Johannesburg - A few days before the Cape Town Marathon, the organisers of Africa’s only gold-label race are confident the dream of “graduating” into a World Marathon Majors (WMM) race in 2025 is well within reach.
“Becoming a World Marathon Majors race is akin to hosting a world championship event every year, with a massive economic impact on its host city, meaning more job opportunities, more international exposure, more tourism and more economic prosperity for our city,” said race director Renee Jordaan.
“While we’re leaving no stone unturned to reach this goal, we will always keep the most important people on this journey – our runners – at the heart of every decision we make.”
This year’s running of the race marks the event’s first year, as a candidate race as the WMM looks to expand to a seventh marathon in three years’ time.
The Tokyo, Boston, Berlin, London, Chicago and New York City Marathons are the world’s largest and most renowned 42.2km events.
The Cape Town Marathon is now contending for seventh spot, along with Australia’s Sydney Marathon and the Chengdu Marathon in China.
Organisers say their race already meets many of the stringent requirements, although an area that needed a change was the route.
Due to the addition of an elite wheelchair division (one of the requirements), they – in conjunction with the City of Cape Town – had to relook at the existing route for a solution that would maintain the perfect balance between meeting the WMM route requirements, as well as minimising the traffic impact on the city and affected areas on race day.
While the final route has a different feel to it, it has essentially remained the same as it has retained some of the event’s iconic elements.
It has, however, added some enhancements to maximise the experience, and runners were delighted to hear that the “dreaded” Buitengracht Street bridge has been removed.
The initial year as a candidate race will see organisers taking as many lessons as possible to build on in the following two years.
Most importantly, they will focus on increasing participation growth to be in line with WMM expectations.
“The organising team will critically review all the learnings from the 2022 event to make the necessary improvements for the 2023 and 2024 evaluation years. In terms of participation, the goal is to attract some 30 000 runners, including at least 10 000 international runners,” Jordaan said.
Given lessons from last year’s race, which was run under strict Covid-19 restrictions, Jordaan and her team will stick to smaller batch starts for this year.
Runners will join their seeded sub-groups at designated times and will flow towards the new start line on Helen Suzman Boulevard, where groups will set off two minutes apart.
The first group to leave will be the elite wheelchair division, taking off at 6am, before the elite runners start 15 minutes later.
IOL Sport