It was a quiet day for South Africa on Tuesday after the four gold medals in the first two days in the Beijing Paralympics, with the main medal hope resting with Oscar Pistorius in the 100 metres T44 final.

Zanele Situ had to be content with a ninth place in her F54-56 javelin final, Michael Louwrens with fifth in the F57/58 men's shot put and Chenelle van Zyl with sixth in her F35/36 discus final.

And South Africa's wheelchair basketball players went into Tuesday's pool match against Germany thinking they may have had an outside shot at toppling their opponents, but they left the arena with a 96-45 drubbing instead.

It was a third successive defeat for the team ? although their two previous defeats were against the surprisingly good Iran and the world and Paralympic champions Canada ? and it was only in the final few minutes that South Africa looked as if it belonged on the same court as Germany.

The reason for South Africa's optimism was that Germany had fallen to Japan the day before, and Japan was one of two teams South Africa had targeted for wins in an attempt to boost themselves into the top eight.

But it all came horribly wrong, as the German players took out their frustrations at their defeat on the hapless South Africans.

South Africa got the first two-pointer on the board, but after that, it was all one-way traffic. Down 21-8 after the first quarter, it never seemed likely the South Africans would get up.

They slipped to 46-16 at half-time and 72-26 at the three-quarter mark, before staging a brief rally in the final six minutes.

"Hopefully that was the little spark that will get things going for us," said Richard Nortje, one of the few players who has consistently scored over 10 points per game. His 19 was considerably more than the 10 by second-best player Nick Taylor.

South Africa take on Sweden on Wednesday in the other of the two games they believe they can win.

It was a quiet day in the swimming pool for South Africa, with just Shireen Shapiro in the 100 metres freestyle S10 and Adri Visser in the 200 metres freestyle S5 competing, and both being eliminated in the heats.