EDITORIAL | Comrades is a national institution and the CMA needs to get its house in order

On June 9 at Pietermaritzburg's Scottsville Racecourse, Gerda Steyn and Dutchman Piet Wiemstra won the 2024 Comrades Marathon. 

Both victories were notable and made for excellent stories. Steyn smashed her up run record defending her 2023 down run title (also a record) in a year in which she won her fifth successive Two Oceans ultra-marathon two months before the Comrades. 

Wiersma, second by seconds in 2023, benefited from going to the Kenyan mountains to train, where he stayed in a tiny house of a running friend from that country, in "one room we shared together for six weeks without running water, taking bucket showers every day". 

The sheer scale of the Comrades is what makes it the spectacle that captures the country's imagination each year.

Less than three months later, however, the feel-good factor of those stories has been dashed by the chaos resembling a dumpster fire that has engulfed the Comrades Marathon Association (CMA). 

On June 27 a screenshot was leaked of a message deemed as racist posted on a WhatsApp group by board member Zinhle Sokhela, accusing Comrades race and operations manager and 2018 race winner Ann Ashworth of getting white people to join the CMA to elect a white board. It read, in part: “Our new GM has recruited as many vanilla people as possible, and as it stands we have close to 400 new members (all vanilla) who have joined and want to attend [the] AGM in November to take back the CMA board to be whites-only.”

It is not clear if the leaked message and its repercussions set off a chain reaction of further calamities, but even if it did, clearly the underlying problems at the CMA meant they were primed to happen. 

Initially the CMA said it would hold a special general meeting (SGM) within 30 days to decide action on Sokhela's message. On June 29 Sokhela was suspended instead, the CMA citing the cost of calling an SGM. 

It went ahead and called such a meeting anyway, for August 15, prompting further disorder. 

Some 70 CMA members who live outside KwaZulu-Natal, including legendary winners Bruce Fordyce and Shaun Meiklejohn, had to secure an urgent court interdict allowing them to attend and vote. The ban was apparently imposed by KwaZulu-Natal Athletics, which claimed the CMA was a “running club” and, according to its domicile rule, members from outside the province had no right to participate in debates or vote at meetings. This move was largely seen to be political and an attempt by KZNA, and some CMA board members, to influence the proceedings.

The SGM, at which Sokhela received a life ban, was called as the CMA was thrown into disarray by the resignations of chair Mqondi Ngcobo and his vice-chair Les Burnard. 

It came as the CMA, apart from being rocked by racism claims, also had members accusing some board members of trying to “capture” the organisation by giving membership to more than 200 “community marshals” — none of whom are athletes but who have voting powers, are reportedly told who to vote for and are considered to be a “most powerful bloc”. 

It is all rather bewildering and disturbing. 

It was not just Steyn and Wiemstra who were winners with great stories on June 9 — 18,884 runners were brave enough to line up on the start line in Durban and 17,313 finished the 85.91km race. 

The sheer scale of the Comrades is what makes it the spectacle that captures the country's imagination each year, as are the drama and remarkable stories of the runners and the race's world-famous camaraderie. 

It is a national institution. So this capitulation into chaos of the organisation entrusted with the administration of the 103-year-old race is not a KZN problem but a national one. 

Someone needs to take control of the situation in a responsible manner the great and historic race deserves. The CMA needs to get its house in order.