When South Africa’s women’s hockey team line up to play their first pool match at this year’s Olympics against Ireland on Saturday 24 July, there will be one player among the South Africans who will continue a special achievement of her family.

With her participation in this year’s Olympic Games, Nicole Erasmus (née Walraven) from the Northern Blues becomes the fourth generation from her family to take part in this global sports spectacle.

Erasmus’ mother, Lynne (née Tasker), represented Zimbabwe as a swimmer at the Olympic Games in Moscow, Russia in 1980. Lynn’s uncle, Tony Tasker, represented Zimbabwe at the 1964 Olympic Games (coincidentally also in Tokyo) as a rower. And before Tony, there was her great-uncle, Frank Rushton, who competed as a 400m hurdles athlete at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany.

Although Erasmus was also born in Zimbabwe, the family moved to Bloemfontein in South Africa during her primary school career. However, at the age of five, Erasmus held a hockey stick in her hands for the first time and since then she has had difficulty putting it down.

With sports genes like hers, it is not surprising that she also received provincial colours as a sprinter and that she was a star swimmer at school. After all, she has already completed the popular and challenging Midmar Mile open water swimming event five times. But it was on the hockey field where she was always in her element and at her happiest.

This midfielder/defender already played her first match for the SA u.18 team in 2011 as a grade 11 schoolgirl from the Eunice Girls’ School in Bloemfontein. After that she played for the SA u.21 team in 2012 and 2013 and during the Junior World Cup of 2013, she was one of the South Africans’ star players who scored the most goals for her country.

As a student at the University of the Free State (Kovsies), Erasmus’ hockey career went from strength to strength and already in her first year she played for the university’s first team when she was still 18 years old.

At the end of a successful 2015 season, Erasmus was named the KovsieSport Junior Sportswoman of the year, as well as the Kovsies Women Hockey Player of the year. It was also the year in which she was selected for the first time to represent the senior South African women’s hockey team.

The icing on the cake of her 2015 season was when Erasmus was named South Africa’s u.21 hockey player of the year.

In her final year as a student (BA Honours Biokinetics) she took over the captaincy of the Kovsies first hockey team and in that season, they reached the final of the prestigious Varsity Hockey Cup tournament.

At university she met Nardus Erasmus, a former Blue Bulls Craven Week rugby player, and these two sports fanatics tied the knot in January 2020. As a student, Nardus also represented the Kovsies as number eight and captain, while even playing for the Cheetahs a few times.

After completing her internship as a biokineticist, Nicole and Nardus decided to go to New Zealand for a year in 2019, where she established an online business and played hockey while he played club rugby.

After returning from New Zealand, the couple got married and settled in Pretoria, where both could start their professional careers.

Although she can live out her passion for the rehabilitation of sports injuries in her professional career and while she still dreams of starting her own practice as a biokineticist, Erasmus nowadays concentrates more on hockey, because her biggest dream has finally come true – she is going to represent her country at the Olympics.

And with the exceptional sports genes of Nicole and her husband Nardus, she may be the fourth generation in her family to experience the Olympic dream, but possibly not the last. Who knows?

Do you have more information about the story?

Please send us an email to editorial@rekord.co.za or phone us on 083 625 4114.

For free breaking and community news, visit Rekord’s websites: Rekord East

For more news and interesting articles, like Rekord on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or Instagram