Nicola Jansen crossed the line at Curro Hazeldean High School on Saturday, 5 September 2026, as South African senior champion for the first time. The 24-year-old from Pretoria took the women’s 10km at the ASA Cross Country Championships, the headline long-course race on the national calendar.
Nicola Jansen has spent the bulk of her competitive life in the NCAA system, where the calendar rarely lines up with Athletics South Africa’s championship dates. Plenty of South African distance athletes who take the college route never make it back onto the domestic start line during their peak years.
The route from Waterkloof High School to a national title ran through Bradley University and then the University of New Mexico. At Bradley she won Missouri Valley Conference titles indoors over 3,000m and 5,000m, set meet records and picked up conference scholar-athlete honours. New Mexico brought the bigger results: Mountain West individual runner-up in cross country, Mountain Region runner-up, and first-team All-American status in 2023.
Nicola Jansen’s track credentials sit underneath all of that.
Personal bests on record:
- 1,500m — 4:21.57
- 3,000m indoor — 9:02.49 (Seattle, February 2026)
- 5,000m — 15:52.03 (Azusa, 2024)
- 10,000m — 32:53.18 (Stanford, 2024)
- 3,000m schoolgirl best — 9:43.43
- 5,000m schoolgirl best — 17:18.82
High-altitude training in New Mexico, college championship racing across a full season, and a Gauteng winter cross country block is an unusual combination to bring to a national final. On Saturday it worked.
She had already shown she could travel back and be competitive off a different training rhythm, taking silver in the U23 4km at the 2024 ASA Cross Country Championships. Saturday turns that into senior hardware.
“Four years in America and she comes home to take the biggest title on the calendar” – 🎙️Jay
The championships were hosted by Athletics Gauteng North at a venue already embedded in the local programme. Curro Hazeldean staged AGN league races earlier in the season and the provincial championships in August, so national day on 5 September was a natural progression on familiar ground.
Official finish times and the complete senior results list had not been widely published at the time of writing. Athletics South Africa and the provincial bodies usually release circulars and results PDFs in the days following the championships, and those documents will confirm the winning margin, the team scores and the rest of the podium.
The title itself is selection currency. ASA treats the national cross country championships as a reference point for teams, rankings and championship planning, and a winner’s name carries further through that process than any college result filed overseas.
Schools and clubs also spend a lot of energy convincing young athletes that the NCAA isn’t a one-way door. Jansen is the example they can now point to, and that closed loop is rare.
What comes next is likely to happen on tarmac and synthetic rather than grass. Her February indoor form and the 2024 marks over 5,000m and 10,000m give her options if she stays in the senior national mix through the summer season.
For Saturday, the story is simple enough. A Pretoria runner lined up in the senior women’s 10km at Curro Hazeldean and left as South African champion.
Photo credit: Cecilia van Bers / Pixallsport / Athletics South Africa.
