Two Laureus nominations for SA
Brad Morgan
18 February 2008
SA has a rich history in the Laureus World Sports Awards: one of its founders, its patron, three members of its Academy and three former award winners are South African. Now the Springbok rugby team and Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius have joined the list of nominees for "the Oscars of sport".
Global figures from sports and entertainment will be in attendance at the 2007 Laureus Awards gala in Saint Petersburg, Russia on Monday night, with the event due to be broadcast to 185 countries and territories.
Three South Africans have won Laureus awards: Mike Horn (World Alternative Sportsperson of the Year 2001), Ernst van Dyk (Sportsperson of the Year with a Disability 2006), and Gary Player (Laureus Lifetime Achievement award 2003).
Swimmer Natalie du Toit was nominated for the Sportsperson of the Year with a Disability award in 2004. Nominations for the awards are made by more than 300 journalists in 75 countries.
The Springboks
Speaking at the inaugural Laureus World Sports Awards in 2000, the Patron of Laureus, Nelson Mandela, said that sport had the power "to unite people in a way that little else does."
The Springboks lived up to those words in South Africa when they won the Rugby World Cup in 2007. Now they've been nominated for the Laureus World Team of the Year award.
It's a first for the Boks, who enjoyed a wonderful 2007, winning the World Cup, being named the International Rugby Board's Team of the Year, and having Jake White named Coach of the Year and Bryan Habana named Player of the Year.
In addition, Percy Montgomery was the highest points' scorer at the World Cup, while Os du Randt became only the fourth man to win the World Cup twice. The three men to achieve the feat before him, all Australians, did it eight years apart; Du Randt's second World Cup victory came 12 years after his first.
The Springboks' inspiring unbeaten run
through the World Cup tournament in France united South Africans in an outpouring of joy and pride in the country, and the image of captain John Smit hoisting aloft the William Webb Ellis Trophy alongside President Thabo Mbeki will live on in the memories of many South Africans.
In terms of impact in South Africa's sporting history, the annexing of the World Cup by the Springboks is challenged only by the 1995 World Cup winning Boks and the African Cup of Nations' winning Bafana Bafana team of 1996.
Five other candidates
The Springboks are up against five other outstanding teams for the Laureus award: AC Milan, the Australian men's cricket side, the Ferrari Formula One team, Iraq's national football team, and Germany's women's football side.
AC Milan
Milan won the Champions League in May 2007 when they defeated Liverpool 2-1 in the final. It was their seventh title in the Champions League/European Cup, leaving them just
two titles behind the record of Real Madrid.
In December, they rolled to a comfortable 4-2 win over Argentina's Boca Juniors to win the Fifa World Club Championship in Japan. Milan's star-studded line-up is highlighted by the current Fifa World Player of the Year, Kaka.
Australian men's cricket team
Australia's men's cricket team claimed their third consecutive World Cup in the West Indies in April 2007. They dominated the event, winning all their matches and ultimately claiming the trophy with a 53-run win over Sri Lanka.
Matthew Hayden was the top run scorer in the tournament, bowler Glenn McGrath was named Man of the Series, and Adam Gilchrist scored a record for the final of 149 runs.
The Aussies have also dominated test cricket; their world record run of 16 wins on the trot was ended recently in the third test against India as the current team tried to break a tie for the record shared with Steve Waugh's team of 1991-2001.
Australia's
cricketers won the award in 2002 and, besides 2008, were nominees in three other years.
Ferrari Formula One team
The Ferrari Formula One team's nomination is its fifth in total. The Italians have yet to win the award. Kimi Raikkonen won the 2007 drivers' title for the iconic team, while Ferrari also claimed the constructors' championship.
Some might consider the team's success as being a little less dominant than may be thought at first glance. Raikkonen claimed the title by just a single point from McLaren-Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso and, had McLaren not been stripped of their constructors' points in a spying scandal, they would have beaten Ferrari for the honours.
Nonetheless, it was a good year for the team in red, with Finland's Raikkonen winning grands prix in Australia, France, Britain, Belgium, China and Brazil, while his teammate Felipe Massa won in Bahrain, Spain and Turkey.
Iraqi national football team
Iraq's
football team provided an unlikely feel-good story in 2007. It proved itself a wonderfully unifying factor in the war-torn country.
The side's line-up comprised Sunni and Shia Muslims, as well as Kurds, but the entire country got behind them as they claimed an astonishing victory in the Asian Cup, beating Saudi Arabia 1-0 in the final.
