Blitzboks win Olympic bronze beating Australia 26-19 in Paris

The Blitzboks won Team SA's first medal of the Paris Olympics, taking the bronze when they beat Australia 26-19 with a last-gasp try at the Stade de France on Saturday.

Zain Davids scored two tries and captain Selvyn Davids would have dotted down twice, but he handed the ball to Shaun Williams in-goal to claim the winning try after the scores had been locked at 19-19. 

Australia had been reduced to six men after Nick Malouf was red-carded, but they scored two late tries to level the scores, before skipper Davids found space on the left side. 

Earlier the Blitzboks lost 5-19 to France in the semifinals. South Africa were booed by the crowd when they ran onto the field, still unforgiven for knocking their team out of the Rugby World Cup last year.

After a scoreless first half, Antoine Dupont ran onto the field to a massive roar, and not long afterwards South Africa finally broke the deadlock when Tristan Leyds scored in the corner.

But after that the home side scored after finding a gap in midfield and from that point they stole the momentum, scoring twice more in the final minutes for a convincing victory.

In other action on Saturday, rower Paige Badenhorst finished third in her single scull heat — her first taste of international competition in this format — to advance to the quarterfinals on Tuesday.

“It was very cool,” said Badenhorst. “Sort of straight into the fire, I guess. The plan was to have no expectations really, just go out hard, see where I'm positioned and then sort of play the field, see what happens.

“But ja, I wanted to have an aggressive first race especially for the physical side of it just to hurt the body a bit on the first day, get one under my belt and get a bit of experience from that.”

Badenhorst said she would make a couple of changes going into the next round.

“I did learn a lot from that race. There will be some different changes that I'll try to take into the next one.”

The men’s hockey team went down 3-5 to the Netherlands, with Mustaphaa Cassiem, Tevin Kok and Matthew Guise-Brown scoring goals.

Judoka Geronay Whitebooi won her opening match of the 48kg competition, beating Jacqueline Solis of Guatemala with two Waza-ari, which converted into a fight-winning Ippon.

But then she ran into Natsumi Tsunoda of Japan, recent three-time world champion, and was beaten by Ippon in 68 seconds.

In the pool Erin Gallagher finished sixth in her 100m butterfly heat in 57.82 sec, but that was good enough to advance to the evening semifinals.