The bronze medal picked up by the Blitzboks at the Paris Olympics was a huge achievement by Philip Snyman and his team, and it is something to celebrate.
Admittedly that is not something we would have considered a few years back, when the SA Sevens team was at the apex of the abbreviated rugby code. In previous Olympics a bronze was considered a failure as there were considerably higher expectations.
Since then though, as with the national under-20 team, there has been a slide that probably reflects a failure in coaching, or coach identification, rather than a shortage of talent available to both teams.
Since Snyman has taken over the coaching reins, after previously being an assistant, the Sevens team has started to come right, as reflected by the against the odds achievement in Paris. Certainly there couldn’t have been any expectation on the Blitzboks going into the Olympics, given they were the last qualifier and were ranked 12th. It was an achievement just for them to make it to Paris.
They got there the hard way. In previous Olympics they made it by satisfying the first requirement, which was by finishing in the top four of the World Sevens Series. This time they were struggling even to make it into the next edition of the World Series, which requires a top eight finish.
They rallied after Snyman’s elevation to head coach and managed to avoid having to take part in a qualifying tournament by finishing seventh in the 2023/24 World Series, but they had to go through a series of qualifiers to make it to the Olympics. The first was in the Africa Cup, where they were surprisingly beaten in the final by Kenya.
Having failed to make it through the regional qualification route, they were then thrown into the repechage tournament making up the next best challengers in Monte Carlo. It was at that tournament, in other words at the last opportunity, that they secured their place in Paris.
At the Olympics, they did it the hard way too, losing their first two games to New Zealand and Ireland. They had to beat Japan in their last Pool game by more than 21 points to get into the knock-outs as the best of the third place teams in the pools. Which they did. Again, it was a case of getting in by the skin of their teeth.
Given that routing to the quarterfinal meeting with the top seeds, New Zealand, there would have been little expectation of success, but that was when the Blitzboks drew on the commitment to the cause that has seen the Springboks win so many tight Rugby World Cup knock-out games.
I was out of internet or Wifi reception on Thursday and Friday and nearly fell on my back when told that not only had the Blitzboks made the quarterfinal, they’d actually beaten New Zealand to make the semifinal.
They were always going to be underdogs against France in the semifinal and put up a good show against the hosts, who were supported by a viciously partisan crowd that rather childishly — but completely erroneously, appeared to equate the Blitzboks with Siya Kolisi’s 15-man team that ended the French dream at the quarterfinal stage of RWC 2023.
Some of the headlines before the semifinal brought into the lie that knocking out the SA Sevens team from the Olympics would bring some measure of revenge, but that was lazy clickbait style journalism. It would only have been true had there been Springbok players in the Blitzbok team and/or some of the same coaches.
Unlike France, who had the supposed best player in the world, Antoine Dupont playing for them and playing a key role in the French win, there was no continuity between the squad that won the World Cup in Paris and the one that won an Olympic bronze in what is effectively a completely different version of the sport.
Comparing the two is not comparing apples with apples. There was a lot of huff and puff from commentators about Dupont and his standing as a rugby figure, but imagine if the roles were reversed and there were 70,000 South Africans cheering on a team featuring the likes of Cheslin Kolbe and other World Cup winning Boks in the semifinal.
Judging from the way the Blitzboks were apparently received by the French crowd it does appear the French are going to take a while to get over their bitterness at being knocked out of their own World Cup by SA. It’s pretty pathetic really, but it should make the Blitzbok achievement of rising above that infantile behaviour, as the Boks did last October, to get an unexpected medal by winning the Bronze final all the more satisfying.
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