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Sport can't fight weather


The 2025 edition of the Cape Town Marathon was cancelled due to strong winds making the course unsafe. It's not the first major sporting event to be affected by weather; and it won't be the last. 

Back in 2020, I was due to run the London Marathon. It was cancelled due to Covid, and we were encouraged to run a 42.2km distance in the 24 hours of the day of the marathon to earn our finisher's medal. I did that in the Covid-emptied streets of Johannesburg. 

We've talked about this before in ThrowForward Thursday:

• Ep 11: Climate change am-dram moment - https://youtu.be/J6QurefheZo 
• Ep 42: Olympics and climate change - https://youtu.be/pgl9UMFPcd4 

Organisers of major sporting events will need to plan for weather related disruptions - not as Plan B or C, but as an expected Plan A. 

This is what our team at TomorrowToday calls an 'Elephant in the Boardroom' - a known, high impact issue that people are not yet taking seriously enough. The cancellation of a major marathon, impacting tens of thousands of people, is a reminder that this is our new normal.