SA athletes eye Athens medals
Brad Morgan
23 July 2004
13 August 2004. That's when the Olympic Games get under way. While there are numerous sports that will be contested in Athens, the track and field events are arguably the focal point of any Olympics, and a number of South African athletes could be in the hunt for medals.
Two-time world high jump champion Hestrie Cloete will lead the South African challenge. She enjoyed a superb season in 2003, when she was named the IAAF Athlete of the Year. The signs are that she is trying to follow the same path to success in the Olympics in 2004.
Last year, Cloete started her season off in low-key fashion, competing mostly at home, where she won competition after competition with very average heights. Then she moved on to European competition, and early on she took some time to find her
form, finishing tenth in Oslo with a clearance at 1.92 metres, second in Lausanne with a clearance at 1.97 metres, then second in Paris with a very useful 1.99 metres.
Unstoppable
Those early season performances helped Cloete peak when it mattered. Clearances of two metres and more become commonplace, and she was almost unstoppable after her early-season period of adjustment.
Olympic Team South Africa
Meet the men and women who'll be swimming, cycling, boxing, fencing, rowing, running, wrestling ... trying for SA at Athens 2004. 
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At the
World Championships in Paris she buried her opposition with one of the finest series of jumps ever seen. Every height she attempted she cleared first time up, all the way through to 2.06 metres, which comfortably sealed the gold medal for her. It also made her a repeat world champion.
In 2004 Cloete has started a little bit stronger than in 2003. She has tasted early success in Europe, and on 29 June she recorded her first clearance of two metres in 2004 in Zagreb.
The exciting thing for South African fans is that Cloete's win in Zagreb was part of a continually improving run of results: her clearances have been coming at higher and higher marks.
Yelena Sivushenko-Slesarenko boasts the best height in the world so far this year, at 2.04 metres. She also has another clearance at 2.01m, while Venelina Veneva has equalled that height. Cloete follows at two metres exactly. The point is, though, that Cloete is only just coming into form, only just starting to peak, and
she is likely to become far better and more consistent.
While Sivushenko-Slesarenko owns the best clearance of the year so far, Cloete is the runaway leader in the world rankings. Some way behind her, Ukranian Vita Palamar is in second spot, and Croatia's Blanka Vlasic, whom Cloete defeated in Zagreb, is in third.
Janus Robberts
Another South African who has been in top form is shot putter Janus Robberts. With four recent wins in Europe inside two weeks, Robberts is looking like a good medal prospect. It is the consistency that has brought him the wins that bodes well for Athens.
Robberts has at times been somewhat like pole vault star Okkert Brits, who hasn't always performed up to scratch in the big competitions - although he turned that around with a silver medal at the World Championships in 2003.
Improved consistency, though, makes it more likely that he will produce "the big one" necessary for a medal, because putting the
shot can at times be something of a hit-or-miss thing.
American athletes lead the way in 2004, with Christian Cantwell owning the top four distances this season, three of them in excess of 22 metres. Robberts recorded his season's best recently in Prague, on 28 June, with a heave of 21.24 metres. He cracked 21 metres in the same competition again, and also broke the 21-metre barrier in Warsaw.
The signs are encouraging and, like Cloete, his performances have been moving in the right direction.
Frantz Kruger
Frantz Kruger, a bronze medal winner in the discus at the Sydney Olympics, remains a medal threat. Like the shot putters, the discus athletes will be looking for that one special throw in Athens.
Kruger has gone over 66 metres twice in 2004, and both efforts have come in the past month, June. He is ranked ninth in world, but another South African, Hannes Hopley, might also bear watching.
Hopley is a two-time NCAA
(American universities) champion, and holds the NCAA record with a superb distance of 67.66 metres. Ranked twentieth in the world, he is not your typical discus athlete, who is usually a very big man.
Kruger, for instance, stands 2.03 metres tall and weighs 126 kilograms. Hopley, by contrast, stands 1.83 metres tall and weights 98 kilograms. He's undersized for the event, but keeping up with the big boys.
Mulaudzi, Sepeng
South Africa has strong medal hopes in the men's 800 metres. Mbulaeni Mulaudzi is ranked number one in the world, while Hezekiel Sepeng, a silver medal winner at the Atlanta Olympics way back in 1996, is ranked fourth.
Neither athlete has yet begun campaigning in Europe. They know timing is vital to ensure that they peak in Athens.
Sepeng's best time of 2004 is a modest 1:46:76, which was just enough to edge out Mulaudzi at the South African Championships in Durban in April. Expect much more from these two
athletes, however.
Sepeng would dearly love to add another medal to his Atlanta silver, while Mulaudzi wants to improve on the bronze medal he won at the World Championships in Paris, where he paid the price for a poorly-timed sprint.
Okkert Britz
South Africa boasts another world number-one ranked athlete in pole vaulter Okkert Brits. He, like Mulaudzi and Sepeng, has been relatively quiet in 2004. His best showing thus far has been a clearance at 5.67 metres, in Paarl early in February.
Given his world ranking and his consistency in 2003 - that was highlighted by a silver medal at the World Championships - he must, however, be regarded as a true medal threat.
400m hurdles trio
The toughest competition for a place in South Africa's squad to Athens was in the men's 400 metres hurdles. The country boasts three athletes ranked in the top 16 in the world: Llewellyn Herbert in eighth place, Okkert
Cilliers in twelfth place, and Alwyn Myburgh in sixteenth. Marnus Kritzinger, who narrowly missed making the squad for Athens, holds down twenty-ninth place. That is, indeed, excellent depth.
Cilliers owns two of the three fastest times in the world in 2004, with his 48.02 clocking in Pretoria in mid-February leading the way. Myburgh is not far back, having run a 48.35, while Herbert has been improving week-by-week recently and owns a best of 48.76.
It is worth remembering, too, that Herbert won Olympic bronze in Sydney, and had it not been for an untimely stumble at the last hurdle at the World Championships in Paris in 2003, he would most likely have added a World Championships silver medal to that.
South African fans, at least, believe there are some Olympic medals destined to find their way into the hands of some of these top athletes.
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