WATCH: Hundreds of supporters recreate famous Springboks run with Francois Pienaar

By Simon Lewis, London

Rugby World Cup semi-finals weekend got off to a nostalgic, poignant start in central London on Saturday morning as South Africa's 1995 World Cup-winning captain Francois Pienaar led team-mates and hundreds of Springboks supporters on a run around the English capital.

With Heyneke Meyer's 2015 South Africans preparing to face great rivals New Zealand on Saturday afternoon in the first of the all-Southern Hemisphere semi-finals at Twickenham, their '95 predecessors wanted to “jog the memory” and invited rugby supporters to join them on a gentle run, leaving from outside the National Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar Square at 7:30am.

The jog echoed the morning of the 1995 RWC final when the Boks set off on a run through the streets of Johannesburg, and were joined by a group of supporters at the start of a day which would end with recently elected post-Apartheid president Nelson Mandela presenting Pienaar with the Webb Ellis Cup following their defeat of the All Blacks.

Twenty years on, the players jogged down the Mall, turned left at Buckingham Palace and into Parliament Square where, as the video shows, they halted in front of the statue of Mandela, where Pienaar led the singing of South Africa's national anthem.

After the necessary photographs were taken in a place often the scene of demonstrations and protests, the happy Boks picked up the pace once more and jogged up Whitehall back to Trafalgar Square.