When Siya Kolisi, the captain of South Africa’s national rugby team, arrived for an interview late on Saturday evening after his country’s World Cup win, his first sentence was, as always, directed at the opponent. Despite the early red card, New Zealand put a lot of pressure on, praised Kolisi, still completely out of breath. “The All Blacks showed us what kind of team they are.” It was once again an interview that perfectly substantiates a popular thesis of many rugby fans: that rugby – unlike football, for example – is a tough sport for real gentlemen.
With the answer to the second question, Kolisi left the sport again and ventured into an area where instead of sweating athletes, slick officials usually move: the elevation of the game into a political event. “People who are not from South Africa cannot understand what this title means for our country,” Kolisi said. “Our country is going through so much right now. We are the little bit of hope that people have left.” With Kolisi, that’s what distinguishes him from the officials, one can assume that this isn’t just talk.
South Africa made rugby history in Paris on Saturday evening. With the 12:11 victory, the Springboks brought the World Cup title to the Cape for the fourth time and are now the sole record world champions – ahead of their final opponents New Zealand. It was the fourth World Cup title in the eighth attempt, an incredible rate. And the final was the third consecutive duel that South Africa won by one point, after the quarter-final against hosts France and the semi-final against England. This doesn’t just strain your nerves. In rugby, where games sometimes end 44-6, like New Zealand’s semi-final against Argentina, that is just as likely as three wins in a row thanks to goals in added time in football.
This evening also had a lot to offer in terms of sport. But sport quickly took a backseat, not just to Siya Kolisi or man-of-the-match award winner Pieter-Steph du Toit, who saw the team’s resilience as mirroring that of the entire country. And basically it was clear before kick-off that this would happen. After all, the final against New Zealand was a repeat of the legendary 1995 final, which South Africa won a year after the end of apartheid in their own country. The handshake between President Nelson Mandela in a green Springbok shirt and the blonde team captain Francois Pienaar is one of the founding myths of the “rainbow state” of South Africa.
But many of the hopes from back then have not been fulfilled. Almost 30 years after the end of apartheid, there is still a huge gap between black and white, which is no longer defined by law but by property. South Africa suffers from crime and violence; Mandela’s ANC party has run the country down for years. There are plenty of symbols for the difficult situation, be it the burned-out roof of Parliament in Cape Town, a street crater in the middle of Johannesburg or the daily power outages that have become routine. The popular sport of rugby and the Springboks, where players of all skin colors play together, are perhaps the strongest glue that holds the unequal country together. Pessimists would say the only one.
Given this, it is no surprise that President Cyril Ramaphosa is keen to benefit from the tailwind of the World Cup title. Next year there will be elections in South Africa, and the ANC is threatened with losing its absolute majority for the first time. On Saturday, Ramaphosa celebrated the World Cup triumph in the stands of the Stade de France, which is of course nothing unusual for the head of state of a team involved. What was unusual, however, was that Ramaphosa mingled with the players at the award ceremony in his jersey and lifted the trophy with his own hands a few seconds after captain Kolisi. The next few months will show whether this rather shameless attack on the gentleman’s sport of rugby will benefit him or harm him.