Iraqis celebrated their team's success wildly and with passion, with divisions forgotten as the people of the country united in an outpouring of happiness.
The victory booked Iraq a place at next year's Confederations Cup in South Africa, which will feature the champion teams from each of Fifa's confederations.
German women's football team
Germany's women's football team was nominated after the Germans became the first country to successfully defend the Women's World Cup. Goals from Birgit Prinz and Simone Laudehr gave them a 2-0 win over Brazil in the final.
Incredibly, Germany didn't concede a single goal in
the tournament. Goalkeeper Nadine Angerer, not surprisingly, was voted onto the All Star team after the event. She was joined by Kerstin Stegemann, Ariane Hingst, Renate Lingor and Prinz.
It is the second time the Germans have been nominated. Their first nomination came in 2004.
Oscar Pistorius
South Africa has a second nominee for 2007, in the category of World Breakthrough of the Year: Oscar Pistorius.
The Paralympic superstar, a double-amputee, made a huge breakthrough in 2007 when he twice competed against able-bodied athletes, at the Rome Golden Gala and the Norwich Union British Grand Prix in Sheffield. He finished second in Rome and seventh in Sheffield.
Pistorius holds Paralympic world records in the 100, 200, and 400 metres and has been trying to get clearance to compete against able-bodied athletes at the Beijing Olympics.
He faces stiff competition for the award. The other nominees are:
- Tour de
France winner Alberto Contador.
- Novak Djokovic, the world number three in men's tennis.
- Tyson Gay, gold medal winner in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m at the IAAF Track and Field Championships.
- Lewis Hamilton, who as a rookie, missed out on the Formula One drivers' title by a single point.
- Motorcycle racer Casey Stoner, who became the second youngest winner of the World MotoGP title, winning it with three races still to go in the season.
SA's Laureus history
South Africans have a rich history in the Laureus World Sports Awards. Former President Nelson Mandela is the patron of Laureus, while the sports awards were co-founded by another South African, Johann Rupert, the executive chairman of Richemont, along with Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche.
Three South Africans - Gary Player, rugby player Morné du Plessis and adventurer-explorer Mike Horn - are among the 46-member Laureus Academy, which reads like a who's who of sporting
greats.
Gary Player
Player, one of only five men to win each of golf's Grand Slam events, is the most widely travelled golfer in history, having flown over 17.5-million kilometres.
He has also won 163 tournaments, 63 more than Jack Nicklaus, including titles in six different decades. He is the only man in the 20th century to win The Open Championship in three different decades.
Player is also well known for his philanthropic work. He was named an honorary member of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club at Saints Andrews in 1994, and won a Laureus Lifetime Achievement award in 2003.
Morné du Plessis
Morné du Plessis is a highly respected former Springbok rugby captain and was the manager of the 1995 World Cup winning team that was captained by Francois Pienaar.
A member of the International Rugby Hall of Fame, Du Plessis is the owner and director of Sports Plan, a company that is engaged in the development of sports and service
facilities. One of its greatest achievements is the establishment of the Sports Services Institute of South Africa in Cape Town.
The former Bok captain is also the chairman of the Chris Burger/Petro Jackson Players' Fund, which provides financial assistance to rugby players who sustain serious injuries, and he heads up Laureus South Africa, which operates projects for South Africa's underprivileged.
Mike Horn
Mike Horn is recognised as one of the world's greatest adventurer-explorers. In 2001 he won the Laureus World Alternative Sportsperson of the Year award for completing a solo journey around the equator without motor transport.
He was elected a member of the Laureus World Sports Academy in January 2007 in recognition of his many achievements. They have been varied, unique and astonishing.
He has descended the Mont Blanc glacier on hydrospeed, swum the entire length of the Amazon River, crossed the Atlantic Ocean by trimaran, travelled from
Brazil to Ecuador by foot, bicycle and canoe, and traversed the Amazon jungle and the Andes Mountains.
Horn also undertook a solo circumnavigation of the Arctic Circle by boat, kayak, ski kite and foot, a challenge that took him over two years to complete. It earned him his second Laureus nomination in 2005.
In 2006, he and Norwegian explorer Borge Ousland became the first men to travel without dog or motorised transport to the North Pole in permanent darkness. The journey included frequent swims in the Arctic Ocean.
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