Black Gymnastics Coach Leads Way In South Africa

INDIANAPOLIS - When he was a young gymnast in South Africa, Brian Le Roux used to be told he couldn't enter certain restaurants or bars with his teammates because he was colored. When he grew older, he was forced to stop coaching black and colored gymnasts. For nine years, he obeyed, but in 1989, he decided to return to his sport despite warnings not to and began coaching again.

Because of the politics of apartheid, for nearly two decades the sport of gymnastics in South Africa turned its back on Le Roux, only to watch him come back for more.

Today his perseverance has been rewarded. The South African gymnastics team was the first of that nation's Olympic sports teams to return to international competition, and Le Roux is with them.

There were no blacks on the South African team at this month's World Gymnastics Championships, just four white teenage girls and two white male college students. None of them was good enough to qualify for the finals in individual competition; none finished better than 100th. Since teams must be made up of a minimum of five men or women, they couldn't compete in the team event.

Because of these performances - totally expected of a nation that hasn't been allowed at an international championship in 25 years - the South African gymnasts did not qualify for the 1992 Olympics. But the South Africans didn't come here to win or lose. They came here to be seen and interviewed, to make a statement, to begin the long road back. And they brought two black developmental coaches, Le Roux and Jerry Masia, with them for their journey.

"Give me three or four years," Masia said at the cavernous Hoosier Dome, site of the gymnastics competition. "You will see a totally different picture. You will see black gymnasts. We've started very late with this development. Now we (blacks and coloreds) are exposed to most of the gyms. Now wait and see what happens."

This also is the refrain of Le Roux, 35, who presently is coaching at a gym in Cape Town that he said, "I couldn't put my foot in before because it was whites-only."

An "average" gymnast in the 1970s, Le Roux said he felt "humiliated" several times when his white teammates were allowed to do things he could not.

"When I couldn't get into a restaurant or bar, the guys would leave with me," he said. "They wouldn't leave me outside alone. We'd find another place that would serve me."

That kind of discrimination doesn't happen anymore, he said.

"There have been massive, massive changes," he said. "I live in a so-called whites-only area. I bought a house there. I can walk in wherever I want to. I can get on any train car. I don't have to run to reach the non-white car. The buses, the beaches, it's all open now."

Le Roux coached gymnastics for several years until 1980, when the South African Council of Sport, the governing body for black athletes, issued a declaration that blacks were not to associate with whites because, as he remembers the edict, "You can't have normal sports in an abnormal society."

The black and colored gymnasts he was coaching were part of the South African Amateur Gymnastics Union, the white-run national governing body for the sport. His ties had to be severed, according to the Council.

So Le Roux turned to coaching water polo and soccer and teaching lifesaving at a colored sports hall from 1980-89. And the black and colored gymnasts he had been helping were set adrift.

"I had a lot of excellent gymnasts who won many gold medallions in national competition," he said. "We were taking them off the street, helping them. And then we lost them."

When Le Roux finally decided to come back, he went to the gym in Cape Town, but didn't stop there. Last spring, he went to Crossroads, a shantytown in Cape Town, and began beckoning black children to try somersaults.

"This is a black township where you wouldn't want your dog to live," Le Roux said. "When it rains, it's like a shantytown in Venice. Water everywhere. I have 60 black children ages 5 to 15 doing tumbling outside on the lawn. I don't even have mats. They tumble on the ground. You ask a white child to do that, they never would."

Despite the hardships Le Roux presses on, he says, because of the positive effects the sport offers.

"Gymnastics is such a wonderful sport," he said. "It teaches a child self-respect, how to behave, how to live and train physically, mentally and socially. In gymnastics, they start achieving. They can say, `I am worth something.' They can go out later and do other things."

Elizabeth Cameron-Smith, the South African team manager, estimated that 20 percent of the children under the age of 10 participating in elite national gymnastics programs in South Africa are black or colored.

"These are the high-potential kids we have found in our national programs," she said. "There is growing (black and colored) representation in these squads. We are preparing for the Olympics of the year 2000 and they are the ones we are looking at."

The problem for years within South African gymnastics circles - white, black or colored - was that there was no particular incentive to get better, because there was nowhere for the best gymnasts to go.

South Africa last competed in the Olympics in 1960 and was banned by the International Olympic Committee in 1970 because of apartheid. In July, the IOC readmitted the nation, and individual international sports federations must make their own determinations about allowing South Africans to compete. Three weeks ago, the International Gymnastics Federation gave its approval.

"Up until now, a carrot was held there, but we didn't know how far away it was," said Kobus Scheepers, SAAGU president. "We have caught up with the carrot."

"We ask ourselves, `Why are we the lucky ones?' " said Helena Cillie, 14, who was 151st in World Championship compulsories. "I feel very sad for the generations of gymnasts who never could compete."

For their part, the gymnasts who competed here are very aware of the changes in their nation.

"The blacks are allowed to live with us and train with us," said Marie Thickitt, also 14. "We're selling our house and a black man is buying it."

While there were years of discrimination in the preparation of athletes, there was none in the selection of this team, said Le Roux. Gymnastics is a sport dominated by whites; the U.S. team here has two black athletes, but for years the United States has been represented by all-white teams at world championships and Olympic Games. The same is true of most Western nations.

"We're not Olympic-standard yet," Le Roux said. "Whites are. They've had it all these years. They've had coaches, facilities. They had the money, you see. But it's fair now. If there were a black of Olympic-standard, he would have been on the team. There is no more place for corruption."