George Kusche crossed the line outside Hollywoodbets Scottsville Racecourse in Pietermaritzburg with his arms doing more talking than his legs had any right to after 85.77 kilometres. The clock read 5:15:56. Nobody in the history of the Comrades Marathon had ever run the Up Run faster.
He didn’t just win. He demolished an 18-year-old record. Leonid Shvetsov’s mark of 5:24:49, set back in 2008, had stood as one of the great untouchable numbers in South African ultra running. George Kusche took almost nine minutes off it. The top five finishers all broke the old record, which tells you everything about the calibre of field he beat to do it.
This was supposed to be Tete Dijana’s race, or Piet Wiersma’s, or maybe Bongmusa Mthembu chasing one more piece of history. Instead, the 27-year-old from Mpumalanga walked into the most stacked Comrades field in years and simply ran away from it.
To understand why that’s not as much of a shock as it looks, you have to go back to where Kusche actually built his engine. This was never an ultra runner’s body. It was a miler’s.
Kusche grew up in Malalane, in the Onderberg region of Mpumalanga, the kind of small town where barefoot walks to Laerskool Malelane and touch rugby at break time shaped him before any stopwatch did. He represented the Mpumalanga Under-12 rugby side before athletics took over. By the time he reached Affies in Pretoria, he’d already qualified for the World Junior Championships in the 800m.
From there, the United States. George Kusche spent four years at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on the NCAA Division I circuit, picking up Big Ten medals and a school record in the mile of 3:57.93, all while completing a degree in actuarial science. He moved on to Northern Arizona University for a master’s in statistics, running on an NCAA national championship cross-country team and earning All-American honours along the way. His personal bests, a sub-four mile and 13:28 for 5000m, are speed numbers most ultra runners never come close to touching.
That’s the part that makes this win different from most Comrades breakthroughs. George Kusche isn’t even a full-time athlete. He works as a data scientist, training around a career most elite South African runners don’t carry. He only returned home and joined Nedbank Running Club Gauteng North last year, switching from a lifetime on the track to the open road almost overnight.
The early signs were there if you knew where to look. He won the Irene 48km in March 2025, then lined up for his first ever Comrades a few months later. He finished 12th on the Down Run, the first novice runner home, after a race that included a bout of vomiting at the halfway mark. It was an audacious debut for a man who’d never raced anywhere near that distance before.
This year, the form only sharpened. George Kusche opened 2026 with a marathon personal best of 2:15:02 winning the Peninsula Marathon in tough Cape Town conditions, then added victory at the Two Oceans Marathon. Pundits started circling his name as a genuine podium threat for Comrades. Some even dared call him a potential winner. Kusche, true to form, downplayed all of it.
On race day, he ran with the patience of someone who understood exactly what his speed could do once the hills ran out. He sat off the early pace, watched Mbuti Mollo lead for the bulk of the race, and waited. With just over 10 kilometres to go, he passed the fading leader and was gone, pulling clear up the final stretch and onto the long descent into Pietermaritzburg before anyone could respond.
There isn’t a race like Comrades in the world, George Kusche said afterwards, and in his words it is the crown of running in South Africa. Coming from a man who spent his entire competitive life on a 400m oval, that’s a significant thing to say.
JAY | JPS SAYS: “What gets me about Kusche is that he didn’t climb the ultra ladder the way most of our great Comrades runners do. He arrived with a miler’s turn of foot and used it to break a record that survived for almost two decades. That’s not a fluke. That’s a different kind of athlete walking into the sport.”
What happens next is the interesting part. South African ultra running has had no shortage of brilliant down-to-earth specialists who built entire careers on the Comrades route and rarely ventured beyond it. Kusche’s profile is different. He carries a track speed base that translates far beyond Comrades, the kind of raw pace that opens doors at marathon majors, at world 100km level, on start lines most of his Comrades rivals will never see.
A win of this magnitude, with a record this emphatic, changes how international federations and sponsors look at a 27-year-old who was, by his own admission, downplaying his own chances just weeks ago. South Africa already had Gerda Steyn flying the flag globally in the women’s race. Kusche’s name now belongs in that conversation on the men’s side, a data scientist turned record breaker with the credentials to chase far bigger stages than Pietermaritzburg.
For a country that has produced Comrades champion after Comrades champion, George Kusche still managed to do something none of them had. He took a discipline built for laps of a track and used it to rewrite history over 85 punishing kilometres of South African road. The Onderberg has never had a prouder export.
📸 Images via Gallo Images / Backpagepix
