28 years later, Egypt back on the Top
The 13th edition of the African championships held for the first time in Algeria has kept all its promises. It should be noted that the last edition to be held in North Africa dates back to 2010, in Casablanca, Morocco.
All records of participation were widely broken in Algiers with the presence of 154 swimmers representing 31 countries. The previous participation record was 131 swimmers when the Championships were held in the city of Cairo, Egypt in 2002 whereas the record for the number of participating countries was set in 2016 in Bloemfontein with 18 countries.
As for as the level of competition in the superb Olympic pool of “ 5 Juillet” , it should be noted that 30 new champion-ship records have been set by 10 swimmers and five relay teams from four countries, namely Egypt (20 championship records), South Africa (7), Tunisia (2) and Zambia (1). The Championships that break all records 28 years after its last victory in Tunisia in 1990, Egypt is back to the Top of Afri-cans swimming nations. For the first time since 1998, date of the first participation of the swimmers from Pretoria in conti-nental competitions, the swimmers from the Nile have beaten their main South African rivals.
The South African team won easily the editions of 1998-2002-2004-2006-2010-2012 and 2016. Only Tunisia in 2008 and Egypt in 2018 managed to impose themselves in this competition. The Egyptian team was simply and truly impressive with a total of 44 medals, including 27 gold, which represents more than 35% of the total of 123 medals awarded and greater in general than the cumulative number of medals (40) won by Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritius and Zambia.
To have an idea of how incredible is the Egyptian performance; it is enough to note that the number of gold medals won in Algiers exceeds by far the 20 gold medals acquired in six participations from 2002 to 2016.
Mohamed Samy , Farida Osman , Marwan El Kamash, Hania Moro , Erin Gallagher, Lara Van Niekerk and Ayrton Sweeney outstanding The remarkable Egyptian’s quartet con-sisting of Mohamed Samy (6 individual titles ,5 in relays together with 5 championship records), Farida Osman (3 individ-ual titles , 2 relay and 5 championship records), Marwan El Kamash (4 individu-al titles, same number in relay and 3 championship records) and Hania Moro (4 individual titles) won half of the 34 individual races whilst widely contributing to the 5 victories of the Egyptian relay teams.
The Egyptian Men’s Team has achieved a huge performance winning 16 out of the 20 events.
The bronze medallist of the 50 m butterfly of the 2017 Budapest World’s Champion-ship, Farida Osman, managed to win this
.jpg)
