While the 2010 FIFA World Cup takes centre stage at the moment, there’s another football world championship heading for South Africa straight after the World Cup.

The World Football Championships for Athletes with an Intellectual Disability is due to be held from 23 August – 11 September in Limpopo. One of the venues earmarked for the event is the Peter Mokaba Stadium, currently being used for the 2010 |FIFA World Cup.

The World Championship, which takes place every four years, was first held in the Netherlands in 1994, the event will attract participants from sixteen countries – South Africa, Germany, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Poland, Egypt, Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Turkey, South Korea, Portugal, Nigeria, the Netherlands and France.

The bid for the event was submitted by the South African Sports Association for the Intellectually Impaired (SASA-II) to the organising body, the International Federation for Sport for athletes with an Intellectual Disability, in 2008. South Africa is currently ranked third in the world, and hopes to improve on this standing at the forthcoming event.

SRSA is supporting the event and will be part of the event’s organising committee. More information on the event is available at the INAS-FID website.

No past South African sports event has been subjected to the kind of critical scrutiny that 2010 FIFA World Cup is seeing, and it was only a matter of time before a book on the subject appeared. Development and Dreams, published by HSRC Press and edited by prominent South Africa social scientists Udesh Pillay, Richard Tomlinson and Orli Bass is one of the first academically orientated perspectives to capture a number o f thought-provoking discourses on the question: “Will the World Cup be a success?”

The book looks at the economic and social realities of the event, and attempts to answer the question whether the event will be economically successful and have sufficient legacies to be called worth the trouble of hosting it.

Essays by more than a dozen authors are included, making for a diverse and interesting mix of perspectives on the matter. While the book is packed with facts and figures, one can’t help sensing that many of the articles are a reflection of the subjective opinions and interpretations of the authors, rather than attempts to put objective research findings on the table. Read the rest of this entry

This weekend SRSA personnel and their partners from other organisations are visiting rural three venues in the Mpumalanga edition of the 2010 Mass Mobilisation Road Show.

The Road Show aims to ensure that all South Africans become a part of the 2010 FIFA World Cup™ excitement by encouraging and supporting sport, especially soccer, in communities throughout South Africa.  The road shows also serve as an opportunity to share information on important matters such as ticketing and match schedules. The road shows have taken place in seven of the 9 provinces across the SA between February and December 2009.

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