When it became known that Stillwater Sports was taking over the management of the Totalsports TWO OCEANS MARATHON, supported by BYD, it did not surprise those who have been following the development of road running in South Africa over the last decade. This seemed inevitable because Stillwater Sports is present at most races in the country.
The company's portfolio includes events such as the Absa RUN YOUR CITY series, the Totalsports women's race, the Boxer Super Run, as well as international competitions held in Mozambique and Zambia. Now, perhaps the country's most iconic marathon has been added to this.
Despite the impressive range of events, maintaining success in road running is extremely difficult: races disappear, sponsors change, and relationships with municipalities can deteriorate after one unsuccessful event.
Nevertheless, Stillwater Sports continues to grow. According to Wade Bromfield, General Manager of Stillwater Sports and Event Director of the Totalsports TWO OCEANS MARATHON powered by BYD, the secret to success lies not so much in logistics as in the goal itself. He explains that based on his experience in organizing events, the focus has always been on value and experience, which are the foundation of the company's entire operation.
Bromfield emphasizes the uniqueness of road running as a sport where one can share a day with beloved athletes, participating in ultramarathons on the same route as the world's best athletes and receiving identical medals.
The company's events are never just about safely moving thousands of participants from start to finish. They represent carefully designed experiences, including entertainment programs, sponsor activations, athlete engagement, television broadcasts, and the atmosphere at the finish line.
In Bromfield's opinion, all elements are designed around one question: 'If runners spend months preparing for our events, what else can we do for them? How can we create even more value?' This approach has become the trademark of Stillwater Sports.
Bromfield insists that corporate sponsorship goes beyond simply balancing the budget. He argues that sponsorship funds allow for the creation of more value for runners—things like gift bags, broadcasts, and entertainment become possible thanks to partners' belief in what the company is building.
However, besides sponsorship, the company's stability is explained by the strength of its team. Bromfield highly values founder and CEO Michael Meyer, as well as COO Dzoro Pul, whose complementary leadership styles have shaped the company over 25 years.
What stands out particularly is something intangible: employees are never afraid to do the dirtiest work. Bromfield notes that Michael and Dzoro themselves handle branding and other tasks, sending a powerful signal to everyone else: every role is important.
Thanks to this culture, Stillwater Sports has earned the trust of municipalities across the country. Instead of complaining about bureaucracy, Bromfield speaks of collaboration, emphasizing that they recognize the city as the host and strive for the city to be proud of what the company brings.
He believes that hosting a world-class event is impossible alone, as it requires municipal support regarding traffic management, safety, emergency services, and road closures.
A similar philosophy applies to Athletics South Africa and provincial structures. Instead of bypassing governing bodies, as some organizers do, Stillwater Sports supports existing systems, respecting the process, since clubs, provinces, and ASA are the custodians of athletics in the country.
Every year, runners from South Africa compete on the starting lines with Olympic champions and world record holders such as Joshua Cheptegei and Agnes Ngetich. For Bromfield, attracting such names is related not only to prize money but also to creating an environment conducive to athletes' performance.
The company provides elite athletes with everything necessary from arrival: accommodation, transport, nutrition, and incentives, focusing solely on their performance. Furthermore, Stillwater Sports strives to create opportunities for South African athletes to compete with the world's best on their home soil.
The company's main challenge now relates to Cape Town and the TWO OCEANS marathon. After taking on this event during a difficult period, the priority was restoring trust. Over several months, the marathon received the World Athletics Gold Label and regained commercial confidence with the appearance of Discovery as a major partner.
However, Bromfield emphasizes that this is just the beginning. The company's mission is simple: to make TWO OCEANS the largest running event on the African continent. Ambitions extend far beyond the projected 50,000 participants next year; the goal is to reach 60,000, 70,000, and even 100,000 people while maintaining quality and working with all stakeholders.
The focus is on sustainable growth: 'We will never jeopardize the experience.' The same approach applies to the Totalsports women's race, which has become more than just a sporting event for Bromfield, as it marks Women's Month and tells stories of women, including cancer survivors, mothers, and daughters.
The philosophy of Stillwater Sports is best explained by the phrase: 'The person who crosses the finish line last should receive the same experience as the winner.' This seemingly simple phrase explains why runners trust the brand, why sponsors continue to invest, and why municipalities open their streets, allowing Stillwater Sports to shape a significant part of the running movement in South Africa through thousands of small, consistent details.
In the field of entrepreneurship, the phrase 'don't reinvent the wheel' is often used, serving both as advice against wasting effort and as a gentle way to point out a lack of originality in an idea. However, this phrase rarely poses a more useful clarifying question: what is the state of the road?
Since the 'bicycle' itself as an engineering solution is largely solved, the 'road'—the infrastructure of distribution, access, culture, and context through which any good or service must pass to reach the customer—becomes critically important. This road is unique to each market and is almost never solved the way outside observers assume.
This distinction is immensely significant in the context of South Africa and across the African continent more broadly. Many key entrepreneurial questions here concern not what needs to be created, but how it should be created for a specific person in a specific place, taking into account specific constraints. For instance, the mobile money revolution that transformed financial accessibility in East Africa was not a new idea about money.
M-Pesa did not invent the concept of transfer or payment. Instead, it deeply studied the conditions under which millions of people moved money: distrust of formal banking, reliance on mobile networks, and the social context of transactions between acquaintances. It developed infrastructure that worked within these conditions, not against them.
The main lesson is that innovations are not unnecessary. The most significant innovations often remain unnoticed at the product level but manifest fully at the system level. A product, such as money transfer, was familiar, but the system—the methods of access, pricing, distribution, and trust—was truly new.
Founders who identified this need did not ask, 'What has never existed?' They asked, 'What exists but does not reach this person, and why?' This second question is harder, requires deep knowledge of the specific context, and generates more sustainable solutions because they are more deeply rooted.
The landscape of South African entrepreneurship is full of examples of this contextual innovation. These companies did not invent their category, but understood their customers and markets so well that they created something existing players could not build. The taxi industry, despite its informality and discussions about formalization, is an example of understanding context. It served customers that formal public transport could never serve, doing so faster and at prices the market could afford, not because it invented a new mode of transport, but because it understood the road.
Any subsequent innovation in urban mobility in this country must take this understanding into account. For a founder deciding to create a product, the question 'has this been done before?' is less useful than the question: 'Has this been done for this specific customer, in this specific context, at this specific price?' The answer to the second question almost always sounds like 'not good enough.' And 'not good enough' is a much more fertile starting point than 'nonexistent,' as it is based on real data from the actual experience of customers who tried existing options and found their shortcomings.
The metaphor of the road extends further than it seems. Roads in South Africa are not uniform. Infrastructure problems related to delivering to a client in Sandton are fundamentally different from problems related to serving a client in a small town's outlying settlement in the Eastern Cape. Business models that gain recognition, funding, and media coverage are typically created for the first road and then presented as solutions to problems existing on the second.
The gap between these two roads—in infrastructure, purchasing power, cultural context, digital access, and trust in formal institutions—cannot be bridged by product alone. A system specifically built for the conditions of the road the customer travels on is required. A founder who creates such a system is not reinventing the wheel; they are doing something more complex by understanding the road well enough to build the infrastructure that allows the wheel to run on it. Such understanding does not come from hackathons or customer portrait exercises; it arises from proximity, from prolonged and sincere interaction with a specific context, which provides insights unavailable in a market research report. Ultimately, this is the most important form of innovation available to a founder in this economy—not what has never existed, but what has never been made functional here.
