NAMIBIA’s Sevens Rugby team failed to qualify for next year’s Olympic Games after finishing fifth at the African Qualifying tournament in Johannesburg over the weekend.
Kenya, who won the title after beating Uganda 29-0 in the final, are the only team assured of a place at the Olympics, although Uganda still have a chance of making it in a final international repechage tournament.
Namibia got off to a winning start when they beat Tunisia 26-21 on Friday morning, but then successive defeats to Uganda (35-17) and Kenya (33-0) that afternoon dealt their hopes a fatal blow.
On Saturday morning Namibia regrouped to beat Senegal 38-19 to qualify for the fifth place play-off, where they comfortably beat Zambia 28-5.
In the semifinals on Saturday, Kenya beat Madagascar 40-14, while Uganda beat Zimbabwe 21-12.
Zimbabwe won the bronze medal after beating Madagascar 24-7 in the third place play-off.
In the other positional play-off results, Senegal beat Nigeria 14-12 to finish seventh, Ghana beat Morocco 33-10 to finish ninth, Tunisia beat the Ivory Coast 19-14 to finish 11th and Mauritius beat Botswana 31-0 to finish 13th.
The vice president of the Namibia Rugby Union, Ivan Gaya, meanwhile denied insinuations that he had intervened to make a late change to the Namibian team before they departed for Johannesburg,
Janry du Toit, who represented Namibia at the recent Rugby World Cup, was dropped from the team and replaced by Tuna Amutenya. Du Toit had made some disparaging remarks about the NRU leadership during an interview with worldrugby.com after their match against New Zealand and was subsequently dropped from the Namibian Sevens squad.
Gaya on Friday maintained that Du Toit had been dropped after failing a late fitness test, although the team doctor Dr Vernon Morkel had declared Du Toit fit.
“The physio told me that he didn’t pass one of his tests and that is why he was omitted from the team. It is true that he violated a code of conduct that he signed before the World Cup, but we can’t act against him, because we haven’t seen the report yet. We still need to hold a hearing on the matter and we cannot punish him if he is not guilty. It now seems that there is a witch hunt against him which is not true at all,” he said.
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