For the first time outside of COVID, Dryland Event Management had to cancel a race ten
days before the start. Here's the man who made that call — and built a 20-year career
on the events that came before it.
Henco Rademeyer is the co-founder and director of Dryland Event Management, the team
behind some of South Africa's toughest and most loved mountain bike stage races: the
Attakwas Extreme, the Cape Pioneer Trek, the Tankwa Trek, and the brand-new Garden Route
Giro. In this conversation he tells the story from the very beginning — running a bike
shop in Oudtshoorn before online retail existed, realising that events drove more bike
sales than anything else, and starting Dryland almost by accident with his co-founder
Carel Herholdt.
He walks through the flooding that forced the cancellation of the 2026 edition of The
36ONE MTB Challenge — a 361-kilometre race through the Klein Karoo that had never been
called off outside of the pandemic — and the decision-making process behind making that
call ten days out, with refunds rather than partial routes. He also gets into the business
side most riders never see: how commercial partnerships made the events financially
viable, why the average rider age has settled around 44, and why South Africa might have
the best standard of mountain bike and gravel events in the world.
This one is for anyone who's ever finished one of these races and wondered who actually
builds them — and what it costs, physically and financially, to pull it off year after
year.
# === CHAPTERS ===================================
0:00 — The 36ONE cancellation and 20 years of Dryland events
0:27 — Inside the Garden Route Giro
1:02 — From bike shop owner to accidental events founder
4:41 — Attakwas: the race that started it all
6:03 — The Cape Pioneer Trek and the move toward technical single track
7:10 — Bernard le Roux joins, and Dryland starts to scale
26:15 — A mountain biker's-eye view of Dryland's events
31:03 — COVID, gravel's rise, and shifting rider demographics
38:39 — The funniest and most dramatic moments in 20 years of events
41:53 — Why Tankwa Trek is Henco's own personal favourite
45:02 — Equipment trends: dual suspension, gravel, and changing customer expectations
52:21 — The real cost of getting young riders into endurance sport
72:24 — New recovery partnerships and what's coming for finishers
76:45 — What Henco does when he's not running events
78:05 — Why Drive to Survive changed sports storytelling forever
80:37 — Cricket, rugby, and the cultural weight of schoolboy sport in South Africa
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