Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 122, September 2019 | Page 31

guy blew spectacularly!” Fordyce set the previous
best in 1983 on the 54-mile London to Brighton
course, which he went on to win comfortably. Later,
having checked things out a bit more thoroughly, it
seems that the event in the USA was more of a poorly
organised marketing event by a shoe company than a
real race, and Jim actually set out to beat the record,
then stopped briefly before deciding to jog the rest of
the race at a more comfortable pace.
To be fair, Jim is a very accomplished athlete. He’s
won the JFK 50-mile race three times, set the course
record at the 2018 Western States 100 Miler, and
qualified for the USA 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials
with a 1:04 half marathon earlier this year, to go with
many other wins. However, despite this impressive
list of accomplishments, Jim is not yet a ‘real runner.’
As all South Africans know, you only become a ‘real
runner’ once you have run Comrades, and as such,
Jim does not have the required credentials to be
making disparaging insinuations about the oldest,
largest and most competitive ultra-marathon on the
planet!
by David Gatebe and, as far as I am aware, has
never had its legitimacy questioned. Unfortunately,
Jim does not name any specific athletes in his
all-encompassing Comrades slur, so it’s unclear
whether he was referring to both times. However, Jim
has stated his intention to run the 2020 Comrades
Marathon, which is a Down run, so it will be Gatebe’s
record that he’ll be gunning for.
The other possibility is that Jim is one of those
Americans who is unaware that the fairly significant
land mass known as Africa is in fact a continent,
rather than a country, and that the 50-plus countries
within Africa are distinct entities with completely
different cultures, customs, conventions, etc. You
see, athletes from certain East African countries
have recently been the subject of several high-profile
doping scandals, which has created a justified
questioning of the credibility of performances of
certain athletes from those countries. Unfortunately,
this has led some narrow-minded ‘first world athletes’
to brand the whole of Africa as a drug-fuelled den of
iniquity.
as contacting the editors of LetsRun.com, where the
quote appeared.
Unfortunately, Jim gave me the cold shoulder. I did,
however, manage to have an interesting discourse
with the editors of LetsRun.com, who were blissfully
unaware as to “what’s controversial about the quote
at all.” Although we are still in the dark as to whether
Jim’s intentions were pure, misguided or deliberately
spiteful, we’re nice people down here at the bottom of
Africa, so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and
assume he meant just Shvetsov.
As someone who likes to cover all the bases, however,
I thought I’d leave the emotions and conjecture aside
and get some hard evidence on the actual anti-doping
procedures and protocols in place within South Africa.
I therefore fired off some questions to Khalid Galant,
General Manager of the South African Institute for
Drug-Free Sport (SAIDS), and faster than Mo Farah
can open his front door for a scheduled visit from UK
anti-doping officials, I received a reply.
However, just because one small section of a
very large continent has a major problem with
performance-enhancing drugs, does not mean that
the other 50-odd countries should be tarred with the
same brush – just as it would be unfair of me to label
all Americans as ignorant! (And to be clear, I am not.)
Sidenote: Also, the fact that South African marathon
runners’ performances at the World Marathon Majors
has been relatively dismal over the last decade, should
be conclusive proof that our athletes are not doping.
The only Top 20 South African performances in this
period that I’m aware of are Hendrik Ramaala finishing
10th in Berlin in 2011, Lusapho April coming third in
New York in 2013, Irvette van Zyl’s ninth in London
2013, Rene Kalmer’s ninth in Berlin 2014, and Gerda
Steyn taking 13th place in New York 2018. (Thanks to
Manfred Seidler for help on this one.) If South African
marathon runners are doping and this is the best
we can do, we need to ask for a refund and switch
chemists!
However, Comrades has two records, the Up and
the Down. The current Down record was set in 2016
Khalid explained that there is a Registered Testing
Pool (RTP) of athletes that is updated on an annual
basis, further elaborating, “The RTP is a group
of athletes that are required to supply updated
whereabouts information to us via the World Anti-
Doping Agency (WADA) online system ADAMS (Anti-
Doping Administration and Management System).
This they have to do for each day of the year, e.g.
provide physical address details, training details, etc.,
and provide a dedicated one-hour time slot per day
where they will definitely be for testing, so as not to
incur a missed test should a test be attempted within
this one-hour slot.”
In many countries (like the USA), national
doping agencies ignore ultra-runners, but SAIDS
comprehensively tests a significant number of male
and female ultra-runners here, says Khalid. “The
inclusion of the top elite Comrades athletes in our
RTP has been a regular feature since 2012, and we
have consistently had between 10 and 20 Comrades
runners in this RTP. These RTP athletes have been
regularly subjected to urine and blood testing, so that
we are able to build a profile of the athlete, called an
athlete biological profile.”
Emotional Response
My first response to Jim’s distasteful defamation of
the greatest race he’s never run was fairly emotive
– as was that of several other journalists and media
personalities, whose seriousness and credibility far
outweigh mine – but I eventually moved on from knee-
jerk emotion to a more calm, collected and considered
approach. Having re-read the quote, I wondered
whether Jim was referring purely to Leonid Shvetsov’s
2008 Up Run record? The general consensus is that
this record is highly suspect, given that the Russian
was subsequently discredited in 2010 after the
Belgian long-distance runner, Eddy Hellebuyck, tested
positive for EPO and named Dr Leonid Shvetsov as
his supplier.
SAIDS Says So
There are currently 13 ultra-marathon athletes on the
RTP list: Anne Ashworth, Charné Bosman, Jenna
Challenor, David Gatebe, Cornelia Joubert, Gift
Kelehe, Ludwick Mamabolo, Tanith Maxwell, Claude
Moshiywa, Bongmusa Mthembu, Gerda Steyn, Irvette
van Zyl and Caroline Wöstmann.
Jim’s Cold Shoulder
In a case like this, it helps to clarify meaning and
intent, so I did everything within my power to elicit
a clarification from Jim himself, sending a friendly
message to his active social media profiles as well
Sidenote: David Gatebe is the only athlete to have
won all three the South African Marathon Champs,
Two Oceans and Comrades titles. He is a long-term
member of the RTP club, so everything indicates that
his 2016 Comrades Down record of 5:18:19 is indeed
beyond reproach. To put this in perspective – and
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