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.
- Ep 42: Olympics and climate change.
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.
Why was the Cape Town Marathon 2025 cancelled? Could it happen again? My name is Graeme Codrington. This is ThrowForward Thursday, where every week we jump into the future, see if there are any lessons that we can learn.
This is not the first time that a major sporting event has been cancelled. 19th of October 2025, Cape Town experienced a massive wind gust gale through the night and at just before five o’clock in the morning of the 19th of October, the organisers of the Cape Town Marathon made what must have been an incredibly difficult decision for the safety of staff, volunteers, and runners to cancel the event. Yeah, incredibly disappointing.
I’m wearing my London Marathon T-shirt from 2020 because after many years of being in the ballot, I had finally got an entry to the London Marathon. Super excited, I think it would be my third or fourth marathon all ready to go and well, we know the history, right? Covid. And COVID stopped that marathon. In fact, most marathons and most major sporting events that year, we remember it well.
Here in season 6 of ThrowForward Thursday, though, we are looking back at some of the predictions we’ve made over the last four years of doing these weekly episodes. And all the way back in episode 11, we talked about climate change for the first time. We’ve dealt with it in many different ways over the years, but all the way back, and we’ll put a link in the show notes so you can go and look for yourself. But in episode 11, I was able, the team encouraged me to go back to high school drama class and to use a little bit of Jonathan Pie, the British comedian, his approach to news making, and I pretended to storm off of the recording and throw my hands up about climate change.
But that, I suppose, is a response, the response of good grief, like when are we going to properly deal with this? Then in episode 42, we specifically linked climate change and sport, where we talked about what the Olympics might do and how the Olympics might be impacted by climate change. And we talked about it again when we linked in a theme with the FIFA Football World Cup, being held in the Middle East, and what they had to do with air conditioning, and that to make sure that football wasn’t impacted by high temperatures.
Well, here we are again, another major sporting event impacted by weather. And yes, of course, it could happen anywhere, everywhere. I’m a big cricket fan, and that’s often impacted by the weather, so is tennis, and we are going to have to learn to live with this. We cannot schedule sporting events just whenever we want to because we want to make more money or because we think people will pay. We’ve got to, if these are outdoor events that are affected by the weather, this now has to become a huge part of our calculation. What could the weather be? And if the weather gets more extreme, that’s the bigger issue.
Yes, of course, higher temperatures make it more difficult for us as human beings to function. Yes, stronger winds and lashing rains make some sports impossible to play. But it’s more about extreme weather and the impact of extreme weather on outdoor activities, including sporting events. We are going to have to take this into account. Organisers are going to have to have insurance for it, are going to have to have standby plans. It can’t just be good enough to just cancel the event, and then there’s no payout, there’s no refunds.
That’s not a criticism of Cape Town Marathon this year, it’s just saying we have to be thinking that this is now much more of a possibility in the future. Our lives, our world, our sports, and our hobbies are going to be impacted by an angry planet.
At TomorrowToday, we call this a grey elephant, an elephant in the boardroom, if you prefer. It’s a big thing that we know exists. We can see it right in front of us. It is going to have a huge impact in our world and yet we are still going about our lives with no plan B, C, or D. In fact, forget about plan B, C, D. What’s plan A? Because the disruption is the most likely possibility.
For all of those of you who were going to run the Cape Town Marathon, I’m planning to do it either next year or the year after, when hopefully it is one of the Abbott World majors. Really disappointing. I love the South African spirit that I saw this last Sunday, as people decided to make up runs anyway. And the whole of Cape Town looked as if it was just buzzing with people running around, getting in their half marathons, their marathons, getting all of that carbo loading out of their system the best way they know how.
But we have to have plans for a changing planet, and we have to know what we will do as the planet changes around us.
Keep running, keep thinking about change, keep looking to the future. I’ll see you next week in ThrowForward Thursday again.
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For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognised brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.