DURBAN LETTER:Durban, the Warmest Place to Be, should land the 2020 Olympics, unless the IOC pull Rabat out of the hat

BEFORE LEAVING Ireland a few weeks back various people had advised me to pack extra layers of clothing as South Africa would be cold at this time of year. Sadly, I thought they meant by African standards, which I was largely judging by the many wildlife programmes I have watched down the years. And so it came to pass that I shivered my way through the group stages here.

Prior to leaving for Durban, a succession of Jo’burgers had talked of how much better the weather would be here but by then I just thought they meant by the standards of the rest of South Africa in July and so, fool that I am, I emerged blinking from King Shaka International Airport yesterday morning bearing a striking resemblance to an Inuit touching down in high season Ibiza.

Somewhere, over the last few months, I might actually have seen the city’s right-to-the-point slogan – The Warmest Place to Be – but if I did, it clearly went right over my head, with the result that in addition to the usual laptop, notebooks, magazines, books and 10,000 or so match-related print outs, my first day in the place has been spent carting coats, jumpers and even a woolly hat about.

I trust the IOC members won’t make the same mistake when they visit for their Congress next year but then I’d be reasonably sure members of that particular body never leave home without their Bermudas and sun cream.

They’ll be here, at least in part, because Cape Town is angling to bid for the 2020 Games and, as local tourism bigwig Perry Moodley puts it with admirable diplomacy: “Getting Olympic decision-makers from around the world to Durban is most important.”

Some of the key elements in Durban’s bid have already been taken care of, courtesy of this World Cup. The city’s crumbling old airport was on the wrong side of town and hemmed in, to the extent its runway wasn’t long enough to take a fully-laden jumbo.

Now, at a cost of some R6.8 billion (roughly €680 million) there is spanking new facility 25 miles to the more prosperous north of the city, which has an initial capacity of 7.5 million passengers per annum, with contingency plans to expand that six-fold over the next 50 years.

Then there is the magnificent Moses Mabhida stadium, which will host its last World Cup game this evening when Spain take on Germany.

“We gave six consortiums R1 million each and asked them to come up with (the concept of) a well-built, sustainable stadium that will also be able to host an event such as the Olympic Games,” said Mike Sutcliffe, the city manager of eThekwini (the broader municipality that contains Durban), who added last week that the venue is the only one in the whole of Africa capable of hosting the Games.

Sure enough, the result of their forward planning is a visually-striking 70,000-seat stadium that can have its capacity reduced to 54,000 after this evening’s match, but which can then be bumped right up to 80,000 even after the installation of the running track which was provided for at the planning stage.

Mabhida, a former leader of the South African communist party, may be dead but he has done rather well to have such a glorious facility bear his name, especially when you see some of the stuff Nelson Mandela has the misfortune to have his name attached to over here.

Surrounding the stadium is the King’s Park sporting precinct, an area in which there is already an athletics track, rugby stadium, 50-metre and diving pools, and a range of other facilities.

Next to none of the stuff is up to the required standard but crucially, much of the land required is there and already in the hands of clubs or organisations likely to support the bid.

All of which puts Durban in the driving seat to beat off competition from Cape Town, which lost out to Athens in 1997, and possibly Johannesburg, in the race to be South Africa’s chosen candidate for 2020.

That there will be a bid is taken for granted; that it will be successful seems quite likely, not least after President Jacob Zuma said last week he favoured one; IOC president Jacques Rogge said he was “glad” South Africa was interested in bidding; and Japanese IOC member Yasuhiro Nakamori revealed the organisation is inclined to look favourably on any viable bid from Africa as it will be, in the wake of Buenos Aires in 2016, the only populated continent not to have staged a Games.

Frankie Fredericks, the four-times Olympic silver medallist who now chairs the IOC’s influential Athletics Commission, has publicly welcomed the prospect of an African bid and mentioned Nigeria and Egypt as countries who might look to stage the event, but, so far, the most serious likely rival to a South African candidate is Rabat in Morocco, and they don’t have a successful (touch wood) World Cup to point to as evidence they can pull the whole thing off.

Nor does Rabat have anything like the tourism infrastructure of its would-be South African rival and so, while the city council’s stated aim of making Durban, “Africa’s most caring and liveable city, where all citizens live in harmony,” might just prove to be a bit of a tall order in light of an economic downturn that has severely dented their ambitious regeneration programme, landing an Olympics should not be.

Unless, that is, the South African people baulk at the idea of stumping up for another multi-billion dollar shindig for the international sporting community which, it seems, is far from being out of the question.

Zuma suggested last week “the people” want the Olympics but with the estimated cost of this World Cup still rising as new costs become apparent – the bill for everything including stadiums, airports, rail links, road improvements plus all the smaller stuff is currently reckoned to be between €8 billion and €10 billion, with around 5 per cent of that estimated to have gone on directly sports-related stuff – there are a great many voices suggesting the cash might have been much better spent.

Those same critics may yet form the basis for an organised opposition to any Olympic bid.

Just about everybody here appears to have signed up to idea of making this World Cup work and then sort out their difficulties in relation to it all after the tourists have gone home.

The scale of any backlash then may end up playing a big part in deciding whether Rabat or, for that matter, the likes of Istanbul, Rome, Mexico or Detroit end up being serious contenders for 2020 when the decision is taken in three years’ time.