Twenty years ago, Kass Naidoo started with a single idea. The story of South Africa’s girls and women in sport was being played out in full, every weekend, in pools and on courts and across fields, and almost nobody was writing it down. gsport was built to change that, and on Saturday, 1 August 2026, the platform turns 20.
The idea was simple and it was radical. Recognition is not a reward handed out after the work is done. Recognition is the thing that makes the work possible in the first place. What gets seen gets supported, and what goes unseen disappears.
Penny Heyns was there at the beginning. On Tuesday, 1 August 2006, the double Olympic champion became the inaugural inductee into the gsport Hall of Fame, and she used the moment not to speak about herself but to honour Karen Muir, Esther Brand and Joan Harrison.
“Who would have thought back then that it would, you know, we would still be doing that today.”
Inaugural gsport Hall of Famer, Penny Heyns
That instinct to look backwards as well as forwards remains one of the truest expressions of what Kass Naidoo set out to build. Heyns speaks about Karen Muir, the youngest person in the history of any sport to break a world record, with a sense of loss at how completely the record has faded from public memory.
“Nobody’s come near that in South Africa,” she says. “So you guys need to honour all of those ladies. Karen Muir, Joan Harrison, all of those.”
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Two decades on, the same idea is doing its work in the present tense. Kgothatso Montjane has carried the South African flag through a career built in a code the country has never adequately funded, and she is direct about what a dedicated platform has meant along the way.
“gsport has really been a phenomenal key to women in sports. They raise the issues that affect women in sports.”
International Wheelchair Tennis Champion, Kgothatso Montjane
Then she says the thing that sits at the centre of the whole twenty-year case.
“I believe that no one has ever seen what I’ve been doing. Besides gsport, I think you guys recognise every milestone that I’ve, I’ve took, even when I felt like I could win other awards, I felt like gsport was seeing every win that came my way.”
For Montjane, 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?” she says. “We wouldn’t have been in the right path if we didn’t have movements like gsport.”
The reach of that idea now extends well beyond South Africa’s borders. Janine Anthony, the Nigerian born broadcaster who has spent more than a decade building the audience for African women’s football, has been watching gsport from Lagos for much of that time.
She understands better than most why a platform like this matters, because her own career began with a single moment of seeing someone who looked like her.
“Dreams are always fuelled by representation.”
Nigerian Football Broadcast Dynamo, Janine Anthony
Her twentieth birthday message is less a celebration than a challenge, delivered to 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 is blunt about what should happen next. “This is the place to invest, it’s the place to be.”
Which brings the arc back to where it started, and to the woman who had the idea. Heyns, the first name ever written into the gsport Hall of Fame, offers the birthday greeting herself.
“So I just want to say happy birthday to gsport. Twenty year anniversary. Wow. It’s it’s mind boggling that it’s been that long. It’s been an amazing journey.”
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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, and a generation of young athletes can find it. That was the idea. The next twenty years are about making sure nobody can look away.
Main Photo Caption: gsport turns 20 on Saturday, 1 August 2026, twenty years after co-founder Kass Naidoo set out to make the story of South Africa’s girls and women in sport visible. All Photos: Supplied
Photo 2 Caption: Penny Heyns, the inaugural inductee into the gsport Hall of Fame in 2006, has watched the platform grow across two decades.
Photo 3 Caption: Marking twenty years of gsport, a platform built to ensure that women’s sporting achievement is recorded, recognised and remembered.
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