Ready to rumble
Gravel riding has grown from a rule-free niche to a fully fledged race category. Now that the UCI is planning a World Series, is the gravel scene at risk of losing its soul?
‘For a lot of people mountain biking is a bit too technical and road racing is too tactical. Gravel sits right between those two’
G ‘ravel racing at a crossroads’ is too tempting a headline, even if the very idea of road infrastructure – junctions, roundabouts, rules and the rest of it – might jar with a purist’s definition of gravel racing and the appeal of riding on gravel roads.
Yet the idea of a crossroads does seem apt in describing where gravel riding might be heading. The culture that has grown up around it is laidback, nonconformist and alternative, the emphasis more on the joy and the challenge of taking part than on the singular goal of winning. But over the last couple of years the scene has taken off to such an extent that it has become big business.
The cycling industry is increasingly banking on gravel. Even traditional companies such as Campagnolo have attributed recent growth in revenue to new gravel groupsets and components, and now the UCI is getting in on the act with an announcement last September that it intends to organise a World Series and World Championships in 2022.
This, say some, sets in motion a battle for the soul of gravel, a branch of cycle sport that developed through quirky counter-cultural events, with waffles and beer cherished as prize money, but which might now be required to conform to structures and rules set by the world governing body. It is sure to create some tension. After all, the world’s premier gravel event is not called Unbound for nothing – as the organisers explain, ‘To be unbound is to be untethered and unrestrained.’
Growth of gravel
The UCI’S interest is understandable for several reasons, one being that gravel racing’s heartland is in a country – or market – that has historically proved resistant to road cycling’s charms. It’s in the United States that enthusiasm for gravel racing has exploded while, simultaneously, professional road racing there has been withering and dying.
The Tour of California, America’s premier stage race, was last held in 2019 and shows no sign of returning. The USA Pro Challenge and Tour of Colorado have both gone. And at the end of 2021 the Tour of Utah was removed from the 2022 calendar, the organisers admitting interest from potential sponsors was ‘not strong enough to support a viable effort to meet our joint expectations’.
In contrast, Unbound Gravel, the Belgian Waffle Rides, Gravel Locos,
SBT and many other gravel events are enjoying exponential growth in popularity. Separate to the UCI announcement, in November a new six-race series was confirmed for 2022. The Life Time Grand Prix will offer prize money of $250,000 for select fields of 20 elite men and 20 elite women, with the money split evenly. Included in the series will be Unbound, Crusher in the Tushar and Big Sugar Gravel, which will offer its own prize money in addition to the series fund.
Among the reasons for the popularity of gravel riding and racing in the US is the vast network of unpaved roads, free of cars and other vehicles at a time when roads are considered to be getting more dangerous. Another appeal, says Tiffany Cromwell, the Canyon-sram pro who combined gravel with road in 2021, is the simple pleasure of riding on a surface that can be challenging but not too technical.
‘It’s a nice medium between mountain biking and road riding,’ she says. ‘For a lot of people mountain biking is a bit too technical and road racing is too tactical. Gravel sits right between those two.’
Tellingly, the big gravel events are often branded as ‘rides’ rather than races. There may be fierce competition at the front, especially given prize money like that offered by the Life Time Grand Prix, but there are big fields, sometimes numbering in the thousands, making them necessarily more inclusive, less elitist, with more in common with a marathon than a road race.
Rock ’n’ roll star
Everyone may be welcome, but ‘as soon as you put down a finish line, someone wants to win,’ as Ian Boswell puts it. Boswell is the former Team Sky pro who retired at the end of 2019 after a bad crash during Tirreno-adriatico left him with serious concussion.
Boswell got a ‘normal’ job – a marketing position with Wahoo – after he quit racing but his competitive fires still flickered and he decided that gravel racing could be the outlet he needed. With 2020 a write-off thanks to Covid, his debut was delayed until last year. Then, at arguably the United States’
(and therefore the world’s) biggest gravel race, Unbound, he emerged as the winner. Quite unexpectedly, Boswell, two years into retirement, found himself the hottest property in the hottest new branch of the sport.
‘Unbound was only my second gravel race,’ he points out. ‘I was surprised at the reaction it got.’
He won by beating Laurens ten
Dam in a close sprint after 331km and ten hours of riding over the dirt roads and Flint Hills of Kansas. To the casual viewer it might have looked like the finish to a mountain stage in a Grand Tour – Ten Dam is also a former Worldtour pro, and other ex-worldtour pros were third and fourth. But there were some giveaways in the picture of the two as they crossed the line: the backpack straps, the mud and grime on clothing that was plain and not covered in sponsor logos, and most obviously the bikes – wide, knobbly tyres and flared handlebars with brake levers at an angle almost parallel to the road. Then there was the fact that they were followed home by a further 4,000 riders.
Unsurprisingly, Boswell found himself in demand after his victory. There were offers to return to full-time professional racing, but on gravel rather than the road. Some were lucrative offers, he says. He declined all of them. There were also invitations to appear at events to talk about gravel racing – an experience that he says gave him imposter syndrome.
‘I was at Rouleur Live in London in November to talk about gravel,’ he recalls. ‘Geraint Thomas was there, Marcel Kittel was there, and they were asking, “How’s gravel going?” And I was thinking, “Why am I here? I’m retired! Why do people care about this niche racing scene in the States?”’
