One can hardly overstate the success of the World Cup in the Republic of South Africa last year: 64 matches were followed over a month by 26 billion viewers in the whole world. The Republic of South Africa has become the first country to host the World Football Championship on the African continent. Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of South Africa, Andries Venter, speaks in an interview with the Ukraine 2012 magazine about the way the moderately economically developed Republic of South Africa managed to organize one of the most successful world football championships.
Duration of Mundial was one month, but preparations for it took six years Mr. Venter, over a year has already passed after the World Cup in the Republic of South Africa. Have the impressions and emotions of the tournament vanished? It was a great honour for our country to host the World Football Championship that was held on the African continent for the first time ever. The duration of the tournament was just a month: from 11 June till 11 July. But preparation for it took six years (the Republic of South Africa got the right to host the championship in 2004). There were quite many optimists
and pessimists with regard to the level of our preparedness. Some people said that we were a backward country, while others persuaded that we would succeed. In our turn, we persistently worked on the organization of conducting 64 matches in 10 stadiums in nine cities. We had to build some stadiums, and we upgraded some others in order to make them comply with the most up-to-date requirements. Luckily, rugby is very popular in the Republic of South Africa, and this is why we already had a number of completed rugby stadiums. Besides the 10 major stadiums, we also had to prepare 24 training bases for participating teams. This is why a number of already existing arenas were reequipped as training bases. What serious problems did the Republic of South Africa encounter during preparations for the World Cup in 2010? Luckily, we did not have substantial problems related to stadiums. We actually had to build four large arenas and just to prepare the remaining six. As regards airports, we had been planning their modernization back since the mid1990s. We had to invest there some more money than we had been planning. There were also problems related to car parking areas at airports, motorways and highspeed railway communications, but we have resolved all of them. Besides this, in order to fulfill FIFA requirements to telecommunications, we had to completely upgrade the country’s telecommunication system. You have mentioned FIFA requirements to organization of the tournament, and it is clear that immense funds were spent
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