South African athletes won three more gold medals for a total of 10 when the 14th African Athletics Championships ended in Brazzaville on Sunday.
The men’s javelin throwers made a clean sweep of the medals, while Llewellyn Herbert and Geraldine Pillay, who scored the best win of her career, added the others in the 400m hurdles and the 200m respectively.
The South African women’s 4 x 400m relay team also set a national record of three minutes and 30,12 seconds, improving the previous mark set 16 years ago.
Herbert scored an easy win in the 400m hurdles in a time of 48,91 seconds to beat Kenya’s Julius Bungei and an improving Ockert Cilliers. Pillay managed a good win in the 200m in 23,18 seconds in a race without any Nigerian sprinters.
Hardus Pienaar, who will represent South Africa in Athens, won the javelin event with a throw of 78,31m with his teammates, Gerbrandt Grobler (76,93m) and Willie Human (71,48), following him in second and third.
Morne Nagel added another bronze medal to the tally by finishing third in the 200m in 20,83 seconds with Clinton Venter, who had been injured for quite a while after qualifying for the Olympic Games, eighth in 21,63 seconds.
The women’s 4 x 400m relay squad of Adri Schoeman, Estie Wittstock, Surita Febbraio and Heide Seyerling broke the long-standing national record set in 1986 of three minutes and 30,22 seconds by a mere 0,1 seconds, when finishing second to Senegal.
In the men’s event the South African team, comprising Marcus la Grange, Werner Botha, Hendrik Mokganyetsi and Arno Malherbe, finished third behind Zimbabwe and Nigeria in three minutes and 3,81 seconds. The winning time was 3:02,38. — Sapa