Ferreira's landmark silver came with a dose of fun

It's no secret that the Olympics goes beyond sport, but few tennis players have felt the power of the Games quite like Wayne Ferreira.

The former world No. 6 won his country's first medal at the Olympics since 1960 at Barcelona 1992, the year that South Africa returned to the Games having been banned from 1964-1988 as part of the sporting boycott of the nation during the apartheid era.

Alongside Piet Norval, Ferreira won doubles silver in Barcelona - one of just two medals for South Africa at the event, with Elana Meyer also later taking silver for her country in the women's 10,000 metres.

Ferreira and Norval came through a five-set semi-final with Croatians Goran Ivanisevic and Goran Prpic to guarantee themselves silver, before falling to Boris Becker and Michael Stich in the final.

"It was a pretty amazing feeling and there was a huge media reaction just because of the fact of us being back in the Olympics and winning our first medal," remembered Ferreira. "That political part of it was much bigger than anything else at that time."

Ferreira went on to reach the quarterfinals in singles at Atlanta in 1996, narrowly missing the chance to play for a medal after losing to Andre Agassi, and also featured at Sydney 2000.

But the core Olympic values - friendship, respect and excellence - were never more evident for the South African in any of the three Games he contested than at Barcelona.

"We did really well in getting to know everybody and there was a good camaraderie between everybody because of the fact it was such a huge occasion for our country," Ferreira said. "I think at all the Olympics I went to, the athletes really did well in meeting, becoming friends and having a very good camaraderie. It was a very special place."

Rather than mark South Africa's return to the Games in conservative fashion, Ferreira admits he and Norval were in playful mood en route to their medal-winning run 24 years ago.

"We were quite naughty in Barcelona," Ferreira confessed. "We had this thing called a Winger, which was a balloon shooter, and we kept shooting all of the other countries with water balloons. It became quite a spoken-about thing around the village.

"Nobody knew where it was coming from and we tried to hide it. We were shooting mostly the Cubans and the Americans, though we were actually just shooting balloons at everybody. Barcelona was by far the best [Olympics] out of the three for me!"

This story features quotes taken from the ITF's Olympic Book, published in Summer 2016. This coffee-table publication features 118 Olympic and Paralympic tennis medallists reflecting on what their medal means to them, told through exclusive interviews and specially-commissioned photography.