I recently had the opportunity to visit Hungary and came away with a lot interesting observations that we our sporting fraternity can learn from.
The world of sport and coaching etc is a constantly evolving one and it was interesting to see that a lot of emphasis was placed on the use of exercise as a medicine.
Here in South Africa we have two forward-thinking doctors in Louis Holtzhausen from the Free State and Demitri Constantinou from Wits and I really think we should rope them in more on the road forward.
I also visited the Hungarian High Performance Adademy and it was interesting to see there move away from a centralised system. I firmly believe that is the way to go in our sporting system.
What we need to do is to work at being strong in each of the different regions, then bring them all together every now and then to share expertise and then go back to their stations with that extra knowledge.
It was also interesting to see that throughout the Hungarian structure, each and every person is extremely well qualified to do the very best in that position, right across the board.
What was also music to my ears was the fact that in Hungary the national government gives the National Olympic Committee money and says: “here is your funding, now use it as best you see fit.” It seems here we still do way more talking than doing.
I also saw the universities very focused on specific sports etc, it seems different varsities often focus on doing well at a specific sport like handball.
There were a lot of excellent things I picked up and ideally we need to adapt them to the South African model. Hopefully that will all start coming together before the national sports indaba in August. The most important  thing is that it all needs to be done within the legal parameters so there are no grey areas.