Donné Breytenbach’s judo bronze took just 33 seconds to seal, and it arrived minutes after the toughest defeat of her Commonwealth Games.
The 24-year-old fought three bouts in a single day at the Scottish Event Campus in Glasgow on Friday, 31 July 2026, in the women’s 57kg division, and finished it with South Africa’s first judo medal of the Games.
Donné Breytenbach opened by throwing Zambia’s Sylvia Nawila for ippon in 35 seconds. The semi-final told a different story, India’s Yamini Mourya caught her with an ippon of her own, ending the run at gold.
Facing Mauritius’ Marie Begue for bronze, Donné Breytenbach opened with a throw scored waza-ari, then turned her opponent straight into a match-ending hold. The whole exchange lasted 33 seconds.
“Lose by ippon in the semi, then answer with an ippon of your own in the bronze fight — what a temperament!” – 🎙️Jay
The story behind that composure starts somewhere unlikely. As four and five-year-olds at pre-primary school in Pretoria, Breytenbach and her twin brother Thomas used to skip nap time and sneak next door to a dojo, tagging along after the older kids.
Their coach billed their father for eight months of lessons before their parents even knew they were training. One tournament win each was enough to convince Theresa and her husband to let them carry on.
That accident of a start turned into more than a decade of graft. The twins moved to the TuksJudo club and TuksSport High School, built a training routine of multiple sessions a day, and by their mid-teens had gone fully professional in outlook if not yet in results.
Donné Breytenbach judo bronze in Glasgow is the payoff, but it followed years of finishing just off the podium at the sport’s bigger stages, fifth at the 2023 FISU World University Games in Chengdu, fifth at the African Senior Championships in both 2024 and 2025, alongside continental medals in Dakar, Yaoundé and Riga along the way.
In September 2023, she and Thomas relocated to Budapest, where Donné enrolled at the Hungarian University of Sports Science to get more regular access to European-level competition than South Africa could offer. It’s the kind of unglamorous decision, uprooting your life for better sparring partners, that doesn’t make headlines until a result like Glasgow arrives to justify it.
It has. South Africa’s judo team left the Games with two medals, and Donné Breytenbach’s judo bronze was the one that opened the account, the country’s first of the tournament.
She currently sits 137th in the IJF’s -57kg world rankings, a number that undersells a fighter who has now shown she can finish a contest in well under a minute when it matters most. Los Angeles 2028 is already the target on her mat, and Glasgow is the clearest sign yet that the years of near-misses were building toward exactly this.
📸 Images via Charmaine Visser / Team SA
