Swimming at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games:

It had been 44 years since South Africa had won an Olympic gold medal but in Penny Heyns they had the woman who had set the world record four months earlier. Lined up against her were world champion Sam Riley of Australia and the precocious 14-year-old Amanda Beard of the USA. Riley nearly failed to make it to Atlanta when she failed a drug test in February 1996. Her coach had given her a painkiller to treat a headache without realizing it contained the banned substance dextropropoxyphen. She was subsequently issued only a warning but her coach received a one-year ban.

Heyns’ Olympic campaign started with a bang as she broke her own her world record to qualify for the final but faltered when she made a basic error in the final where she badly mistimed her turn. Beard threatened to take the lead over the home stretch but Heyns fought back and reached the wall with a third of a second to spare over her American rival to the acclaim of her home nation. Riley finished a distant third.