Cape Town
Sport and recreation

Cape Town's most popular sports by participation are cricket, association football, swimming, and rugby union. In rugby union, Cape Town is the home of the Western Province side, who play at Cape Town Stadium and compete in the Currie Cup. In addition, Western Province players (along with some from Wellington's Boland Cavaliers) comprise the Stormers in the United Rugby Championship competition. Cape Town has also been a host city for both the 1995 Rugby World Cup and 2010 FIFA World Cup, and annually hosts the Africa leg of the World Rugby 7s. It has hosted the 2023 Netball World Cup.

Association football, which is mostly known as soccer in South Africa, is also popular. Two clubs from Cape Town play in the Premier Soccer League (PSL), South Africa's premier league. These teams are Cape Town Spurs F.C. and Cape Town City F.C. Cape Town was also the location of several of the matches of the 2010 FIFA World Cup including a semi-final, held in South Africa. The Mother City built a new 70,000-seat stadium (Cape Town Stadium) in the Green Point area.

In cricket, the Cape Cobras represent Cape Town at the Newlands Cricket Ground. The team is the result of an amalgamation of the Western Province Cricket and Boland Cricket teams. They take part in the Supersport and Standard Bank Cup Series. The Newlands Cricket Ground regularly hosts international matches.

Cape Town has had Olympic aspirations. For example, in 1996, Cape Town was one of the five candidate cities shortlisted by the IOC to launch official candidatures to host the 2004 Summer Olympics. Although the Games ultimately went to Athens, Cape Town came in third place. There has been some speculation that Cape Town was seeking the South African Olympic Committee's nomination to be South Africa's bid city for the 2020 Summer Olympic Games. That was quashed when the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2020 Games to Tokyo.

The city of Cape Town has vast experience in hosting major national and international sports events. The Cape Town Cycle Tour is the world's largest individually timed road cycling race – and the first event outside Europe to be included in the International Cycling Union's Golden Bike series. It sees over 35,000 cyclists tackling a 109 km (68 mi) route around Cape Town. The Absa Cape Epic is the largest full-service mountain bike stage race in the world. Some notable events hosted by Cape Town have included the 1995 Rugby World Cup, 2003 ICC Cricket World Cup, and World Championships in various sports such as athletics, fencing, weightlifting, hockey, cycling, canoeing, gymnastics and others. Cape Town was also a host city to the 2010 FIFA World Cup from 11 June to 11 July 2010, further enhancing its profile as a major events city. It was also one of the host cities of the 2009 Indian Premier League cricket tournament. The Mother City has also played host to the Africa leg of the annual World Rugby 7s event since 2015; for nine seasons, from 2002 until 2010, the event was staged in George in the Western Cape, before moving to Port Elizabeth for the 2011 edition, and then to Cape Town in 2015. The event usually takes place in mid-December, and is hosted at the Cape Town Stadium in Green Point.

There are several golf courses in Cape Town. The Clovelly Country Club and Metropolitan Golf Club have 18 holes.

The coastline of Cape Town is relatively long, and the varied exposure to weather conditions makes it fairly common for water conditions to be conducive to recreational scuba diving at some part of the city's coast. There is considerable variation in the underwater environment and regional ecology as there are dive sites on reefs and wrecks on both sides of the Cape Peninsula and False Bay, split between two coastal marine ecoregions by the Cape Peninsula, and also variable by depth zone.

False Bay is open to the south, and the prevailing open ocean swell arrives from the southwest, so the exposure varies considerably around the coastline. The inshore bathymetry near Cape Point is shallow enough for a moderate amount of refraction of long period swell, but deep enough to have less effect on short period swell, and acts as a filter to pass mainly the longer swell components to the Western shores, although they are significantly attenuated. The eastern shores get more of the open ocean spectrum, and this results in very different swell conditions between the two sides at any given time. The fetch is generally too short for southeasterly winds to produce good surf. There are more than 20 named breaks in False Bay. The north-wester can have a long fetch and can produce large waves, but they may also be associated with local wind and be very poorly sorted. The Atlantic coast is exposed to the full power of the South-westerly swell produced by the westerly winds of the southern ocean, often a long way away, so the swell has time to separate into similar wavelengths, and there are some world class big wave breaks among the named breaks of the Atlantic shore.

In the 1950s the city was part of four editions of the famous Algiers-Cape Town Rally, during the pioneer years of trans-Africa rallying and motor exploration. The closing of the road to the newly founded Zaire caused the city to be dropped from the traject.
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