Team South Africa Brings Home 17 Paralympic Medals

The South African Paralympic team has brought home 17 medals in total after returning home from the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. Seven of these medals were gold.

South African Paralympic team during Opening Ceremony in Rio (Photo courtesy of Getty Images)

Competing against 4000 athletes from 176 countries, the South African team was only 40 strong.

Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula says, “The story of the Paralympic is a great story. It’s the story of the triumph of human spirit. You are not disempowered by your disability.”

The 25-year-old Paralympian swimmer, Kevin Paul says, “The first thing I looked at is when is my 100m breaststroke and I saw it was on Day 1 and that I’d be the first South African competing and inside of me everything was just like ‘Come on, we’ve got this we can get the ball rolling for team South Africa’.”

Kevin was born with Poland Syndrome which means that he is missing some muscles on the upper left side of his body. He has been swimming since the age of three and has never seen himself a disabled but rather differently abled than others.

Kevin knew that if he wanted to win gold he had to completely devote himself to the training. Paul left in his final year of a law degree to focus on winning gold. Paul told Carte Blanche that “at the moment you’ve been waiting for, you’ve trained, you’ve made sacrifices and now it’s all going to come down to this one moment in your life.”

Anrune Liebenberg, a silver medal Olympic runner who was born with deformed arm says, “I love what I do. Every time I run a get goosebumps and my heart pumps faster.”

“I actually don’t think people have disabilities and my favourite movie is Soul Surfer when she says ‘Being normal is overrated’. That’s how life is. We’re all different and unique and God made us like that”, says Liebenberg.

Inspired by the crowds, Tyrone Pillay who was born with an abnormality of the left foot, put everything behind his last throw in the men’s shot put final. The shot made 13.91m which was a new South African and African record. Pillay’s prize money for winning the bronze medal was R80,000 and he plans to donate it to Jumping Kids, a NGO that helps disabled children with prosthetic limbs. “It’s going to empower them and change their lives dramatically. I think people don’t realise the benefits of prosthetic legs. One, they’re going to be able to walk, they’re going to be able to go to normal schooling. They’re going to be self-sufficient and I think that’s key” says Pillay.

Jumping Kids has helped 14-year-old Paralympic sprinter Ntando Mahlangu by providing him with prosthetic legs after he was confined to a wheelchair. Mahlangu, who is from Mpumalanga says, “In 2012 I got a bit interested in sports and that’s where the dream began.” The 2016 Rio Olympics was Mahlangu’s first Paralympic race, making it to the men’s 200m final where he won the silver medal. “It was a really good competition and it was a very, very, very good race.”

Kevin Paul concludes by saying, “Every single athlete has a story to tell and it doesn’t matter if you come last or first, just being a Paralympic athlete for team South Africa means that you’ve basically won a gold in life.”