Executive Summary: If you make the final cutoff at Comrades 2024 by 1 second you will need to run at a ‘slowest possible pace’ of 7:20/km to finish under 12 hours. If back-of-the-pack runners can run faster than this over the last split, it means that the cutoff is wrong and will result in Comrades runners losing out on a medal. Data analysis from the last Up run in 2019 shows that over 1000 Vic Clapham medallists and hundreds of last 10 minute finishers ran faster than this. Therefore the current cutoff is badly calculated and will rob potentially hundreds of Comrades runners of a medal.
The good news is that we’ll see runners on the field during the last minute before cutoff this year. The bad news is that we’ll still be a few hundred runners short of a full field.
After the cutoff debacle at Comrades 2023, the Comrades 2024 cutoffs were always going to come under scrutiny. When the original Comrades 2024 cutoffs were published, several people pointed out some serious potential flaws. It was encouraging to see that new Race and Operations Manager, Ann Ashworth, listened to the feedback and took them back for review.
Continue reading “Comrades 2024: Polly Shortts cutoff likely to kill the dreams of hundreds”