Blast from the past: Scheckter sails to victory in Monaco

1979 — Jody Scheckter wins his second straight Formula One race, taking the Monaco Grand Prix two weeks after his Belgian triumph to move to the top of the drivers’ championship. 

2000 — Simon Ramoni survives three knock-downs before forcing Englishman Patrick Mullings, himself down twice in the early rounds, to quit in the eighth round to retain his IBO junior-featherweight title in London. Ramoni had won the belt from Mullings in 1998. 

2010 — Playing at the refurbished Soccer City for the first time, Bafana Bafana beat Colombia 2-1 in a World Cup warm-up match. Amazingly, all three goals came from penalties. Teko Modise scored first, though it was his second attempt after his first had been saved, but the linesman ruled the goalkeeper had moved too early. Giovanni Moreno equalised for the visitors and Katlego Mphela made it 2-1 for the home side. It later emerged that this was one of five Bafana warm-up matches influenced by an Asian betting ring. 

2017 — The Proteas fall an agonising two runs short in their chase to overhaul England’s 330/6 in the second ODI in Southampton. Ben Stoke’s 79-ball 101 proved critical for the home side. Opener Quinton de Kock struck 98, but not even AB de Villiers’s 52 from 50 balls and David Miller’s unbeaten 71 from 51 deliveries were able to get SA over the finish line. The win gave England an unassailable 2-0 lead in the three-match series. 

2018 — Hayley Nixon is the first woman home in the Molokai Challenge, making the 43km (27-mile) crossing by surfski in a record 3hr 52 min 32 sec. Nixon enjoyed an unusual downwind the entire race from Molokai to Oahu in Hawaii. Nixon, the reigning world canoe ocean racing champion at the time, was a late entry after an Australian sponsor contacted her on Facebook three weeks before the race and unexpectedly offered to cover her expenses. The cost of travelling there and competing — each entrant needs to hire a skipper in a skiboat to trail them at about $1,000 (R15,752) a hit — had been too prohibitive for the Durban biokineticist at an estimated R60,000. Her male countrymen Hank McGregor and Jasper Mocke finished second and third in the men’s race.