Keaton Stansfeld, 22, has wings on his heels.
When this young man hits the tarmac, he flies. Mind you, over rocks, rivers, sand, track, trail, mountains and streams, he does the same.
Keaton was this year’s winner at The Discovery Surfers Challenge.
As is usually the case, I was working at the Gonubie River mouth with the marathon hosts, Buffalo City Surfing, to welcome and direct the challenge athletes to the ropes and river crossing.
Keaton was the first athlete to the river, remarkably well ahead, over in a flash and gone like a rocket.
I caught up with him earlier this week to find out more about him.
Keaton hails from Johannesburg. Perhaps he finds the air at the coast moist and thick and full of oxygen and energy?
He is a provincial athlete across an outrageous nine different sports. He is humble about it, too, and almost surprised that this writer thinks his achievements are fantastic.
Some people just run on a higher octane than others. Janey-Heather Wood is that girl. She runs on 440 volts while the rest of us lesser mortals are on 220.
She has the personality of a small village and the energy level of three large ones.
Her dad, Haydon, tells me that already at the age of six or seven she told him that she wanted to be a Springbok one day.
Mom Anita tells me that Janey has a will like concrete. When she sets her mind to something and digs her heels in, that is the way it is going to be.
Janey’s can do/will do attitude comes from mom but her stamina and endurance come from dad.
Dad has completed three full Ironman races, many half Ironmans and Comrades, the Two Oceans, climbed Kilimanjaro and completed the Washie.
No doubt about it, Janey has good genes and she is driving her good start like Tiger Woods off a golf tee.
Janey smiles and laughs a lot. She is an absolute tonic to talk to.
Even when she was totally heartbroken, debilitated with a huge back injury and locked out of any sport with a nine-month rest period back in 2024, she still radiated humour.
She loves true grind. The more blood, sweat and tears in the training, the happier she is.
If her coach makes her do plank crawls over a rough carpet until her elbows bleed, she is 100% happy about it.
“Battle scars,” she tells me with a big smile.
It seems to me that a key coaching requirement to training Janey might be to hold her back a bit so that she does not self-combust.
When she channels her energy, she is a laser ready to cut steel. If you want the biggest and the best test of your mettle, Janey is the girl you want to compete against.
Her results are tumbling in.
At the tender age of 18, this grade 12 Merrifield pupil has provincial colours in six different sports — Border Cross Country, Border Surfing, Buffalo City Biathle, EL Lifesaving (winner SA national board race), East London netball and Border water polo.
Janey loves her surfing, netball and lifesaving but right now she is happy to lay it all down for water polo
Having surfed with Janey on multiple occasions, I can tell you that she is an absolute wizard on her pink, white and blue Hurricane lifesaving Malibu board.
If not that, on her Lonnie Buhn surfboard, in today’s photo, she can drop in with style, class and control at Yellows Point and line up a thrilling ride.
Janey loves her surfing, netball and lifesaving but right now she is happy to lay it all down for water polo.
Over the years, she has spent huge amounts of effort on all platforms and finally she has cracked green and gold.
She has a junior Springbok call-up for the Water Polo World Championships on August 16, in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.
Goodbye surfing, lifesaving and netball for the next while. HPP — high-performance polo — here we come.
“Life without huge, impossible, insane, far-fetched goals is boring for me,” Janey tells me.
Erstwhile motivation guru Mike Lipkin describes ABHAG — a big, hairy audacious goal, in his books.
I doubt that Janey has read any of Lipkin’s books, but she sure understands the concept.
She is an all-in kind of girl. All or nothing. Burn the boats, as the Vikings would say.
In 2032, Janey will be 24 years old, and it is an Olympic year. The trajectory for her heart, mind and sport is clear. This is where she wants to go.
In the meantime, she is evaluating sport scholarship offers from universities in the US.
An aggregate scholar in the 75% area, with a beyond-stellar sports history; the sun, moon, stars, sky and all in between describe Janey-Heather Wood’s limits. That is to say, no limit.
Merrifield and Buffalo City have reason to feel proud.
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Dad is an all-round athlete and encouraged son to have a crack at almost everything, including badminton (green and gold representation), athletics (he has run and competed at world cross country in Kenya), hockey (been on a school trip to Malaysia/Singapore), baseball (provincial) and swimming (provincial).
He has played provincial soccer, competing in Barcelona, Spain, and played provincial cricket.
I think he was about to tell me more but I was about to fall off my chair so he stopped.
Keaton related all of this without much fanfare as if his achievements are quite normal.
Both his dad and grandmother have represented South Africa at “everything” he tells me. Sports genes completely run in the family.
Don’t think for a moment that this means school and academic work takes a back seat. Mom, also an athlete, is a principal, so school work has never been allowed to suffer.
