This month’s Harmony Prison Run at Pretoria Central prison provided a rare glimpse into prison life, with athletes wearing hand-sewn shorts and drab green vests, sporting handmade race numbers on their backs. They ran along a bumpy 200m concrete path with six 90Þ bends that hugged the prison’s high brick walls.

The one-time favourite son of South African athletics, Hezekiel Sepeng, has been excluded from the national team for the world championships, signalling that the curtain may be coming down on his illustrious career.

Could the ultra-marathon – and for that matter the standard marathon, the long-standing backbone of South African road running and the life blood of Athletics South Africa – be heading towards intensive care?

This warning may come a tad late for paddlers taking part in the two-day Fish River Canoe Marathon, which kicks off at the Grassridge dam on Friday, but elephants have been spotted in the Fish river. Well, that’s according to sheep farmer Tiaan Naude, who took a preparatory paddle down the river this week.

There are two kinds of people in this world, according to the hit movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding: there are Greeks and those who wish they were Greek. The bad news is neither kind is queuing up to watch the Olympics in the Greek capital.
Perhaps the main reason for the lack of local support for the games is the embarrassment caused by successive drug stories.

The transition from conservative Zurich to easy-going Athens was great, the difference between Swiss chocolate and ouzo. The week leading up to the start of the Olympic Games, when nothing is happening on the sports front, is an ideal opportunity for journalists to dig up dirt and scout the lie of the land.

With only one week to go before the ”greatest sports show on Earth” gets under way in Athens, the South African team looks in good shape. A medals haul higher than the current record of five looks on the cards, even though the president of the National Olympic Committee of South Africa remains non-committal about the team’s chances.

If any of the 150-strong South African Olympic team take to the competition halls, pools and fields in Athens feeling they are on their own, they obviously have not met their chef de mission, Hajera Kajee. Kajee is the first female to take up the all-important task of looking after the Olympic flock for the Games.

Is the Comrades Marathon a sleeping dragon or a dinosaur, trying to find somewhere comfortable to die? The latter would seem to be where the betting money is going, with the news that entries for this year’s up-run are just 12 013 after an all-time high of 24 223 in the race’s 2000 edition.

Three strikes and you are out, cried Athletics South Africa CEO Banele Sindani, as Atlanta Olympics silver medallist Hezekiel Sepeng was unceremoniously shown the door for pushing his luck once too often. Sindani clearly had had enough of the misconduct from one of the country’s most talented, but often most wayward, sons.