By Lucky Vince Pienaar
She stood facing the main stand singing the national anthem, and she nailed it. Perhaps the best rendition of the anthem ever heard at a sports event. And the fans joined in. Keabetswe ‘KB’ Motsilanyane sang the first part of the anthem, then the second, and then stood silently, smiling, with her arms spread wide.
And the crowd responded. For a minute, every single one of the 50,000 fans shoehorned into a packed Loftus Versfeld stadium sang the last part of the anthem unaccompanied – a nation united.
It is a moment that will live on in the annals of South African sports history for a long time to come.
Rassie Erasmus said it last year: “Siya Kolisi is not the most important thing in South Africa. South Africa is the most important thing in South Africa.”
It is the spirit that the Springboks have lived by for the last four years.
Siya Kolisi has said it many times, and he said it after the match on Saturday. “When we play, we play for everybody in South Africa.”
On Saturday at Loftus, that spirit spilled over into the voice of the people. Nobody who was there, and nobody who watched it anywhere in the country and around the world, could come away from that unaffected.
Pictured above: The Loftus crowd.
Source: Springboks/X
