Olympic champion Kristy Coventry of Zimbabwe captured two golds in the pool on Saturday after the organizers committed a blunder in playing the South African national anthem.
The farce broke out when Ncgonde Balfour, South African minister for sport and recreation, suddenly became outraged and walked out of the men's 50m breaststroke medal awarding ceremony where he had presented the gold medal to his countryman Cameron Vander Burgh.
The organizers played an incomplete version of South Africa national anthem during the ceremony and this enraged Balfour, according to South Africa swimming team manager Velan Marimuthu.
The anthem compromises four sections and the organizers only played the last two which were indeed the former South Africa national anthem used before the abolition of the apartheid system, Marimuthu told Xinhua.
"After the apartheid was abolished, we did not discard the old national anthem and added another two sections to form the new one," he said.
"But today they only played the last two sections of the anthem, and this was a disrespect to our sports minister," Marimuth added.
The organizers scrambled to sort out the hassle and held the ceremony again to the some boos from the stand. Burgh finally got his gold which he won in 27.74 seconds.
Coventry then came out to get the South Africa juggernaut off their winning track, seizing two gold medals in 25 minutes.
She claimed the gold of 100m backstroke in one minute 1.28 second before winning the 800m freestyle in style with a timing of 8:43.89.
"I felt satisfied with my performance today, everything here is fantastic for me," Coventry said calmly.
She will go back to the United States to prepare for the 2008 Olympics after the games are over, she disclosed.
South Africa triumphed in the men's 200m backstroke through George Durand and the women's 4X100m freestyle, increasing their gold haul from the pool to 12.
The gold of the men's 100m freestyle went to Algeria's Salim Iles whose feat drove the home crowd ecstatic.
"They pinned a lot of expectation on me and this was a must-win situation for me," he told Xinhua.
"I tried my best and finally did not let them down," he said.
It turned out to be a bumper day for the host as they also clinched three golds out of four on offer from the judo competitions.
But the dodgy organization of the games saw no improvement leaving some participants frustrated.
Former Secretary of the Supreme Council for Sports in Africa Awoture Eleyae, who got incensed by the shambles he saw around him, launched a scathing attack on the organizers.
"They are not prepared at all, it is just now that they are getting started with their organization. They probably thought that it is still the same games they hosted in 1978," he was quoted as saying .
"We cannot even make any comparison with the 2003 Games, there is no basis. Algiers is chaotic.
"Obviously they were not expecting this huge turn out of countries, we have 52 here present," Eleyae said.
The cobbled-together main press center is increasingly becoming a joke as it delivered only outdated information and no hot food at all, hardly a decent place for the journalists to work in.
"They did some delayed work in preparation for the games, and they promised everything would be in place, but it seemed impossible," said an Algerian journalist who asked for anonymity.
Source: Xinhua
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