Another medal for South Africa

South African rowers Donovan Cech and Ramon di Clemente won a bronze medal with a time of six minutes and 33,40 seconds in the coxless pairs rowing event at the Olympic Games in Athens on Saturday morning.

The reigning world champions, Drew Ginn and James Tomkins of Australia, cruised to victory in six minutes and 30,76 seconds. Both also have a coxless fours gold medal from 1996 and Tomkins a fours gold from 1992 as well.

Sinisa and Niksa Skelin of Croatia took silver in 6:32,64.

Cech and Di Clemente only reached the final after the Canadian team was disqualified.

The South African rowing pair, in the true spirit of the Olympic Games, had vainly put their weight behind the Canadian team in an effort to get their boat reinstated for Saturday’s final.

Canadian rower Chris Jarvis said his team had a letter signed by the South African rowers ”stating their support for us to race in the final” — despite the Canadian heavyweight coxless pair of Jarvis and Dave Calder infringing into the South African lane during Wednesday’s second semifinal.

This caused a clash of oars with the South African champions.

The Canadians were judged to have impeded the South Africans’ progress, resulting in them finishing fourth. The Canadians finished second, but were disqualified and spent the following 36 hours exhausting all levels of protest and appeal, which resulted in a two-hour hearing with the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

In a dramatic sequel on Thursday, the appeal against the initial disqualification was heard by the jury of appeal, which upheld the umpire’s ruling.

A second appeal was heard by the executive committee of Fisa (Fédération Internationale des Sociétés d’Avironthe, the international rowing federation), which reviewed the actions and decisions of both the umpire and the board of the jury.