Pieter Coetzé became the first South African to win a trifecta of medals across one stroke at a world championships as he claimed the men’s 50m backstroke silver in Singapore on Sunday evening.
He lowered his own African record to 24.17 sec as he ended tied for second with Russian Pavel Samusenko behind the other Russian in the field, world record-holder Kliment Kolesnikov, who clocked a 23.68 championship record.
The 21-year-old Tuks psychology student has emerged as a phenom at this gala after claiming the 100m backstroke gold and silver in both the 200m and 50m events.
He is only the eighth man in history to win a 50m, 100m and 200m treble since the 50m freestyle was incorporated into the 1986 world championship programme and the 1988 Olympics.
The 50m races in the other three strokes were introduced at the world championships in 2001 and will make their debut at the Los Angeles Games in 2028.
Coetzé, only the second man to achieve the backstroke trifecta, is also the second South African to win three medals at a world championships, after Roland Schoeman who scooped gold in the 50m freestyle and 50 butterfly as well as the 100m freestyle silver in 2005.
His three gongs and Kaylene Corbett’s 200m breaststroke bronze gave SA four medals for the showpiece, one short of the country’s best tally of five, achieved twice in 2005 and 2013. Those were also the only occasions when SA won more than one gold, with three in 2013 and two in 2005. It’s also only the second time the national team has lifted four medals, with Chad le Clos and Cameron van der Burgh landing two each in 2015.
Coetzé is the third South African to bag a medal in the 50m backstroke, after Gerhard Zandberg, winner of four medals from 2003 to 2011, and Zane Waddell in 2019.
But their impressive haul of six makes the 50m backstroke only the country’s second-best world championship event after the men’s 50m breaststroke, where Van der Burgh landed six medals and Giulio Zorzi one.
At the same time Olivia Nel and Erin Gallagher powered the national women’s 4x100m medley relay team to the African record in the morning heats, combining with Rebecca Meder and Aimee Canny to second in their heat. They clocked 3 min 59.47 sec, just 11-100ths of a second behind the neutral athletes’ combination who bagged the final eighth spot in the evening final.
Meder, Gallagher and Canny were survivors of the team that set the previous 3:59.63 mark exactly three years to the day earlier at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.
Newcomer Nel went more than a second faster in the opening backstroke leg, completing the opening 100m in 1:00.33. Meder, switching from backstroke to breaststroke, touched in 1:07.63, which was understandably slower than the 1:05.56 effort in 2022 by Lara van Niekerk, who was in the form of her life at the time.
Meder, who was laid low by a stomach bug earlier in the gala, is a 200m specialist, but she was still the fastest available 100m breaststroker.
Then Gallagher smashed more than a second off her effort from three years ago as she completed the butterfly in 57.31. Canny narrowed the gap on the neutral athletes’ combination considerably as she rounded off the effort with 54.20 in the freestyle. Had she matched her 53.80 from England the team would have become the first SA relay outfit to make an evening final at a world championships since 2011.
From 2007 to 2011 five SA relay teams made world championship finals, all of them men’s. The last time an SA women’s team made a final at a major gala was in the 4x100m medley at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
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