First published in The Citizen - June 10, 2011.
Tomorrow it will be exactly a year since the start of the 2010 Fifa World Cup South Africa.
Like the rest of South Africa I have been reflecting this week on our nation’s moment in the sun.
A year ago I was part of the 2010 Fifa World Cup Organising Committee South Africa – more commonly referred to as the LOC.
The days building up to the tournament were an odd mixture of calm and panic. We knew then that we were on the brink of history whatever happened over the next 30 days.
For a month South Africa was filled with unbridled colour and joy and when the final whistle blew on July 11, we took a second to heave a collective sigh of relief and then joined the rest of the world to celebrate our success.
For months afterwards we spoke of the gains our country had made and the benefits we would reap from hosting the tournament.
Then we fell silent and went back to the way things were before the party began.
This week, in the sober light of day, I found myself asking if the World Cup really was as important as we made it out to be. Did it really have as profound an effect on South Africa as we all thought?
There are many who will say in hindsight we gave up too much for the right to host the World Cup. The naysayers will continue to point at stadiums standing empty – a complete fallacy by the way – or to the fact that our roads remain potholed, or that basic services remain undelivered and ask why we spent all that money on something which didn't take the country forward. What did we gain, they will ask?
In the past the benefits of hosting the World Cup have been fairly tangible for host nations. Germany's hosting of the tournament in 2006 had a major, lasting impact on their tourism figures and experts there have attributed this to how the World Cup changed perceptions of the German people.
Instead of the stereotype of a stoic, overly serious nation, Germans are now regarded as a friendly, hospitable people.
Africans have never faced the same problems as the Germans. We have never been thought of as efficient or capable of meeting deadlines. From the start there were doubts that we would be able to pull it off.
It is something we in the LOC had to face daily. These doubts didn’t only come from the foreign media and people outside of South Africa, but more importantly they came from the people within our own borders.
The more I thought about it the more I began to realise that perhaps the greatest success we as a nation gained from hosting the World Cup was changing the way the world thought about Africa.
The World Cup provided us with the opportunity to change the preconceived ideas of the people of this continent. It gave us the opportunity to prove all of those who doubted us wrong.
What the World Cup allowed was the opportunity to be our best. We showed that when we put our minds to it we are capable of putting on a world-class show and we are capable of meeting strict deadlines.
Cynics will argue over whether the tournament left any tangible benefits for the country and the history books will take a more sober view of the event’s success, but for those of us who worked there, the World Cup will always be about more.
It will be about how we proved that as South Africans we could come together and compete with the world on an equal level.
Francois Rank is news editor of The Citizen.
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