Olympics: South Africa's Tatjana Smith wins 100m breaststroke gold

  • 3 months ago

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00:00Well now it's been another eventful Monday of Olympic action for Africa's athletes and joining
00:04me now from Johannesburg, South Africa is our resident sports guru and journalist Mbulelo
00:09Tinta to go over all that action. South African swimming sensation Tatiana Smith, we cannot start
00:17with anything else but her gold, Africa's first gold in these Olympic Games. My favourite part
00:24is that some people may not know her story, it's that she actually said I had fallen out of love
00:28with swimming, she considered not swimming at all in these Olympics and Tatiana now is on the brink
00:35of emulating of course her hero and one of our very first gold medalist post-apartheid of course
00:41Penny Haynes, the only woman to have ever won the 100 metre and 200 metre breaststroke. Tatiana holds
00:48the 200 already from Tokyo, she's capable now of becoming the second woman of all time to win the
00:54100 and 200. Extremely proud of her, South Africa's first gold, oh man we are going absolutely crazy
01:00here in Johannesburg. I'm sure Mbulelo, it really is magnificent because there was a lot of
01:06heart and mouth moments in the swimming, we didn't see Peter Kutzer quite deliver like we hoped but
01:12we certainly are, I mean proud as Africans to see in the pool Tatiana doing what we hoped
01:22and expected to do. But now talking of South Africa, Alan Hathaway has done something which
01:28wasn't maybe quite expected and that was to get a bronze medal in the mountain bike cross-country.
01:33Absolutely incredible, he's been in red hot form on the world racing scene this year, he becomes
01:38Africa's very first mountain bike cross-country medalist ever by the way, so shout out to him
01:45blazing the trail there. The 28 year old from Hillcrest, absolutely sensational, remember
01:50two seconds off the silver medal, a quite incredible performance from the 28 year old
01:55and he is now entering his peak at the age of 28, we can expect him to really be pushing for the gold
02:00medal in LA in 2028. Absolutely incredible, another bronze of course for Africa at large.
02:06And South Africa's first cycling medal since the 1950s in the Olympics, there's nowhere else to end
02:13though than with Nigeria's women's basketball team, their first victory in 20 years and what an
02:21occasion to do it. You know my favorite thing about these human beings that we call Olympians,
02:27here's where they're different to us, some adversity at the beginning, some controversy
02:31if you didn't see it Nigeria's women being denied of course entrance onto their own boat to parade
02:37with their team at the beginning, but they said you know what that doesn't matter, we've got mental
02:42fortitude, we're not just human beings, we are Olympians, we are the peak of performance. They
02:46went on as the 12th ranked team in the world to shock the world, the third team in the world
02:51Australia, 75-62, Ezinne Kalu with 19 points there, 17 of those coming in the first half,
02:58a quite incredible performance and those Nigerian women, if you haven't seen the highlights I urge
03:02everybody at home to jump on YouTube and go and see as they went absolutely ballistic at the end
03:08representing the wonderful country of Nigeria and Africa at large, incredible, incredible result.
03:14And just touching on the result of yesterday, of Sunday, it was South Sudan which caused an
03:21upset in the basketball if we can cast our minds back, so Africa really dominating on the court.
03:27Absolutely, I think South Sudan of course the youngest country in Africa and for them to be
03:32at the debut Olympics, they've got an incredibly tough group, we saw them push America to just one
03:37point, the great USA team, the dream team reincarnate people are saying, to just that one
03:42point LeBron James at the end having to do what he did there, they've absolutely decimated Puerto
03:48Rico on the weekend and now they will face MVP of course from the NBA Nikola Jokic and his Serbian
03:54team, if they beat them that is almost a guarantee to go through to the next round which would be
04:00nigh on an absolute miracle, the South Sudanese doing an incredible job and remember what they've
04:05done really, really well is that they've taken a former Duke and Bulls player Luol Deng to be
04:12their president, so South Sudan doing the business for Africa.

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