North Gauteng Champs More Evidence Of An Emerging Dynasty

The Northern Gauteng Athletics Championships (illogically actually called the Athletics North Gauteng Championships) in Pretoria this weekend was a phenomenal success with a handful of South African, African and World junior and senior records falling over the two-day competition. Here's a very brief round-up of a few of my personal highlights from the Championships.

1) Mean mugging 21 year old Thando Roto (don't let the pic fool you, he's a lovely kid) ran a new personal best sub-10 time of 09.95 seconds to finish second behind Akani Simbine in the 100m final and in doing so became the second fastest South African ever, in the only race in history to feature two South African sub-10 finishers.

2) Sokwakhana "Sox" Zazini broke the World junior record in the 400m hurdles with a blistering time of 48.84 to stun and thrill the Pretoria crowd. The 17 year old ran blind in a three-man race - the best run I've seen with my own two eyes since Wayde van Niekerk in Rio. Honest to God.

3) Popular junior sprinter Gift Leotlela was the talk of Saturday morning when he did what everyone's been waiting for him to do and finally obliterated Akani Simbine's five year old SA 100m junior record by going 10.12 in his heat. Leotlela, who's got a Junior Commonwealth gold medal and a World Junior Games silver medal to his name already has been threatening Simbine's junior record since 2015...

"I knew from 2015, when he went 10.20, that that record was not gonna last long" Simbine told me after congratulating Leotlela on Saturday afternoon. "I told myself that with a 10.20, he's already there. So the record is already gone."

4) But the big star of the weekend was 2016 Olympic silver medalist, Luvo Manyonga. Coming off a series of massive jumps (8.25+) in the Bloemfontein leg of the ASA Speed Series two weeks ago, Luvo came into the AGN Champs on a hot streak and broke Khotso Mokoena's African long jump record with his first leap of the competition. 8.62 metres - the longest jump in the world in the last eight years.

In my brief interview with Manyonga after the meeting, he made his intention for the immediate future very clear:

"I want to be the first person on Earth to jump over nine metres" he said.

In my opinion, the single most thrilling (and genuine) statement of intent to come out of South African track and field in many years - if not ever.