give a timeline.
"Forestry and fishing is awaiting confirmation from water and sanitation to do a sub-lethal dose aerial spray to reduce the biomass on the dam," water and sanitation spokesperson Sputnik Ratau said in an email.
"There are four teams that are waiting to return to manually remove the water hyacinth plants.
"Forestry and fisheries with Rhodes University Centre for Biocontrol is setting up mass rearing stations around the dam for the rearing of water hyacinth biological control agents."
The weed has been left unchecked since shortly before lockdown in March, and its proliferation is proving expensive.
Kerr said more than R200,000 was spent repairing the rowing course after it was damaged in floods last season, and more than R50,000 booming off the hyacinth to create waterways earlier in the year.
But someone had cut the boom and the weed had ripped up the course. "It'll cost significantly more than R200,000 to restore the course again," he said.
Ratau said an aerial spray would cost about R800,000 and the teams about R50,000 a month.
For the past few months the rowers had to relocate to the Vaal to get onto water, but conditions were far from ideal there.
For starters, it cost money to stay there. Secondly, they couldn't get on the water on weekends because of the speed boats, and they also had to watch out for debris, like tree branches, which damaged equipment.
Roodeplaat has been home to SA rowing for 19 years, the base from where Don Cech and Ramon Di Clemente won the first world championship medal in 2001 and the first Olympic gong at Athens 2004.
Since coach Roger Barrow took over after Beijing 2008, he has created a world-beating squad.
Linked to the success has been the tie up with the University of Pretoria, which has allowed rowers to study on the side and, through Tuks Sport's high performance centre, given them important medical and scientific support.
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