Keeping it real
Boswell was also invited by the UCI to share his thoughts when cycling’s world governing body began to formulate its new gravel series and World Championships – events it is working on with the Belgian company Golazo, which was co-organiser of last year’s UCI World Championships in Flanders.
‘I was worried that the UCI getting involved would change the landscape and I think it will,’ says Boswell. ‘But my response to that is that I’ll continue doing what I want to do. I’ve had so much fun doing this and I want it to continue being fun, which means going to races I want to do and supporting causes that I’m passionate about.’
Boswell is one of several former road professionals to have switched to gravel. Peter Stetina, Ted King and Ten Dam are others, with Alex Howes also a regular in gravel events and Nathan Haas switching full time from the Worldtour to gravel in 2022 (see p38).
‘We all approached it at a point in our career when we were ready for something new or different,’ Boswell says. ‘We’re still elite athletes but we were all thinking, how can we fall back in love with going to events and taking part? It was a shift in mindset for all of us. There’s an emphasis on winning but also on everyone taking part. It’s still a race but there’s a lot more to it than just the racing itself.
‘I approached it with the attitude that I’m not here to change it. I’m here to follow the unwritten rules put in place by those before me. But things change and evolve and no doubt the emphasis on pro gravel racing has grown and become more prominent. And it’s only going to keep going in that direction.
‘I think there will still be space for the events that have grown up over the last ten, 15 years and they’ll continue to be successful, but we love to romanticise things. Already people within the gravel scene are saying, “Oh man, it was way better in 2015.”
‘But it definitely will change, especially the minute four or five Worldtour teams send a squad to an event. Some events are planning for that already, I think.’
Cromwell’s new model
Tiffany Cromwell has approached it from a slightly different direction.
The 33-year-old Australian, in her 13th year as a professional, still races on the road at the highest level with her team, Canyon-sram, but for the past couple of seasons has combined road with gravel
racing. In 2021 she won the third and final Belgian Waffle Race of the season in Kansas.
‘It was 180km, not as much climbing as some gravel races, about 2,000m, but endless gravel roads and continually undulating,’ she says. ‘Some races are a mixture of road and gravel. San Diego is the flagship Belgian Waffle Race and you can do it on a road bike, but Kansas was 80 per cent gravel with some singletrack thrown in there and a cyclocross section for a bit of fun.’
When she first tried gravel racing at SBT Gravel in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Cromwell found ‘the whole culture really fun. I had zero pressure. I enjoyed it, and when it was proposed that I incorporate gravel into my schedule I thought it was a cool idea.’
Even in the three years since her gravel debut, she has detected a shift. ‘I think the culture is changing a bit. From 2019 to 2021 I saw a big difference in the competitiveness of the events.
‘When it was announced that the UCI was coming in, pretty much every gravel specialist was against it,’ Cromwell adds. ‘But on the flip side, I can see more pros and more sponsors coming in. We’ll see more crossover between road and gravel and I think some mountain bikers will do it too.
‘Certain aspects of the gravel spirit will remain but there are some areas that, in my view, need to be more regulated. What’s the true definition of self-sufficient, or having support? There need to be clear lines, black and white, in terms of what you can and can’t do.’
Laying down the laws
Controversies have arisen, particularly concerning women’s races. While gravel racing in the US has made great strides in addressing the inequality in traditional bike racing – there’s often equal prize money and it’s not uncommon for 30% of the field to be women – it doesn’t always work to have the men and women starting together, as is usually the case.
There were allegations last year that one team used its male riders to pace its female riders, which is against the spirit if not the letter of the rules (because, as Cromwell and Boswell note, there aren’t too many written rules).
Cromwell also welcomes the idea of a rainbow jersey for the World Champion (there currently is a world gravel championships, but it’s not sanctioned by any governing body).
‘I’ve always been in the UCI system so I think its involvement could be good, to some extent,’ she says. ‘I think it would be kind of cool to be able to fight for a rainbow jersey – but that’s because I know the importance of a rainbow jersey.
‘I do think America will be the hub for gravel, but it would be nice to have some races in Europe, and Australia too, because we have a really good network of gravel roads,’ she adds.
Global perspective
A World Series could, she suggests, help establish some sort of hierarchy in a calendar that’s currently a jumble of vastly different events, from, effectively, mass-start road races on gravel to endurance events such as Gbduro
(see box opposite).
Then again, purists would, perhaps rightly, balk at the idea of Gbduro being described as a gravel race. The fact is that gravel racing – as we now know it – is as American as the Tour of Flanders is Flandrien or the Giro d’italia is Italian. The UCI might want to take this fast-growing branch of the sport to the world, but they’d do well to recognise the culture and rich network of gravel roads in America.
‘I think it’s awesome that it’s a uniquely American model,’ says Boswell. ‘In the past we’ve tried to copy the European model of road racing. The Tour of California was a great race but it was always searching for something.
‘With gravel we’ve been able to create something unique to the environment, landscape and culture.’ Richard Moore is a cycling journalist and author, former racer and co-founder of The Cycling Podcast
‘When it was announced that the UCI was coming in, pretty much every gravel specialist was against it. But on the flip side, I can see more pros and more sponsors coming in’