Half the team. No visas. Less than ten days to go.
That was the reality facing Athletics South Africa’s squad for the World Athletics Road Running Championships in Copenhagen — and the federation’s response was to tell everyone to calm down. Whether you believe them or not depends entirely on how much faith you have left in South African sports administration.
It started, as these things often do, with social media. Reports began circulating that more than half of the South African team had not yet received their travel documentation, with the clock ticking dangerously close to the global event in Denmark. For any athlete who has spent months training for a world championship, that kind of uncertainty is not a bureaucratic inconvenience — it is a threat to everything they have worked for.
Then came the detail that made the situation worse. ASA had only officially announced the national squad the week before. One week. That is the window the federation gave itself — and its athletes — to clear international visa procedures, absorb processing backlogs, and arrange travel logistics for a world championship. The timeline alone tells you something about how these institutions operate.
By Thursday, ASA was pushing back hard against what it called unnecessary alarm. “There is nothing of alarm here,” the federation stated, confirming that most athletes had already received visa approval notifications and that the remaining applications were still being processed. On the surface, it sounds reassuring. But consider what it took to get there.
ASA did not resolve this quietly through good planning. It escalated. The federation made a direct request for intervention to World Athletics, the sport’s global governing body, and to South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco). Both stepped in to help push the applications through. That is not a routine administrative process — that is a federation calling in favours to fix a problem that should never have existed in the first place.
Weeks earlier, none of this pressure would have been necessary if the squad announcement had come sooner. The staggered approvals that ASA describes as “a normal part of international travel logistics” look a lot less normal when you factor in the self-imposed time crunch that created them.
Amid all of this, the athletes themselves have stayed focused. Elroy Gelant, South Africa’s marathon record-holder, is set to compete in the men’s half-marathon in Copenhagen — a redemption run of sorts after finishing 13th at the inaugural edition of these championships in Riga in 2023. He deserves a clean runway to that start line, not a last-minute scramble through embassy queues.
ASA says there is nothing to worry about. Further updates were expected Thursday as approvals continued to roll in. The crisis, if you trust the federation, is already over. But the young Kenyan sports fan — or South African, or any African athlete watching this unfold — knows exactly what this pattern looks like. It looks like institutions that treat athletes as afterthoughts until the optics get bad enough to force action. It looks like “we fixed it” being offered as a substitute for “we should have planned better.” And it looks like the people who actually have to run the race bearing the cost of decisions made in boardrooms.
The championships will go ahead. The South African squad will almost certainly make it to Copenhagen. But the real story here is not the visa approvals — it is the system that made those approvals a crisis in the first place.
