A ballot for the 100th Comrades has left thousands of runners angry, but the real question is larger: when a national institution becomes too popular for everyone to take part, what does loyalty actually entitle you to?
I was one of the lucky ones. A few weeks ago I paid R10, put my name into the ballot for the 2027 Comrades Marathon and, when the results came out, I had an entry. Thousands of other runners did not. I should probably acknowledge that before saying anything else about the controversy that has followed. It is considerably easier to defend the principle of a ballot after your own name has come out of it.
Next June will be my sixth Comrades. My first was in 2010, when I was much younger and Comrades already seemed impossibly big. There were 23,567 entries that year, 16,482 runners actually started and 14,338 finished. At the time, the finishing field was a world record for an ultramarathon. I remember looking around at the start and wondering how on earth so many people could possibly be attempting to run nearly 90 kilometres on the same day.
Seventeen years later, Comrades is bigger still. The 2027 race will be the 100th running and the entry cap has been increased to 28,000, which the organisers say will make it the largest Comrades field ever. The previous Down Run record was the 24,172 entries in 2025, while the 2019 Up Run attracted 24,636. So the centenary is clearly exceptional, but it would be wrong to pretend that the demand suddenly appeared because someone put a “100” on the medal. Comrades has been getting very big for some time.
The clearest evidence came last year. For 2026 the organisers actually reduced the cap to 22,000, partly because of safety and operational concerns. General entries then disappeared in less than ten hours. Almost 20,000 were taken during that brief general-entry window alone. Whatever one thinks of the ballot introduced for 2027, first come, first served was already becoming a fairly ridiculous way of allocating places.
The centenary has simply magnified the problem enormously. Demand for 2027 far exceeded the 28,000 places available, and the result was entirely predictable. Once the ballot results started appearing, social media filled with disappointment, anger and, in some cases, fairly spectacular indignation. Some people objected to the ballot itself. Others objected to international runners being able to secure guaranteed places through official tour packages. Others argued that runners who had completed Comrades several times should surely have received preference over first-timers.
Some of the reaction has been excessive, but I don’t think all of it should simply be dismissed as entitlement. Comrades is not just another road race, and people who have run it repeatedly are not imagining their connection to it.
South Africans have a peculiar affection for endurance sport generally, but Comrades occupies a category almost entirely of its own. Families organise June weekends around it. Running clubs build whole seasons around it. People who have never come remotely close to running an ultramarathon know about the Green Number. Thousands of spectators get up at absurd hours to spend most of a day standing next to a road watching other people suffer. The race has developed its own rituals, language and mythology.
I understand the attachment. I have five Comrades finishes and there are memories attached to each of them that have very little to do with the medals sitting at home. So when someone who has run six or seven or eight Comrades says that he has helped create the history of the event, I think he has a point. Comrades exists in its present form because generations of ordinary runners kept coming back. They joined clubs, volunteered, brought their families, told stories about Inchanga and Fields Hill and convinced the next idiot that running from one KwaZulu-Natal city to another was something worth doing.
The more difficult question is what that history entitles them to. If someone with five finishes should receive preference, why five? Why not four? If eight is enough, what happens to the runner sitting on seven? Comrades already recognises the strongest cases. Green Number holders with ten or more medals had their own entry window for 2027, as did Yellow Number holders sitting on nine and attempting to earn their Green Number. Runners with 25 or more finishes do not pay an entry fee at all. There is therefore already considerable recognition of loyalty built into the system.
Eventually, though, a line has to be drawn. If having run Comrades previously becomes the principal justification for being allowed to run it again, the system becomes self-reinforcing. The easiest way to earn a future entry is to have already had one. That leaves a fairly obvious problem for the person trying to run a first Comrades.
And novices are hardly an irrelevant constituency. Of the 22,399 people who secured entries for 2026, 5,774 were novice runners, just over a quarter of the field. A race that gradually closes itself off to newcomers would, over time, become something very different from the Comrades people are trying so hard to protect.
The mechanics of the new ballot are also perhaps less outrageous than some of the reaction suggests. General applicants paid a non-refundable R10 fee and had almost two weeks to put their names in. It did not matter whether you applied the moment the ballot opened or shortly before it closed. Successful runners then had to pay for their entry within the prescribed period. If they didn’t, the place lapsed and could be put back into a redraw.
