A bureaucratic botch-up has obliterated two Olympic-qualifying swims that should have seen double Commonwealth Games champion Lara van Niekerk safely onto the South African team for the Paris showpiece.
The 21-year-old is now heading to Europe in a last-ditch bid to book her spot before the qualifying window closes on June 23.
Van Niekerk needs to match the 1min 06.79sec entry standard for the 100m breaststroke — even though she achieved it twice soon after the Olympic qualifying window opened on March 1 last year.
She went 1:06.65 at a local grand prix meet on March 3 and then clocked 1:06.74 at the national championships in Gqeberha on April 12 last year.
But it turns out neither gala received Olympic qualifying event status, leaving Van Niekerk out in the cold at the recent naming of Team South Africa’s eight-strong pool squad for the games that run from July 27 to August 11.
Van Niekerk, the only local swimmer affected in this way, will compete at the Mare Nostrum series this coming week.
A Swimming South Africa (SSA) official believes the error lay with World Aquatics (WA), saying the national federation had done the necessary paperwork to register the 2023 national gala as a qualifying event for the Olympics, as well as the 2023 and 2024 world championships.
WA countered it had not received the games-related paperwork.
The official said SSA’s request to have the 2023 championships accredited for the Olympics retrospectively was denied.
WA told the Sunday Times the only SSA paperwork that had passed its desk was for the 2024 national championships.
“For Paris 2024 Olympic qualification events in swimming, an application process with specific requirements and deadlines was established,” said WA communications manager Torin Koos.
“Only the events that have gone through the process and been approved by the WA technical swimming committee are included in the calendar of Paris 2024 qualification events.”
It appears other swimming bodies didn’t experience similar problems for their 2023 galas. A cursory Sunday Times count showed 14 swimmers posted Olympic entry times in seven European nations as well as in the US, Canada and Japan from March 4 to April 22 last year. Several galas were national championships and some were local meets.
During the 2024 South African championships in April the SSA hierarchy seemed unaware of Van Niekerk’s qualifying effort at the national gala in the same Gqeberha pool a year earlier.
Van Niekerk is on the top tier of the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc) Operation Excellence funding programme, which was relaunched in 2023, making her eligible to claim support of up to R300,000 a year.
Van Niekerk is scheduled to compete in Barcelona on Wednesday and Thursday and again in Monaco on Saturday and next Sunday. A Sascoc official confirmed they are contributing to her qualifying campaign — being conducted at a time she should be fine-tuning her Olympic preparations.
Van Niekerk stormed onto the international scene in 2022, lifting the world championship bronze in the non-Olympic 50m breaststroke event.
Then came Birmingham 2022 where she clocked an impressive 1:05.47 to win the 100m breaststroke ahead of Olympic star Tatjana Smith.
Her form has slipped since then after a few health issues.
Van Niekerk’s omission is the latest controversy affecting local Olympic aquatics hopefuls.
SSA’s move to raise Olympic selection standards cost open-water swimmer Amica de Jager a spot in Paris, a punitive measure that has been deemed unjustifiable by all observers.
The men’s and women’s water polo teams also fell victim to the policy.
Yet SSA’s standards were never discussed by the federation’s athletes’ commission, a failing that should have scuppered the validity of its selection document, signed off in late 2023 and accepted by Sascoc.
