Tears of joy, so much sweeter than tears of pain

Ihave seen tears from SA hockey players before. At the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi on a sultry mid-October day, as the black kites swooped and dodged the sprinklers at the Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium, SA’s Jennifer Wilson sat slumped against the wall behind the team dug-out.

Her head was bowed as she held on to her stick. I called her name from behind the barrier keeping the media away from the athletes and she looked up. She had been crying, the tears sitting heavy on the bottom of her eyes. I asked if I could have a word. She was reluctant. She needed a moment, but eventually came across.

“It’s so hard …” she said, staring back at the pitch. SA had lost the bronze-medal match 1-0 to England. They had pushed England hard and had chances, but falling short hurt badly.

It was, as Pietie Coetzee put it a lot more bluntly a few minutes later, “just sh*t”.

It had been a hell of a run through the tournament for SA. In their pool matches they had thumped Trinidad and Tobago 12-0, beat Scotland 2-1, drawn 1-1 with Australia after taking an early lead, and then lost 3-1 to India. A 1-0 loss to New Zealand in the semifinal and the medal miss against England meant they had to watch Australia and New Zealand play out a 2-2 match that was only settled by penalty flicks in favour of Australia after extra time.

I watched a lot of hockey at the 2004 Olympics in Athens. It helped that the hockey was at the Hellinikon complex near my hotel in Glyfada, a fair old trip south from the Olympics stadium. It was the site of the former Hellinikon International Airport on the Aegean Sea coast.

The complex was a ruin waiting to happen. Paving stones had not been bedded down nor grouted and were lifting in the first week of the Games. Piles of rubble were hidden behind fences lined with Olympic branding banners.

Two passenger jets that had obviously missed the memo that the Olympics was coming to town were stranded there.

It was stinking hot, and hotter still inside the hockey stadiums, which were brand, shiny new. The water sprayed on the astro lifted the humidity to silly levels.

As they have done in Tokyo this last week, SA played a lot better than their results gave them credit for. They pushed a very good Dutch team hard in their third game, so much that the Dutch fans began to shout “we are being robbed” at the umpires. They lost 3-2, having led 2-1 for a spell.

Paul Revington, the coach, was in a fury after the game at how much the Dutch had been allowed to get away with. He kept it cool in the media conference, but outside had a few, off-the-record words about how he felt SA had been robbed.

They played Australia two days later in a game that began in the early evening, about 6pm or so. About 8,000km away, SA were playing the Wallabies in the final game of the Tri-Nations. I was getting SMS updates from David O’Sullivan back home.

When the Boks won, I leant over the barrier and told striker Greg Nicol and keeper Dave Staniforth what had happened and how it was now their turn. Except it wasn’t, and they lost 3-2 for the second time despite taking the early lead through Nicol.

In Tokyo on Thursday morning, after the final whistle had gone and SA had deservedly beaten Germany 4-3, Mustapha Cassiem sat in his seat in the team dugout and sobbed. It was their first win at the 2020 Olympics. He had scored the winning goal to give this self-funded team of amateurs the win they had shown they were capable of.

They had led 3-0 against the Dutch, but went down 5-3. Cassiem had opened the scoring in that match that had promised so much. On Thursday, he scored the final goal on a day that meant so much, on a day when the tears were of joy.