No Comrades this year
But your place is secured for 2021 and goodie bag is on the way
● It seems the Comrades Marathon Association (CMA) can’t avoid the firing line, no matter what it does.
In mid-March sports, arts & culture minister Nathi Mthethwa hit the roof when the CMA said it was still considering staging the race, originally scheduled for June 14. He had insisted it cancel.
And when it did cancel this week, some of the 27,500 runners blew their lids, demanding their R600 entry fee back.
That’s how much it cost each local runner to enter the 2020 edition. Entrants from overseas paid R3,800 and those from Africa R1,500, but they can defer their entries until next year, or 2022.
Local runners will have to pay again to take part next year, but for 2020 they will get a goodie bag that includes a T-shirt, worth more than R850.
Apparently this is unacceptable to some. Entry fees for the Comrades this year totalled R16m, including VAT, the Sunday Times learnt. With no race this year the CMA doesn’t get its R18m in sponsorships. It costs nearly R1,000 to put a single runner on the route on race day.
The CMA has a regular turnover in the region of R40m, including the additional R7.3m from foreign runners, but for 2020 that’s going to shrink to roughly R14.5m, excluding VAT.
Of that, R12m will go to annual running costs, from salaries to lights and water, at about R1m a month.
And then there is race-related costs that eat into the remaining R2.5m, money already spent in anticipation of the 2020 race taking place. These include R500,000 for the bags that will contain the goodies such as badges that amounted to R191,000.
The body could refund the entry fees and dip into its reserve fund of about R22m, which has been set aside for rainy days, like losing a multimillion-rand sponsor. Goodie bags aside, those R600 entry fees secure the future of the race.
Durban’s other iconic winter event, the July, was given the green light by organisers this week, offering a boost to the troubled horse-racing industry.
The country’s most famous horse race will go ahead behind closed doors as a broadcast-only event on July 25, though gaming operator Gold Circle added “the extremely fluid nature of the pandemic means this could change as circumstances dictate”.
Phumelela, the operator for horse-racing in the rest of SA, had failed to receive government approval to start racing before it went into business rescue last Friday.
The wider racing ecosystem is struggling in lockdown too, with retrenchments looming and some horses being put down.
But the July announcement has been accompanied by rumours within the industry that racing will start soon.
For tens of thousands there is hope.
Time will tell.