Olympic day in history: Wayde van Niekerk retains world 400m title at world championships in London

1992 — The American basketball side featuring stars like Magic Johnson, Patrick Ewing and Michael Jordan, dubbed the Dream Team, win gold at the Barcelona Games.

2010 — Burry Stander takes bronze at the UCI Mountain Bike Marathon World Championships at Sankt Wendel, Germany, finishing the 107.93km course in 3hr 50 min 0.8 sec, just 5.5 sec behind Austrian winner Alban Lakata. 

2015 — Chad le Clos wins his second straight 100m butterfly world championship title in Budapest, adding to the crown he lifted two years earlier in Barcelona. He beat Hungarian Laszlo Cseh to avenge his defeat in the 200m butterfly earlier in the week, clocking 50.56 sec. Taking bronze was Joseph Schooling of Singapore, who would turn the tables on both the swimmers at the Rio Olympics a year later.

2016 — Chad le Clos has to settle for Olympic silver in the 200m freestyle at the Rio Games after he’s caught on the final lap by China’s Sun Yang. Swimming unsighted in lane one, the South African took a big early lead as he’d done in the semifinals, where he pretended to fade over the second half. But in the final the Asian favourite hunted him down to win in 1 min 44.65 sec. Le Clos’s 1:45.20 was an African record.

2017 — Wayde van Niekerk retains his world 400m title as he wins the final at the world championships in London in 43.98 sec, ahead of Steve Gardiner of Bahamas (44.41) and Abdalelah Haroun of Qatar (44.48).

2022 — The curtain goes down on the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham with Team South Africa delivering their worst performance since 1994. They had hovered between fifth and seventh on the medals table in the six showpieces from 1998-2018, winning between nine and 13 gold medals amid total hauls of 33 and 40 gongs. But in Birmingham they ended ninth on the table with 27 medals, seven of them gold.