Farwa Mentoor, the first South African woman to cross the finish line at this year’s Comrades Marathon, had to sell her most cherished possession just to make it to the starting line.
The story of how the 29-year-old sports assistant at a primary school on the Cape Flats even got to Durban last Monday morning — let alone finish fourth in the world’s most gruelling ultra-marathon — is remarkable.
In an act of desperation, to fulfil her ambition of running the Comrades, she sold the medal she had won just months earlier for finishing sixth at the Two Oceans Marathon.
The purchasers were Harmony Gold, the makers of the medal, and now one of the three major sponsors of athletes in ultra-distance running in this country. But while the same company was offering lavish incentives to members of its elite club for high finishes in Monday’s race, it bought back Mentoor’s medal for just R3 000. It’s that cash that covered the cost of Mentoor’s petrol, board and meals for three days as she chased the dream that, it seems, only she believed in.
Had Mentoor been enrolled by the Harmony Gold club’s team management after her run at the Two Oceans, where she finished one place in front of the subsequent Comrades champion Maria Bak, then her fourth-placed arrival at the Scottsville racecourse on Monday lunchtime would have earned her a sponsor’s bonus of R75 000. Instead, she drove home to Mitchells Plain on Tuesday on a promise of just the R25 000 prize money on offer from the race organisers. ”And I think they’re going to tax me,” Mentoor says.
On Monday the woman who restored the pride of South African ultra-running in the women’s division was a pauper rubbing shoulders with the rand millionaires of the modern Comrades era. Mentoor’s tale will not be read too comfortably by the proprietors of the Harmony Gold and Mr Price squads whose thousands of rands have supported the likes of Vladimir Kotov, Dmitri Grishin and Bak. They may have been viewed — and perhaps rightly so — as more bankable names than Mentoor. But it’s also a fact that, with the exception of Willie Mtolo and one or two others, the main recipients of the sponsors’ cash have been former Soviets, Poles, Germans and even the odd Hungarian. Xenophobic tendencies may, as a rule, be undesirable, but in a country — and it would seem a sport as well — of ”haves” and ”have nots”, there’s something to be said for the idiom ”charity begins at home”.
Mentoor’s rise to Comrades heroine from the dusty and violent streets of the Cape Flats is the stuff of fairy tales. She gets up every day at 4am for her first run of the day. ”I run somewhere between 10km and 12km and then go to school,” she says.
That trip is made by taxi before returning home in time for her second session of the day. When she’s not on the track it’s a 25km run. Every step she takes is solitary. And that, for a woman in particular, is a dangerous pursuit. ”I often run into gunshots and that stuff,” she says. ”It’s gangsters shooting at one another. It happens at least four or five times a month.”
Assuming a generous benefactor doesn’t get there in the meantime, Mentoor’s life will return to its own bizarre kind of normality this week. That’s when, three hours before sunrise, she’ll head out of the front door for her first training run on the long hard road to Comrades 2003.