In other words, nobody gained an advantage by having the fastest internet connection or by being able to sit refreshing a website at precisely 10am. That matters, because the old system was hardly neutral either. It favoured people who happened to be available when entries opened, whose internet worked, whose bank cards behaved themselves and who knew sufficiently far in advance that ten hours was apparently all the time they were going to get.
Randomness is frustrating because it is obvious. You put your name into a machine and someone else comes out while you don’t. But the old online scramble was arbitrary in its own way. It just hid the arbitrariness behind speed.
There are other possible systems. One suggestion doing the rounds is that Comrades should guarantee places to runners who meet demanding qualifying times and then ballot whatever entries remain. There is a certain appeal to that. At least the runner would have some control over his fate rather than relying entirely on chance.
But Comrades would need to be careful. Boston can build its identity around qualification because Boston has always been that kind of marathon. Comrades has not. Comrades already requires runners to qualify to participate, but the standard is deliberately achievable for a very wide range of runners. The athlete trying to scrape home before the final gun is as much a part of the culture of Comrades as the person chasing a silver medal.
Turn guaranteed entry into a reward mainly for fast marathon runners and the race begins to become something different. You might make allocation more meritocratic, but only by deciding that speed is the particular form of merit that matters. I am not convinced that is what Comrades is supposed to be.
There is a more awkward problem with guaranteed entries. For 2027, runners willing to make a R10,000 contribution to the official charities could obtain one of a limited number of guaranteed charity places. International and Rest of Africa runners could also secure guaranteed entry through the official Marathon Tours & Travel packages. Ordinary South African entries cost R1,200; international entrants pay R4,500.
I can see why this irritates people. Imagine having run Comrades six times, missing out in the ballot and then watching someone from London who has never run the race secure a guaranteed entry through a tour package. The instinctive response — “but this is our race” — is hardly incomprehensible.
Still, I don’t think the answer is to turn Comrades into a closed shop. International runners pay considerably more to enter and they also fly here, stay in hotels, eat in restaurants, arrange transport and often spend additional time in South Africa. There is nothing particularly grubby about wanting some of them at one of the country’s great sporting events. More importantly, Comrades cannot sensibly aspire to be one of the world’s great endurance races while simultaneously treating foreign runners as people who are taking places away from the “real” owners.
The same principle applies domestically. A 28-year-old South African lining up for a first Comrades has no less right to want a place simply because someone else got there years earlier.
There is another fight surrounding Comrades at the moment, between the Comrades Marathon Association and the formal athletics structures of KwaZulu-Natal Athletics and Athletics South Africa. The 2027 rules now explicitly state that the race is not affiliated to either KZNA or ASA. That is a substantial controversy and probably deserves an article of its own, but it also connects to the ballot question in one important respect: different groups believe they have some legitimate claim over what Comrades is and how it should be run.
Comrades has become so big, valuable and culturally important that lots of people feel some degree of ownership over it. The administrators do. The athletics bodies do. Clubs do. Green Number runners do. Ordinary runners do. Perhaps all of them are right, to some extent. Ownership is not quite the same thing as entitlement, though.
That is what makes the ballot argument more interesting than a simple administrative dispute about how to distribute 28,000 entries. The runners who say they helped build Comrades are not wrong. The mistake comes in assuming that contribution creates a continuing right to a scarce place.
If Comrades is worth preserving, it must remain possible for new people to become part of it. Somebody has to run number one before he can ever run number ten. There is also something rather encouraging about the whole mess. South Africans spend an enormous amount of time talking about institutions that are declining, traditions that are disappearing and things that no longer work. Here we have almost the opposite problem. Far more people want to participate in Comrades than can safely be accommodated.
For the centenary, at least, the problem is not that nobody cares about this strange South African institution anymore. It is that far too many people do.
I have five finishes and, thanks substantially to luck, an entry for number six. Next time I might be the person complaining on social media that someone else got the place I wanted. That is probably the more useful test of whether I really think the ballot is defensible. It is easy enough to support a system when your own name comes out of it. The harder question is whether I will still think it fair when it doesn’t.
[Image: Peter Swanepoel]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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