Elroy Gelant shatters 26-year-old SA marathon record

Elroy Gelant has broken the 26-year-old SA men’s marathon record, finishing the 42.2km race in Hamburg, Germany, on Sunday in fourth place in 2hr 5min 36sec.

The three-time Olympian, who finished 11th at the Paris Games in 2024, beat the 2:06:33 mark set by Gert Thys in Tokyo in February 1999.

His time was also inside the 2:06:30 automatic qualifying time for the world championships in Tokyo in September. 

It was a huge feat for the 38-year-old Gelant, who went into the race ranked 11th on the all-time national list with the 2:08.56 he ran in Seville in 2024, leapfrogging greats such as Hendrick Ramaala, Ian Syster, Josia Thugwane, Zithulele Sinqe and Willie Mtolo.

Gelant quit the sport in late 2022, picking up weight to the point that he was sporting a boep.

But the junior lecturer at North-West University in Potchefstroom changed his mind after a chance encounter with a former convict while on holiday in Pacaltsdorp, near George, where he grew up.

Gelant was coming out of a shop when he heard the gangster call him in a deep voice, “Hey, Elroy”.

“Obviously it’s a gangster,” he said in a previous interview, adding that thugs had hung out at that shop when he was a child.

He was not sure whether to engage the hoodlum or carry on walking.

“I went back to him and he said, ‘Elroy, I got out of jail yesterday and you know what inspiration you mean for our community’.”

Gelant, who had planned to tell his agent not to renew his contract extension, changed his mind then and there and since then has been running the best times of his career.