And the winner is…

The bike that might just have invented gravel for 21st century

So where do you go from here? If there’s one thing our testers can agree on it’s that today’s gravel bikes bring something genuinely different and necessary to the cycling canon. A cyclocross bike might be nimble and quick but lacks long-distant comfort and utility; an endurance road bike simply doesn’t have the robustness or the tyre clearance to go deep off-roading; a mountain bike is… well, it’s a mountain bike.

What unites the Open, GT, 3T and Moots is their immense across-the-board ability. As Sam remarked, ‘The gravel spectrum is getting wider by the day,’ and although its beginning is still a mere meander along a bridleway, its most extreme end now involves trekking across the Himalayas or performing three-foot drop-offs in the Alps.

Sam then declared that one of his bikes should win. He is tech editor. But after careful consideration and not unexcessive amounts of swearing, it was decided that because any one of these contenders could be considered the best of the best gravel bikes, the winner should also be the most original. Thus the GT Grade is our runner-up and the Open UP our winner. So, through gritted teeth, here is Sam to explain:

‘The UP almost singlehandedly created the current gravel niche, so much so that despite little changing in its design since 2016 the bike is still competitive with the best designs today. For a start, Open pioneered the dropped driveside chainstay, now used by a host of brands to create tyre clearance in an area constrained by a narrow road Q-factor, without compromising driveside chainstay stiffness. It did the same with dual wheel sizes – it was the first to design around 700c and 650b, and it did all this while keeping the road DNA that drew roadies to gravel bikes in the first place.

‘The Open UP is a genuine do-it-all bike, and it was the original – UP stands for Unbeaten Path so it makes sense. It also makes perfect sense that it was designed by the same bloke who designed the 3T Exploro. Which I picked.’