Clifton crushed it at this year’s DHL Lifesaving National Club Championships in Gqeberha. The Cape-based lifesaving club combined for an overall tally of 916 points to comfortably be crowned the winners.
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More than 1 500 athletes, some as young as eight, took to Kings Beach’s Surf & Sand and the Pool at Newton Park as 34 clubs from across the country battled for the bragging rights of being lifesaving’s sporting best in South Africa in 2023.
All the athletes are on regular duty every weekend throughout the country and, when and where necessary, during the week. But once a year, they get to showcase their sporting lifesaving skills in a competitive environment.
Gqeberha has played host to this one-week lifesaving festival for the past four years, and this year’s championship exceeded expectations with a full complement of athletes on display.
COVID interrupted one of the years and in 2022 the event was also limited as families were dealing with the aftermath of the pandemic.
However, this past week, the championship returned to all its glory, and the best of the best in lifesaving pitched up.
Clifton and Fish Hoek, as clubs, were engaged in the most thrilling junior and senior surf championships in the first three days. The championship winners are determined by the combined points tally of the seniors and juniors, and it was Clifton, thanks mainly to its juniors, who took top honours with a combined total of 589 points to Fish Hoek’s 585 points. Never has the club surf title been that close in points difference.
The juniors scored 455 of those points to Fish Hoek’s 337, but in the seniors, it was Fish Hoek who topped the table with 248 points to Clifton’s 134 points.
Clifton also showed their versatility among the juniors by scoring 277 points in the pool championship as they won the combined surf and pool junior title by some distance, totalling 732 points to second-placed Kings Beach’s 373. Fish Hoek, who scored 15 points in the pool championship, were third in the juniors with 352 points.
Harties Reflection won the junior pool title with 341 points, and Woodridge, the only school entered as a junior lifesaving club, scored 171 points.
Tukkies Lifesaving Club dominated the senior pool championship by scoring 275 points. The next best was Clifton’s 50 points.
Summerstrand’s Nippers were as dominant in the pool, scoring an emphatic title victory, but were edged into second place by Fish Hoek’s nippers in the surf championship.
Individually, Sasha-Lee Nordegen Corris enjoyed an outstanding championship in the surf and pool. Nordegen Corris, 25 years old, tied for first place with Tuks’s 19-year-old Kendra du Toit in the pool championship with 42 points for females 19 and over.
The men’s 19-and-over pool title also produced a tie, with Tuks’s Ockert van Schalkwyk and Robbie le Roux finishing with 39 points.
Luke Nisbet was named the senior male athlete of the surf championship, and Nordegen Corris was the female winner.
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Clifton the kings and queens of surf at Lifesaving National Club Champs
Picture: Ant Grote / LSA
