Team SA completed their African Games campaign when they added seven more medals on Friday to take their final tally to 106. That left them in third position behind Egypt and Nigeria headed into Saturday’s last day, although Team SA don’t have any representatives.
They had gone into Friday’s competition with 99 medals, and Rogain Joseph brought up the 100th in style when she raced to the gold medal in the women’s 400m hurdles in a personal best time of 55.39 seconds.
One gold quickly became two when Asande Mthembu won the men’s long jump, with his fifth leap of 7.86m. And moments later Ashley Erasmus made it three when she won the women’s shot put with a distance of 16.98m. Ishcke Senekal also chipped in with bronze in the women’s shot put, while defending champion Mpho Links battled heroically in the high jump with a height of 2.21m.
Neither of the two boxing medallists, Lubabalo Lusizi (men’s 51kg) and John Masamba (men’s 63.5kg) were in action on Friday, but received their silver and bronze medals, respectively. Lusizi sustained a cut in his impressive semi-final victory on Thursday night and was unable to take to the ring for the final.
Team SA had won 83 medals at the 2019 African Games in Morocco when finishing fourth on the medals table, so the Accra campaign was a considerable improvement on that performance.
Swimming finished with 46 medals, while cycling had 13, athletics 11 and wrestling 10.
They completed their Accra programme with 106 medals, comprising 32 gold, 32 silver and 42 bronze.
Photo of Lubabalo Lusizi by Frennie Shivambu in Accra