COMRADES MARATHON POSTPONED "TO A SUITABLE DATE"
By Riël Hauman
(c) 2020 Race Results Weekly, all rights reserved - Used with permission.

(18-Apr) -- The 95th Comrades Marathon will not be held on June 14, but has been postponed "to a suitable date" later in the year, according to a media release sent by Athletics South Africa (ASA) yesterday. The ultramarathon, the largest in the world with 16,702 finishers last year, is a "down" run this year from Pietermaritzburg to Durban covering approximately 90 km.

The decision came a month after the Comrades Marathon Association (CMA) had announced that the race would be run as scheduled. The CMA was then rebuked by both ASA and the government's Minister of Sport for taking the decision on its own. Following a meeting between ASA and the CMA on March 20, Aleck Skhosana, President of ASA, announced that "all further comments and statements during the 30 days of postponements of all athletics activities... will only come through the national office of ASA".

"ASA and KwaZulu-Natal Athletics [the provincial body under whose auspices the Comrades is run] --and not the CMA-- will now determine a new date," said Race Director Rowyn James. "I do not know when that will be."

A number of experienced Comrades runners have expressed concerns about running the Comrades later than the end of September or early October because of the heat and the extreme humidity for which Durban is infamous. Charl Mattheus, Comrades champion of 1997 and now a professor in hospital management at California State University in Sacramento, said that he is confident that the Covid-19 pandemic will be past its peak by the end of June or even earlier. The Comrades should not be run later than the last week of September, he said.

Nick Bester, who won the Comrades in 1991 and in 1997 was beaten by Mattheus in one of the most thrilling Comrades of all time, said the race can still be run in the first week of October, but he feels the date will be "sometime in September." Bester is manager of the Nedbank Running Club and coach of Two Oceans and Comrades champion Gerda Steyn.

Deon Holtzhausen, five-time top-10 finisher, said he was worried about the runners who will be on the road between 11 and 12 hours. The warm and humid conditions will cause problems for these runners because they are not so well prepared as the top athletes, he said. Holtzhausen suggested that the race start before dawn, even as early as 3 a.m.

In the statement ASA also said that the suspension of all activities "will remain in place until it is deemed safe for us to resume by the national government. This affects all fixtures and programmes from 26 March until 30 April." This includes all ASA championships (senior, junior, high schools and primary schools), as well as all road running, cross country, trail and track and field meetings.


PHOTO: South Africa's Gerda Steyn won the 2019 Comrades Marathon by almost 20 minutes (photo via Gerda Steyn/Facebook)