Paris 2024 – or, officially, the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad – gets underway on Friday. It will be South Africa’s 21st Games, its ninth since the ban against its participation was lifted in 1992.
South African athletes have won a total of 38 medals in the post-apartheid era – 11 gold, 18 silver and nine bronze, mostly in swimming and athletics. Two South Africans currently hold Olympic records: Tatjana (Schoenmaker) Smith for the 100m and 200m women’s breaststroke, and Wayde van Niekerk in the men’s 400m.
Sports stories are often best told in visuals. Here are six more charts that explore South Africa’s performance on the world’s greatest sporting stage.
Even numbers
Women were not allowed to compete at the Games until the 1900 Paris Olympics. Now, in the same city 124 years later, there will be equal numbers of male and female athletes on the field of play.
More than half of the athletes from North America and Oceania are women and almost half (49%) from Asia and Europe are women. Africa and South America both fall below the half-way point, with African teams having the lowest proportion of women.
There are exceptions. Female competitors make up two-thirds of the Olympic team for Sierra Leone, Zambia, Nigeria, Angola, Cameroon, Lesotho, Malawi and São Tomé and Príncipe.
The number of women in the South African team has always been lower than the number of men. This year, we’re nearing parity, with women making up a just under 45% of the competitors.
Swimmer Blanche Nash was the first woman to represent South Africa at Antwerp in 1920. In 1928, five of the 10 South Africans in Athens were women. All were swimmers, with the women’s relay team winning bronze.
In 1952, swimmer Esther Brand became the first SA woman to win an Olympic gold. A few days later, 16-year-old Joan Harrison won the 100m backstroke. It would take 44 years for South Africa to win another gold in the pool, with Penny Heyns winning two at the 1996 Games.
Size matters
This year’s TeamSA stands at 138 athletes across 19 codes – including four sports climbers, three skateboarders, two BMX trick riders, an archer and a badminton player.
The men’s and women’s hockey (32) and rugby 7s (24) are the biggest teams. The codes with the most participants are track and field (34 athletes) and aquatics (eight swimmers and one diver). The South African cohort is smaller than Tokyo 2020’s, when 179 athletes participated in 17 sports.
Ga-ga for gold
At the Olympics, a country’s position on the medals table is based simply on gold medals. Silver and bronze are used as tie-breakers.
When measured in golds, South Africa’s two most-successful performances are a century apart. In the 1912 Games in Stockholm, South Africa won four golds and two silvers in tennis, cycling and the marathon. Tennis player Charles Winslow, one of SA’s most-successful Olympians, won two of those gold medals.
At London in 2012, TeamSA won four golds in rowing, swimming and athletics.
South Africa’s highest medal haul is 10 at the 2016 Olympics in Rio, but only two of those were gold.
Apart from Winslow, only two other South Africans who have two golds: swimmer Penny Heyns; and 800m queen Caster Semenya, who is South Africa’s only black female medalist. She won in 2012 and 2016.
Swimmer Chad le Clos is the country’s most-decorated Olympian, with a total of four medals, one of which is gold. Paris will be the 32-year-old’s fourth Games.
You may notice ‘Art’ in the list of medals for South Africa. These were won in competitions, held as part of the Games between 1912 and 1948, to reward artistic works, such as poems or sculptures, that were ‘inspired by sport’.
In numbers
- 10,500 athletes participating in 329 events over 16 days
- Paris is the host for the third time
- 35 venues, including one 15,000km away in Tahiti, French Polynesia – for surfing
- The Paralympics will take place from 28 August to 8 September, featuring 4,400 athletes in 549 events
- This year’s mascot is … a hat. The Olympic phryge is a traditional hat once worn by French revolutionaries
- The Olympic medals, designed by Chaumet, contain 18g of iron from the Eiffel Tower
- Bedazzled! The US gymnasts’ Olympics leotards, which feature 47,000 crystals, cost about $3,000 apiece. Each member of the team received eight leotards
Notebook
- Charts and story updated 24 July to reflect final team size announced by Sascoc