Heroes to act on complaints

The organisers of the Heroes Marathon are set to investigate complaints they’ve received from athletes who ran in Mthatha on Sunday.

Organiser Gogo Manqoyi said they received numerous complaints on social media about the race.

She said a group of runners said they were almost run over by cars.

Some runners said they had to ask for water from houses along the marathon route.

Manqoyi expressed regret and said it was unfortunate what the participants had endured, but an investigation would be conducted to get to the crux of what had occurred.

“We got complaints on social media and other platforms; we regret that our people had that kind of experience.

“We really apologise for everything and we have issued an apology on social media and we promise to improve next year.

“And one of the resolutions we’ve taken as the organisers is to work with athletics clubs when putting together the race and not with federations. Because clubs are there for the welfare of the athletes and federations are administrators,” said Manqoyi.

“We’ll take all the advice we receive and we hope that next year will be better than this year, and we also hope that running clubs can assist us in evaluating the race next year.

“But more than anything else we apologise to the people for everything that went wrong.”

Manqoyi said the national Day of Reconciliation celebrations, which was addressed by President Cyril Ramaphosa at the Walter Sisulu University’s Zamukulungisa campus main fields, also made matters on the roads difficult for athletes.

“The clashing of the race and the national Day of Reconciliation celebrations had an impact in traffic control.

“The roads that we had identified for closure couldn’t be closed off entirely, because they were the same routes that were going to be travelled by the national Day of Reconciliation celebrations entourage.

“So that had a big impact on the roads,” she said, and apologised for that as well.