Since about the age of 10 Keaton has always known what he wants to do, but selection was impossible, so off he went to Tuks to study a degree for town and regional planning.
After his second year at varsity, his dream came through.
It is hard for me to describe just how fabulous the East London Surf Lifesaving Club is. I run out of superlatives.
The club was there on Nahoon Beach before I started surfing and I started a long time ago.
What a fantastic institution it is and who can even vaguely guess how many lives have been saved due to this club?
How many guards have been trained here that now look after our beaches from Port Alfred to Port St Johns and beyond?
How many youngsters now have a solid appreciation for the ocean, team sport, winning and losing, health, vitality, opportunity and life.
I cannot say enough about the Princes, Woods, Fenns, Smiths, Tebbutts, Gallows, Rooses, Breetzkes, Malherbes and on and on.
My apologies — I have left out far too many names. It is all about family and, wow, what a legacy, what a history.
The ELSLC members have just returned from the DHL SA Masters Lifesaving Championships in Gqeberha. Approximately 300 athletes competed from 18 clubs across the length and breadth of our land.
Our home team came a credible fifth behind Fish Hoek first, Summerstrand second, Umhlanga Rocks third and Clifton fourth.
The big cherry on the top, though, was our own Joshua Fenn, the victor ludorum of the whole show. What a colossal achievement.
This writer spent some time with team captain for this ELSC SA Masters outing, Peter Fielding (age 75), showing that there is no expiry date on how much fun you are allowed to have down at the beach.
Pete competed in malibu, surf ski, swim and long run. He tells me that he became a lifesaver semi by accident.
He wanted to surf ski paddle with his late brother around Cape Point and in those days you were not allowed to enter if you did not have an SPA (surf proficiency award), so Pete joined a club and got started.
Pete has been in love with the sea since about 1970.
When he started surfing in Cape Town, there were no wetsuits, no board leashes and between him and his five buddies, they had three boards to share in total.
Freezing, broke and keen as mustard, the bug bit and never let go.
Pete ended up studying a BA at UCT, majoring in English and philosophy. He says he was a bad student and surfed too much because he took four years to get a three-year degree.
He seemed to get over the bad bit because he then secured a BSC in zoology and chemistry. Then followed some traveling, surfing and earning money catching fish on fishing boats.
He earned enough to work six months and travel six months, and save enough to study honours, master’s and a Phd!
All along Pete never lost his love for the ocean.
Pete has travelled the world over and can recount stories from all corners of the globe, in the water, under the water and next to the water.
By the time Pete got to his honours year on account of his travelling and working, he was about seven years older than his then-girlfriend, Bridgit who was in the honours class with him.
Ever the adventurer, Pete had a kombi at the time and took the entire honours class on an extended trip to the former Transkei, so much so that they all missed their graduation.
Pete has travelled the world over and can recount stories from all corners of the globe, in the water, under the water and next to the water.
Much like this writer, any time outside of the front door of the home is a good time.
I asked deputy headmaster Bridgit how she managed all Pete’s energy.
“Oh, he makes life interesting,” she said. “He is never boring.”
Pete loves his ELSLC family and is greatly pleased with the nippers, who are out and about, and away from cell phones, Xbox, computer games and the like.
Club leadership like Travis Smith, Keith and Sharon Jones and so many others in the club have his respect.
There are too many medals from this most recent SA Masters lifesaving championships to list them all, but local surfer Andre van Wyk deserves a nod, coming home with two gold medals in double ski (with Hennie Roos) and taplin, two silver medals in iron man and surfski, and one bronze medal in surf swim.
The World Masters Lifesaving Championships take place in Gqeberha in November this year.
No doubt our home club will come home with some international gold.
ELSLC is a feather in our cap.
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Keaton has always wanted to be an air traffic controller. He finally got accepted, dropped his degree and stepped into ATC.
Full qualification takes about 12 years. This young man is not frightened of a long haul. He is in for the long run.
Currently, Keaton is working for Air Traffic and Navigation Services as assistant to the tower at King Phalo Airport here in Buffalo City. It takes about three to five years to get into the tower.
Keaton is living his dream and still running while he is about it. Doors have a habit of opening for him, and blessing and favour seem to be in front of him, beside him and behind him.
His hero athlete is Kenyan long-distance runner Eliud Kipchoge for both his decades-long athleticism and incredible mindset.
Keaton is a very mindful young man. Three priorities he impressed upon me included:
1 Be a good person;
2 Be humble; and
3 Life is more important than any medal.
Keaton likes to put God first. He follows his faith at Gonubie Baptist Church while he is here, and then family, friends, coach, physio and sport psychologist are relationships that follow out of that.
