Comrades cheat takes gold but slips up because of his time piece
In 1999, Sergio Motsoeneng finished in the top 10 in famous Comrades Ultra-marathon by exchanging places with virtually identical brother Fika at toilet stops. Unfortunately for them, they weren't quite meticulous enough when it came to looking identical and the brothers were caught out after a newspaper published photos showing them wearing watches on opposite wrists.
Image: File
On this day in history, July 21
356BC The Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, is destroyed by arson. Of the original seven wonders, only one – the oldest, the Great Pyramids of Giza – still exists, unlike the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Temple of Artemis, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.
365 A powerful earthquake off Crete raises the island and causes a tsunami along the coasts of Libya and Egypt. Thousands are killed and in the Egyptian city of Alexandria the devastation is so bad the event was known for centuries as the ‘day of horror’.
1816 Baron Paul Julius von Reuter, founder of the Reuters News Agency, is born in Germany as Israel Beer Josaphat.
1853 New York’s Central Park is created when more than 300 hectares of land on Manhattan Island are set aside for it.
1901 Cape Town has 3 cases of Bubonic plague.1904 After 13 years in the making, the 7 400km Trans-Siberian railway is completed.
1967 Nobel Peace Prize winner and ex-ANC president Chief Albert Luthuli is killed by ‘a train’ in Groutville. An ongoing inquest in to the circumstances seem to indicate government agents were responsible.
1973 Israeli agents kill a waiter they thought involved in the Munich Olympics massacre. He wasn’t.
1978 The world’s strongest dog, an 80kg St Bernard, pulls 2 909kg for 27m.
1983 The world’s lowest temperature, −89.2°C, is recorded at Vostok, Antarctica.
1999 Gold medal winner Sergio Motsoaneng admits to cheating by letting his twin brother run some of the Comrades Marathon for him.
2005 Four suicide bombers target London’s public transport system, two weeks after the July 7 bombings. All four bombs fail to go off.
2021 China unveils the world’s fastest train, a bullet train that uses magnetic levitation and can go 600kp/h, in Qingdao, China.
2023 A 2 000-year-old stone slab used to grind spices is unearthed in South Vietnam, is the earliest evidence of curry in South-east Asia and still smells of nutmeg.
DAILY NEWS