Cape Town Strides Toward Major Status

After almost 17,000 runners crossed the finish line on Sunday last week, Cape Town Marathon is one step closer to joining the Abbott World Marathon Majors. If successful the race will join the big six and – almost certainly at this stage – Sydney. Shanghai recently replaced Chengdu as China’s candidate race; if it too is admitted, that would be nine majors around the world.

In Cape Town, assessors from the AbbottWMM group were joined by high-level officials and race directors from the Boston, London, New York and Berlin marathons to observe the event.

“We’re extremely happy,” says Cape Town Marathon race director Barry van Blerk. “The initial feedback from the world marathon majors assessors was extremely positive. We’ll take it as a pass, though we haven’t got the final report yet.”

“So we had a lot of experienced eyes on the event,” Van Blerk says. “People who have done it for many, many years. And they were blown away. They basically said they, as World Marathon Majors, need Cape Town Marathon as a major because we bring something uniquely different that no other major in the world has.”

For Mike Obery, co-founder of Full Send Running and Community Track Club, Cape Town Marathon’s unique character starts with the spectacular course it’s known for – but it goes much deeper.

“Running has united us from our apartheid background,” Obery says. “It was one of the sports where we saw the first black men competing against white men. It broke down that racial divide. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from – running is running.”

And distance running, especially ultras such as the Comrades and Two Oceans marathons, is in the nation’s blood, Mike says. “In South Africa, we say a marathon is just a training run for the ultras.” He completed Cape Town’s 44km trail marathon held the day before the main event – before shouting himself hoarse the next day in the Full Send cheer zone. Cape Town's two-day running festival also includes community-focused 5km and 10km Peace Runs on the Saturday.

Cape Town is mad about running, another reason a new major should be right at home here. It puts on a stacked calendar of road racing, with people lining up for a starter’s gun almost every weekend. With Full Send Running, Mike says they will often schedule their long runs around other different clubs’ weekend races.

“There’s a lot of clubs from previously disadvantaged or underdeveloped areas, and we’re trying to support those communities by going to run their races and then doing our long run on the day that they don’t have their race, on the free day of the weekend.”

Cape Town Marathon’s candidacy began in 2022, and organisers must meet more than 100 criteria to progress. They’ve already made significant improvements – this year, extensive community consultation helped resolve issues around parked cars on the course, while route adjustments introduced in 2013 reduced the elevation gain from 230 metres to 190 metres.

Van Blerk acknowledges there’s still work ahead. “The job is not done,” he says. “Next year again, exactly the same. We have to tick all 105 boxes. We can’t slip on any of them.”

But if Cape Town continues to meet the stringent criteria, it could be announced as a major in 2026, becoming the first race on the African continent to join this elite group. It began its candidacy in 2022, the same year as Sydney, and is in the first of two assessment stages.

If Cape Town becomes the first African major, it would leave South America as the only populated continent without one. But given that almost every top-tier marathon champion in recent years has been African, albeit almost exclusively from Ethiopia or Kenya, it’s only right that Africa, the spiritual home of distance running, should host a pinnacle 42.2km event.

As part of its bid to join the majors, Cape Town made the aforementioned course changes in 2023, aiming for a flatter and faster route. That and the fact that the event is now attracting a deeper elite field saw records fall left and right last Sunday. Ethiopia’s Abdisa Tola claimed a new course record of 2:08:16, while South African Glenrose Xaba made an epic marathon debut to claim the women’s title along with the course and national records.

Cape Town’s course showcases both the city’s natural beauty and its complex history. Starting in Green Point, runners see the sun rise over Table Mountain before passing through District Six, an area that still shows the scars of forced clearances under apartheid, and on to the vibey Woodstock, down party street Long Street, and eventually to Sea Point, cruelly taking runners past the finish line for a final 5km stretch Mike calls “the infamous loop of death”, where the wind has an uncanny ability to be against you both out and back.

Overall though, it’s a spectacular course. “It’s so picturesque,” Mike says. “We have oceans, mountains, greenery, beautiful culture. That’s South Africa for you – it’s all about throwing explosions of colours and just celebrating.”

From the community perspective, he believes the next step is building even more crowd support. “I want to see 42 kilometres of absolute South African GEES,” he says, using the Afrikaans word for energy and spirit. (He insists it needs to be in all capital letters.) “I want to see cheer zones that rival the big ones from New York and Boston.”

That seems fitting for a continent that has produced so many of the world’s greatest distance runners. “This is the home of running,” Obery says. “What better way to celebrate that than in Cape Town?”