The Comrades Marathon Association’s scaffolding contract went through an audited, structured, governance-compliant request-for-proposal process, the kind of routine procurement discipline that Rory Steyn says most South African sports federations simply cannot manage. Steyn, a veteran of twelve Comrades runs and a board member of the association, argues that the ultramarathon’s governance overhaul offers a working template for fixing federations that cannot seem to deliver anything for their athletes. The failure elsewhere, he says, lies squarely with administrators rather than with the sports themselves.
The contrast he draws is stark. Comrades has reformed its constitution, cleaned up its procurement and handed control back to participants. Swimming South Africa, by contrast, sits with a high-performance centre in Franschhoek that, in Steyn’s assessment, is currently good for nothing more demanding than frog swimming. Athletes there are developed largely despite the system, sustained by bursaries from American universities rather than domestic structures.
Steyn traces Comrades’ transformation to a specific trigger. The former president of KwaZulu-Natal Athletics, whose provincial jurisdiction covered the race, issued a directive requiring anyone wanting to join, attend or vote at the marathon association’s annual general meeting to be domiciled within the province. The effect would have concentrated power locally and excluded roughly seventy percent of the membership. For Steyn, that was the last straw. The association responded by taking the matter to a special general meeting, where eighty percent of members voted to put Comrades first, breaking away from Athletics South Africa and determining their own future.
What makes the model function, according to Steyn, is the composition of its membership and the discipline of its board. Membership can only be earned by finishing at least one edition of the race or by volunteering, meaning the people deciding the event’s direction are the people who actually deliver it. On the board side, he insists the current directors behave like company executives rather than politicians. Conflicts of interest are declared at the top of each board meeting, immediately after attendance and apologies, and Steyn himself declares whatever applies to him. There is no subterfuge, he says, and no steering of contracts towards mates, which he identifies as the classic route by which board seats elsewhere become income-generating opportunities.
That operational cleanliness extends to staffing. The association employs a general manager who plans the logistics of the race itself, keeping administration subordinate to delivery. Independent directors with genuine skills in business and finance provide oversight without holding constituencies inside the sport. Next year carries added weight: the association marks its centenary, a hundred years since the first Comrades in 1921. The milestone lands in 2026 rather than 2021 because four wartime years during World War Two and two pandemic years interrupted the count.
Swimming presents the mirror image. Steyn points to a swimmer forced to fly back to South Africa for a medical scan that duplicated one already performed by a doctor in the United States. Who treats a human being that way, he asks. Meanwhile the Paralympic movement, under Andy Scott’s leadership, attracted sponsorship directly from Mercedes-Benz and Nedbank because those companies trusted its administrators, while withholding confidence from SASCOC and the athletics federation. Sponsors, Steyn predicts, increasingly want nothing to do with federations marked by greed and malfeasance, and he expects sport generally to move toward independence as a result.
His prescription for swimming follows the Comrades playbook. Sports minister Gayton McKenzie cannot fix the federation directly and should work through SASCOC, but Steyn suggests the real leverage lies elsewhere: swimmers and everyone with the sport’s interests at heart should consider a breakaway body, as Comrades did from Athletics South Africa. Water polo has already gone down that road, splitting from its parent federation, though securing international recognition remains a hurdle Comrades never faced given the nature of its event. Alternatively, a constitutional amendment passed properly at an annual general meeting, creating a majority of independent board members unattached to any swimming faction, could achieve the same outcome internally. Steyn notes that calls for change at Swimming South Africa stretch back to the mid-2000s, led by figures who paid a personal price for speaking out.
He acknowledges the difficulty. Unlike Comrades, ordinary swimmers hold no automatic membership stake, so there is no ready-made electorate to force accountability. An intervention by World Aquatics, the global federation, may ultimately be required, particularly if international funding flows into local operations and gives that body grounds to demand answers about malfeasance.
For Steyn, the broader issue is who belongs in administrative roles at all. Too many board seats across South African sport are occupied by political operatives rather than practitioners, positions that pay reasonably well and reward loyalty over competence. He recalls a KZN Athletics official who survived attempts to remove him by dragging club meetings on for nine or eleven hours until attendees drifted away, leaving too few voters to unseat him. Against that backdrop, the Comrades message lands simply: the race rebuilt itself around honest governance, transparent tenders and participant ownership, and proved it can be done. Other sports bodies, Steyn concludes, lack excuses. Only backbone.