BREAKING TRADITION, COMRADES WILL BE "DOWN" IN BOTH  2009 & 2010
By Riel Hauman
(c) 2008 Race Results Weekly, all rights reserved. Used with permission.

With 2010 being a landmark year for South African sport when soccer's World Cup is held in the country, the Comrades Marathon Association (CMA) has decided that the Comrades Marathon that year will also be a "down" run, like the 2009 edition of the world’s biggest ultramarathon.

The tradition of alternative up and down races has been broken only twice before, when both the 1974 and 1975, as well as the 1987 and 1988 races were run up i.e., from coastal Durban to Pietermaritzburg.  (Strictly speaking it also happened in 1940 and 1946, although in this case the races were not in consecutive years – World War II came in between).

Every finisher in the 2010 race, to be run on 30 May, will be presented with a special 85th Comrades/World Cup 2010 commemorative race medal.

Next year there will be another major change in the scheduling of the Comrades: For the first time since 1996, the race will revert to a date in May, specifically Sunday, the 24th. This is because the FIFA Confederations Cup soccer tournament will take place in South Africa from the second week of June onwards.

The race will be a down run from Pietermaritzburg to Durban, starting at the Pietermaritzburg City Hall and finishing at Sahara Kingsmead Cricket Stadium. Because the race will take place about three weeks earlier than normal, the closing date for entries has been set at 31 March, and no entries received after this date will be accepted. However, taking into consideration that several key and traditional Comrades qualifying races will take place after 31 March, the CMA has decided to allow participants who have not qualified by 31 March to run races up to 28 April, and then inform the CMA office of their qualifying time, at which stage their entry will be confirmed. The CMA insists, however, that the closing date for entries remains 31 March, and the final qualification date will be 28 April.

In addition, the CMA has decided that all official finishers in the popular local and international Ironman endurance events will automatically qualify to run the Comrades Marathon, providing that the qualifier falls within the CMA’s official qualifying window of 15 June 2008 to 28 April 2009. The standard Ironman event comprise of a 3.8 km swim, 180 km cycle and 42.2 km marathon. Given that next year’s Ironman event in South Africa takes place on 5 April, athletes will, according to the new rules, have to submit their entries before participating in the event. This qualifying option excludes the 70.3 Half Ironman.

Online entries for the 2009 race open on 1 December at http://www.comrades.com, while traditional printed entry forms will be available in January.