Gravel races such as the Dirty Kanza in the USA can help pro riders rediscover their love of cycling

Former Worldtour professional Ted King is a convert to ‘alternative’ races, and is a two-time winner of Dirty Kanza, the race run over gravel roads ‘in a sleepy town in the middle of Kansas’, as he puts it.

King retired after spells with the Cervélo Test Team, Liquigas and Cannondale. He twice rode the Giro d’italia and started the Tour de France twice, becoming something of a cause célèbre in 2013 after crashing in the opening stage and separating his shoulder. He was dropped early in the Stage 4 team time-trial and struggled in alone, missing the time cut by seven seconds. Many felt his disqualification was harsh in the circumstances.

When he stopped in 2015, King believed it was the end of his competitive cycling career: ‘I was ready to finish,’ he says. He was 32. Next stop, a finance career on Wall Street… or so he thought.

‘Because I still loved riding my bike I did some fun events in spring 2016 and met Rebecca Rusch [the renowned endurance athlete and three-time Dirty Kanza winner]. She said, “You really gotta go to Dirty Kanza.” I’d heard about it but knew nothing about it. All I knew was it was a mass-start event on gravel roads in the middle of America in a town and a state I hardly knew.

‘I went there not having any idea what to expect. I knew how to ride long distances [it’s 200 miles/322km long]; I knew how to ride off-road. You have to be self-supported outside of the feed zones – there’s no outside support. There are three checkpoints that you have to pass. It’s nothing like traditional road racing. I knew I had the ability to do well, but it was really going into the unknown.’

In his first Dirty Kanza, King did do well – he won in 11 hours 50 minutes, more than 40 minutes ahead of the second-placed rider. In 2017, says King, ‘it was a lot more competitive and luck was not on my side’. But this year he showed that 2016 was no fluke – he won again, this time by 10 minutes, finishing in 10 hours 44 minutes.

‘It’s a festival, a community that comes together in this sleepy little town,’ says King. ‘If you compare it to the Tour of Flanders – I mean, there, you’ve got about 200,000 who come to the start, and they really know the race, they understand it, it’s a community. Dirty Kanza is kinda like that, but on a much smaller scale.’