The pride of Joppie Village gearing for glory at Comrades Marathon 2019

With a soft-spoken, somewhat shy personality, Elia Nkuna has impressive accolades within the Marathon circles at his age.

Elia Nkuna, born and bred in the dusty streets of Joppie Village, he was fortunate enough to have been exposed to Marathon running as a child. With his father – Solly ‘Makamaka’ Nkuna, being a professional runner and a proud competitor in bigger South African Marathon events such as Two Oceans, Soweto, Comrades and Victorious Marathon among others.




Elia’s father would run from Joppie Village to Tzaneen town whenever he was home for holidays and this prompted Elia to tag along with the old man, he would race with him while at a practice session.

Elia started running 42KM races before his father advised him to join the South African famous race, Comrades Marathon. In December 2017, Bra Gibb Foundation and Victorious Attitudes launched a 21KM race at Joppie Village under N’wamitwa Traditional Authority outside Tzaneen. In this event, we witnessed the best of Elia Nkuna and this event lifted his status around the running communities of N’wamitwa.




One of Elia’s achievements was winning Victorious Marathon & Fun Walk in 2017 & 2018 respectively. The highlight of his running career was to compete at the 2018 Comrades Marathon from Maritzburg to Durban clocking around 8hours.

In today’s (07/06/2019) interview at Munghana Lonene FM, Elia confirmed that he’s already in Durban preparing for the latest edition of the event to be hosted on Sunday, June 09.




DOWNLOAD  AND LISTEN TO ELIA NKUNA’S INTERVIEW BELOW: