South African Sports Journalism Platform Marks Two Decades of Covering Women Athletes

Twenty years ago, Kass Naidoo identified a gap at the heart of South African sport and built gsport to close it. Every weekend, girls and women competed in pools, on courts and across fields, their achievements unfolding in full view, yet almost nobody was documenting them. On Saturday, 1 August 2026, the platform marks its twentieth anniversary.

The founding insight was both simple and radical: recognition is not a prize bestowed after the work is done. It is the precondition that makes the work possible. What gets seen gets supported. What goes unseen disappears.

That principle has shaped two decades of institutional practice. Kgothatso Montjane, an international wheelchair tennis champion who has carried the South African flag through a sport the country has never adequately funded, speaks directly to what dedicated coverage has meant. “gsport has really been a phenomenal key to women in sports. They raise the issues that affect women in sports,” she says. More crucially, she describes how visibility has become something more useful than applause. It has become a map for the girls coming behind her. “I feel like gsport has become an educational tool also in terms of, if you are lost as a woman, like what can I do?” Montjane explains. “We wouldn’t have been in the right path if we didn’t have movements like gsport.”

The platform’s reach now extends well beyond South Africa’s borders. Janine Anthony, a Nigerian-born broadcaster who has spent more than a decade building the audience for African women’s football from Lagos, has watched gsport’s growth across that time. She understands the mechanics of visibility better than most, because her own career began with a single moment of seeing someone who looked like her. “Dreams are always fuelled by representation,” she says.

Anthony’s twentieth birthday message to gsport is less celebration than challenge. She directs it at funders, investors and anyone else within earshot. “With no coin, with no support, with just passion and a dream and a vision, gsport has stayed and risen, and it has to stay,” she says. She is blunt about what should happen next. “This is the place to invest, it’s the place to be.”

Meanwhile, the platform’s first Hall of Fame inductee, Penny Heyns, became a double Olympic champion and a guardian of historical memory. On Tuesday, 1 August 2006, when she received that inaugural honour, she used the moment not to speak about herself but to honour Karen Muir, Esther Brand and Joan Harrison. Muir, the youngest person in the history of any sport to break a world record, has faded almost completely from public memory. “Nobody’s come near that in South Africa,” Heyns says. “So you guys need to honour all of those ladies. Karen Muir, Joan Harrison, all of those.”

That instinct to look backwards as well as forwards remains one of the truest expressions of what Naidoo set out to build. Heyns reflects on the arc of two decades with a sense of astonishment. “So I just want to say happy birthday to gsport. Twenty year anniversary. Wow. It’s mind boggling that it’s been that long. It’s been an amazing journey.”

The transformation is measurable. Twenty years ago, the story of South Africa’s girls and women in sport was largely invisible. Today it is written down, archived, awarded and argued over. A generation of young athletes can find it. The question now is whether the funders and investors Anthony addressed so directly will answer her call before another generation passes undocumented.