Teenage soccer players who dream of becoming star South African professionals are taking up ballet to give them the edge on the field, in a training regime inspired by Argentine great Diego Maradona.
The youngsters at one of South Africa’s elite soccer academies spend 30 hours a week practising on the pitch.
And now they are also putting in the hours in the ballet studio where they leap and plie in their soccer kit to learn skills their trainers say will make them better players.
PHOTO: AFP
“It started off [when] some person went and compared Maradona’s game to typical ballet movements, and that’s where they started developing their ballet curriculum for football,” said Kobus Maree, a physiotherapist at the Sport and Art Exchange Academy.
The program began a year ago when the sparkling new campus opened in a suburb between Johannesburg and Pretoria, and the gains are already showing, said Dirk Badenhorst, who heads the school’s ballet program.
“There’s a basic move that they do called a rond de jambe en l’air, where they lift the leg in the air, and that in particular helps them with kicking the ball in the air,” he said.
Maree said ballet training has already improved the players jumps and kicks, improvements that helped them overcome any initial reluctance about taking up dance.
“They were worried they would have to put on tights and all that funny stuff,” he said. “If they see the performance benefits, and it gets related back to their sports, then I think kids will do quite a bit to perform better and be competitive.”
The boys were recruited from across South Africa, with scouts also venturing out into Botswana, Zambia and Kenya. Full tuition for boarders costs 140,000 rand (US$14,600) a year.
To make it more accessible, some students are given assistance, like Botshelo Madumo, a 14-year-old from Pretoria who has had all his fees covered.
“I almost went into tears. My mum was in tears though, so I was really happy. She was jumping for glory,” Botshelo said, remembering when he found out about his scholarship.
He grew up in a poor township, but was scouted at his first tryout with a local club in Pretoria.
To find other young players like Botshelo, both the sports and the ballet programs head into some of the poorest neighborhoods, hoping to spot young talent.
Ballet teachers run classes at the nearby Madibotle primary school, where headmistress Patricia “Busi” Lumwila said she has only 26 teachers for more than 850 students, including about 100 orphans.
“They are from the poorest of the poor,” she said. “Some of them don’t even know where town is.”
During their dance lessons, students who can’t focus in the classroom become disciplined and attentive as they practise their movements, she said.
“Most of their parents did not get this opportunity,” she said.
Bayer 04 Leverkusen go into today’s match at TSG 1899 Hoffenheim stung from their first league defeat in 16 months. Leverkusen were beaten 3-2 at home by RB Leipzig before the international break, the first loss since May last year for the reigning league and cup champions. While any defeat, particularly against a likely title rival, would have disappointed coach Xabi Alonso, the way in which it happened would be most concerning. Just as they did in the Supercup against VfB Stuttgart and in the league opener to Borussia Moenchengladbach, Leverkusen scored first, but were pegged back. However, while Leverkusen rallied late to
If all goes well when the biggest marathon field ever gathered in Australia races 42km through the streets of Sydney on Sunday, World Marathon Majors (WMM) will soon add a seventh race to the elite series. The Sydney Marathon is to become the first race since Tokyo in 2013 to join long-established majors in New York, London, Boston, Berlin and Chicago if it passes the WMM assessment criteria for the second straight year. “We’re really excited for Sunday to arrive,” race director Wayne Larden told a news conference in Sydney yesterday. “We’re prepared, we’re ready. All of our plans look good on
The lights dimmed and the crowd hushed as Karoline Kristensen entered for her performance. However, this was no ordinary Dutch theater: The temperature was 80°C and the audience naked apart from a towel. Dressed in a swimsuit and to the tune of emotional music, the 21-year-old Kristensen started her routine, performed inside a large sauna, with a bed of hot rocks in the middle. For a week this month, a group of wellness practitioners, called “sauna masters,” are gathering at a picturesque health resort in the Netherlands to compete in this year’s Aufguss world sauna championships. The practice takes its name from a
When details from a scientific experiment that could have helped clear Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva landed at the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the leader of the organization’s reaction was unequivocal: “We have to stop that urgently,” he wrote. No mention of the test ever became public and Valieva’s defense at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) went on without it. What effect the information could have had on Valieva’s case is unclear, but without it, the skater, then 15 years old, was eventually disqualified from the 2022 Winter Olympics after testing positive for a banned heart medication that would later
RSS