AP
Bridgitte Hartley of Richards Bay celebrates at the podium winning the kayaker bronze medal in the womens K1, 500m yesterday.
A couple of hundred metres away from the athletes village in London there is a small shop with a window display showing off an Olympic podium with signs for each position reading: 1st Champion; 2nd Nearly; 3rd Next time.
For South Africans Bridgitte Hartley, Caster Semenya and the men’s 4x400m hurdles team we know there will all be a next time. But the insinuation that third is nothing could not be further from the truth.
Hartley is unlikely to have read the sign, but her unreserved joy at getting a bronze medal for finishing third in the women’s 500m K1 race at Eton Dorney – just outside London – proves just how much a medal at the Olympics means – so much so that Hartley has promised to be in Rio for the next Olympics in 2016.
“This really is emotional. It is what every athlete dreams of. It’s the most amazing thing that has ever happened in my life so far,” she said through the tears after realising she had earned a medal. I crossed the line and I looked to the side and thought I might have a medal, but I wasn’t sure,” Hartley said.
“I saw the Hungarian shouting and I thought ‘OK she has got it’, then they put Ukraine up as second on the screen and I thought ‘Please, please, please’ and then they put |up South Africa and I thought ‘Ah, but maybe they will switch it, maybe they need a photo finish’ but they did not and it was ‘thank you, thank you’.”
Later in the Olympic Stadium Caster Semenya destroyed all opposition and dispelled any notion she was not in gold-medal winning condition when she ran her best time of the season to book a place in the final with a very fast but controlled run.
After a slow, tactical heat and this fast semi-final the broad smile on the face of Semenya’s coach, former 800m great Maria Mutola, confirmed that her charge is peaking at the right time and must now be considered the favourite to claim gold on Saturday.
For the 4x400m runners there was a sense of relief that they will have a next time tonight after they were controversially tripped out of their heat.
There was a massive sense of relief from the team when they learnt that they would be included in the final following Ofentse Mogawane’s fall after a clash with a Kenyan runner on the last bend and he failed to finish the second leg of the race.
Oscar Pistorius, Willie de Beer and Shaun de Jager looked on in disbelief as Mogawane rolled on the ground, clutching his dislocated shoulder.
Hezekiel Speng, the athletics manager of Team South Africa, appealed, saying that they had not been given a fair chance of competing by the actions of Boniface Mucheru, who looked to have turned sharply to the right and taken out Mogawane.
The IAAF agreed and SA will start in lane one tonight as the ninth team in the final.
Mogawane will be replaced by LJ van Zyl, the 400m hurdler, who admitted that he had already packed his bags for home before he got the news that he would be replacing Mogawane.
