The South African Olympic gold medallist who is now a luxury real estate executive

After breaking multiple world records and winning gold at the Olympics, Ryk Neethling decided to trade his swimming goggles for a business suit.

Today, Neethling is a director and works as the marketing manager for one of South Africa’s foremost luxury estates, Val de Vie.

Born in 1977, Neethling ‘started his swimming career’ at five years old when he nearly drowned in Bloemfontein, where he grew up.

He was playing in the pool’s shallow end but went deeper than he could swim, and he ended up at the bottom of the pool, he told Biznews.

Fortunately, there were some older boys around who jumped in and helped pull him up. After that, he learned how to swim, which became an outlet for his competitiveness.

When he was about 10, he heard about the 1988 Olympics and asked his father what it was. At the time, South Africa was still banned from the Olympics.

From then on, Neethling dreamed of competing in the games. Although his family had no swimming history, they supported his dream.

His school, Grey College, also encouraged him to excel, often inviting alumni who were Springbok players, successful businessmen, or winemakers to tell their stories.

“I was a runt,” Neethling said on the Sias du Plessis Show. “I had the audacity to dream big, and I worked hard, so here I am now.”

Growing up, his family was good friends with Hansie Cronje, former South African international cricketer and captain of the South African national cricket team in the 1990s, and he spent a lot of time at his house.

“My sister was very ill, and she would go for brain operations in Johannesburg, and I would go to the Cronje house to ‘study’.” In actual fact, he would just lie in Hansie’s room and admire his memorabilia.

“The cricket players would visit, including Alan Donald, Allan Lamb, Omar Henry, and Franklyn Stephenson. All these guys would come, and I was just the little kid running around.”

Although he had watched these players on TV, he remembered thinking just how normal they were. They even asked him about his swimming.

“I was always just around people encouraging me, so I was very fortunate. Without that, I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today.”

Going to the United States

From 13 years old, Neethling knew he wanted to attend a university in the United States, and he got that opportunity a few years later when several American universities tried to recruit him.

He initially settled on the University of Southern California, but he and his dad thought the jump from Bloemfontein to Los Angeles would have been too big.

So, they decided on a school in a university town, the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he studied a BA in Psychology and Business. “It was the best decision I’ve ever made,” Neethling said.

At the time, he had just competed in his first Olympics in 1996 in Atlanta, Georgia, where he swam the 400 and 1,500-meter freestyle.

“It was an unbelievable opportunity. I arrived there as a very green 18-year-old. I went straight from Atlanta, from the Olympics, and I went there with two suitcases.”

At university, he competed in swimming competitions all over America for the school’s team. “You get to travel a lot, all within a team context,” Neethling said.

The fact that swimming was so team-oriented – with 25 swimmers on the men’s team and 25 to 30 on the women’s team – made it much more enjoyable.

“You’re swimming with 50 of your friends. It just makes it easier to wake up early in the morning, jump in a cold pool, swim for two hours, then go to class and then come back in the afternoon and do it again – because you’re doing it as a team.”

Learning about working as a team in Arizona would also lead to Neethling winning a gold medal in the 4×100 metres Freestyle Relay in the 2004 Athens Olympics.

Winning an Olympic gold medal

A year before the Olympics, Neethling and the three other men in his relay team, Roland Schoeman, Lyndon Ferns, and Darian Townsend, competed in the world championships in Barcelona.

However, they lost the race and missed the final as a result. Fortunately for them, Sweden was disqualified, and they snuck into the final where they placed second.

“We were 4.5 seconds behind the winners,” Neethling said. These 4.5 seconds translated to a gap of around 12 meters between them and the winning team, which was devastating.

“If you watch it now, we’re not even in the frame. I always say I could have stopped and climbed out the pool, and nobody would have noticed.”

“We just said, ‘Okay, just remember this feeling. Let’s bank it, and we’ll never feel like this again’. It was from that moment we stopped making excuses, we stopped being victims, and we invested in each other.”

They thought the chances of winning a medal individually were slim, but as a team, they knew they could achieve something bigger.

“We used being South African to our advantage. We accepted that we were not going to get any support, we’re not going to get any sponsors, but that’s just going to make us even tougher.”

Although they never spoke about winning gold, they knew that if everyone did what they were capable of, they could get very close to breaking the world record.

They were determined: anyone who beat them would have to break the world record to do so.

“The big test came after the prelims in the morning, where we almost broke the world record, to everybody’s surprise. We were the most surprised because when we walked out I said all we’re going to do is make finals.”

That night at the Olympics, everything worked in their favour. In particular, the Americans chose what they felt was a very poor order for their relay team.

“We just looked at it and said, ‘The table is set for us, now we must just go and take it.’ And we did. We all swam perfectly and it was just one of those moments where everything came together at the right time.”

Neethling and his teammates won the 4×100 m freestyle relay with a record-breaking time of 3.13, beating the American team that was favoured to win.

Neethling swam in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which made him the first South African to compete in four consecutive games.

However, he was very disappointed in his own performance and realised that it was time for him to retire.

Ryk Neethling becomes a business executive

After retiring from swimming, Neethling threw all of his energy into property, which he was very passionate about.

He started his business career in the real estate industry in the United States, assisting in the development, management and sales of various commercial properties in Arizona and California.

In 2008, Neethling launched the Ryk Neethling Swimming Schools franchise in Pretoria, and in 2009, he was appointed as the marketing director and shareholder of the Val de Vie Group of Companies, positions he still holds today.

“I was just going to come down for a photo shoot and an interview for the Val de Vie magazine, and I thought it was a free trip to Cape Town, a nice weekend,” he said.

“I was living in Pretoria at the time, and when I flew down and drove through the gates, I just fell in love with the place.”

“Val de Vie was very young, maybe a year or two, with less than 30 homes built on the 220 hectares. Even at that point, there was something to it.”

He connected with Martin Venter, the founder of Val de Vie, and he became an unofficial, unpaid ambassador for Val de Vie. “In early 2010, I told Martin I was coming to Val de Vie to join the team full-time,” he said.

“When I told people I was moving down to the Cape Winelands and Val de Vie, the majority said I was making a mistake.”

“I believed in Martin’s vision and enjoyed the team he had assembled here. I felt like this was home. I had a passion for property, and I moved down.”

Today, the group owns what is widely viewed as the most exclusive security and lifestyle estate in South Africa, and Neethling played an important part in the project.

In this role, he established Cape Winelands Properties, the official on-site property agency for Val de Vie Estate, with his business partners.

It was also Neethling’s idea to add a padel court to the Val de Vie estate, the first one in South Africa. It was an instant hit, and the sport’s popularity has grown tremendously in the years since.

“His strategic approach to implementing brand and marketing plans is evident in the numerous successfully sold-out developments of the Val de Vie Group of Companies,” Val de Vie Estate explained.

“Under Ryk’s leadership, the Val de Vie brand has internationally been positioned as pioneering in the world of luxury property development.”

Ryk Neethling and Val de Vie Estate