As Tete Dijana won his third Comrades Marathon title on Sunday, it signalled another exciting staging of the ultra marathon between Pietermaritzburg and Durban.
Dijana out-duelled defending champion Piet Wiersma in this year’s down run, to add to the titles he won in 2022 and 2023.
In a race in which a couple of runners went out like pacemakers for the first half of the race, before they burnt out – the real race took place further back.
It came down to the final 8.5km of the down run from Pietermaritzburg to Durban, in which Dijana running at the front would outlast Wiersma. At that point, Dijana clung to a 44-second lead over Wiersma.
| Position | Runner | Finishing Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | Tete Dijana | 5:25:28 |
| 2nd | Piet Wiersma | 5:25:33 |
| 3rd | Nikolai Volkov | 5:29:42 |
| 4th | Edward Mothibi | 5:31:41 |
| 5th | Joseph Manyedi | 5:32:09 |
| 6th | Alex Milne | 5:34:08 |
| 7th | David Gatebe | 5:34:30 |
| 8th | Bongmusa Mthembu | 5:35:48 |
| 9th | Gordon Lesetedi | 5:36:22 |
| 10th | Vasilii Korytkin | 5:38:59 |
Note: Tete Dijana claimed victory in the 2025 Comrades Marathon men’s race, narrowly beating Piet Wiersma by just five seconds in a thrilling finish.
Top payouts
The top-10 runners in each race will sleep soundly not just from exhaustion but also from the knowledge of their bank balance receiving a significant boost.
Long gone are the days when record nine-time champion Bruce Fordyce won the race purely for prize and not a single cent in prize money.
Fordyce’s last win in the gruelling ultra-marathon took place in 1990, and five years later prize money was first introduced.
This year, both the men’s and women’s top-10 finishers will also receive the same payouts:
1st place – R875,000
2nd place – R438,000
3rd place – R315,000
4th place – R158,000
5th place – R123,000
6th place – R71,000
7th place – R62,000
8th place – R54,000
9th place – R45,000
10th place – R36,000
Earlier, in a first for the Comrades Marathon, the elites went off 15 minutes ahead of the rest of the field in what was an attempt to alleviate some of the congestion of runners at the start.
Onalenna Khonkhobe was the first athlete to make a major break in the race, and by the two-hour mark he had amassed an eight-minute lead over Mbuti Mollo, and a staggering 19 minutes over a large group of runners which was the main chase pack.
