Time to get the bid between the teeth again

After all the finger pointing, rancour and disappointment, the fact remains that South Africa have now lost two major attempts to host international sporting events: Cape Town's failed bid for the 2004 Olympic Games and the 2006 World Cup.

Charles Dempsey and his unique interpretation of the democratic process aside, there are some possibly unpalatable lessons to be learnt from failure, lessons which might be used to improve future bids, particularly if the South African Football Association (Safa) decides to launch an assault on the World Cup in 2010.

According to Peter de Tolly, director of the planning and environment team for Cape Town's Olympic bid, there was a manifest reluctance on the part of the relevant parties to become involved in any debriefing after failure.

The bid was a political balancing act at the best of times and, in De Tolly's opinion, it was the political power structure in Cape Town immediately after losing the tender process that prevented any meaningful analysis of what went right and what went wrong. Cape Town's reliance on sentiment - the notion of a developmental, African bid - was, he believes, overplayed.

"I think that tugging at the heartstrings was overdone," says De Tolly. "The original breakdown of the equation, and this was very much Chris Ball's thinking, was that our bid was going to be 75 percent a business proposition and 25 percent sentiment. Once the government became involved those percentages were inverted."

De Tolly believes, with the benefit of retrospect, that the Cape Town bid committee misunderstood the incredible degree to which the 2004 Olympics was not only a franchise but a business. He also thinks the bid committee misunderstood the degree to which the European block has difficulty in understanding what a developmental bid is about.

He acknowledges that the World Cup bid ran on an exceptionally tight budget, but suspects that once again South Africa made too much of the emotional aspects of the bid. This is not to suggest that he doesn't believe that the added dimension of colour and festivity that an African World Cup would be was a good selling point, it's just his suspicion that Danny Jordaan's team, despite their excellent performance, were not sufficiently business-minded as, say, the Germans.

Clare Digby, the South African Hockey Association (Saha) president, suspects that the technical merits of our World Cup bid were irrelevant. "I don't know that there are any rules in this kind of thing," she says. "Maybe we are too naive in the way we approach these things. I think that, in all honesty, these situations are about money, politics and influence and that they have little to do with the standard of one's technical document."

Digby is well-acquainted with international sporting realpolitik considering Saha's recent appeal to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to overturn the National Olympic Committee of South Africa's (Nocsa) decision to exclude the South African men's hockey side from the Sydney Olympics. Her experience of the hard realities of international sport have made her somewhat suspicious of world governing bodies.

At the same time she believes that there are angles worth working, particularly through both formal networks of power and informal channels of favour and influence. "The rules of the game seem to provide for due process at least in theory," says Digby. "But when push comes to shove, they back what they know. In the case of the IOC it was Nocsa and in the case of (soccer's world governing body) Fifa it was Germany, part of the strongest block in world soccer."

De Tolly doesn't quite share Digby's pessimism and believes that South Africa desperately needs, what he dubbed, a "mega-event". His experience of Cape Town's Olympic bid was that apparently "irreconcilable differences" between the various tiers of government miraculously vanished when Cape Town made the shortlist of possible winning cities, although he did mention that when the bid failed there was little energy to have another bash at becoming a host city.

"I think that Safa should brace themselves to go for it again," says De Tolly, adding that he finds it somewhat obscene that the world's most prestigious events could be circulated amongst the privileged few.

Early indications are that South Africa's failure to host the World Cup, combined with the country's legitimate disappointment at the way in which Dempsey contrived to fudge the issue, has had an impact on both Fifa president Sepp Blatter and his archrival, Lennart Johansson.

Blatter recently said that he believes the cup should be awarded to South Africa in 2010 and Johansson, the president of European soccer's governing body Uefa, immediatley followed suit. Safa, however, remain undecided as to their future course of action.

Ismael Bhamjee - as Botswana's delegate to Fifa, the closest South Africa have to a man on the executive - was quoted as saying South Africa could legitimately bid for the 2010 World Cup in that South Africa's agreement with Brazil prior to bid for 2006 was dependent on the fact that South Africa was awarded the event, which they were not.

And with the rotation lobby gaining momentum in Fifa, who knows, South Africa might yet see their work come to fruition - it might take a little longer than expected, but there is room for hope.

While guarded hope is not entirely misplaced, we should not lose sight of the factors which probably impacted negatively on our 2004 and 2006 bids.

De Tolly says these range from crime and security to guarantees on investment. However, most revealing of all, he suspects, is that there were those in Europe and Asia who saw that Africa's footballing house was not quite in order, an impression surely reinforced by last Sunday's tragedy in Harare.