The South African 7s Rugby Team are more commonly known as the BlitzBokke. The team’s nickname is derived from “blitz”, an Afrikaans word meaning lightning, and of course Bokke – the nickname of our rugby team.
Since its inception in 1999/2000, they’ve won the Sevens World Series 4 times with 39 tournament wins. They’ve won a Bronze Olympic medal (Rio 2016) and were runners up at the Sevens World Cup in 1997 (their only WC final). They’ve also won 3 Commonwealth Games medals – gold in Scotland in 2014 and 2 bronze medals.
I’ve watched them a number of times in London without seeing them win a tournament – 2016 being particularly disappointing with Scotland scoring twice after the hooter to win the final. Thankfully the winless duck was broken at the start of the year where I watched the boys win a series tournament in Sevilla. Rugby and tapas make for a wonderful weekend 🙂
The BlitzBokke comfortably made it out of their pool beating Malaysia 46-0, Tonga 36-5 and Scotland 34-0. Canada went down 33-0 in the quarterfinal before a tough 24-12 semi-final win over Australia having come from behind twice.
We would be up against Olympic Champions Fiji for the gold medal and were expecting a very tough game. That wasn’t to be with the BlitzBokke putting on a 7s masterclass to score 5 tries and comfortably win 31-7. We were aggressive in defence, clinical on attack and made just 1 error all match. It was without doubt the best performance I’ve seen live.
We had thought our seats in Row B (very close to the grass) weren’t great as it’s hard to see what’s going in the other half when you’re that low. We changed our minds, though, when our third try was scored in our corner and we made it on to TV! It’s alway fun receiving messages from folks around the world to say we’ve been spotted! 🙂 Some I hadn’t spoken to since they last saw me on TV!
We moved to the halfway line to watch us receive our medals and there were a few renditions of Shosholoza as we waited. We proudly sang the anthem as we watched our rainbow flag being raised before making a dash to the shuttle bus, which took us back to the station where we jumped on the last train to London.
