Rocks to riches - gravel racing soars with bigger cash purses, flashy prizes, and rising stars

Gravel races now take place 11 months of the calendar year, with the 2024 season beginning just weeks after the 2023 UCI Gravel World Championships in early October. 

After a quiet November, events are beginning to open registration for 2024. Riders are confirming endorsements and decide on their race calendars and travel schedules. What used to be a casual approach to the alternative appointment book for off-road competitions and adventures has become a more structured and serious business. Growth is good, right?

At Cyclingnews, we decided it was time to reflect on 2023 and highlight some of the revelations of the burgeoning discipline of gravel and in an era where the sport is rapidly evolving on an international level there were plenty of those. 

Topics that stood out ranged from the changing nature of race starts to increasingly rich prize purses, shifting equipment trends and what did, and even didn't, happen at the UCI World Championships.

Changes in gravel currency

There are still gravel events where the winners take great pride in earning sweaters, belt buckles, swashbuckling swords and themed trophies, but cash is king, especially for privateers. 

Grinding out a living on gravel got a boost in 2022 when the Life Time Grand Prix took shape and the invitation-only field of athletes competed across six designated off-road US races for top 10 men and top 10 women to divvy up a $250,000 prize purse. 

The series of gravel and mountain bike races gained broad appeal, with riders and fans, and hit the repeat button in 2023 as an earning opportunity. Plus, a new Life Time perk covered event registration fees for all invited series riders.

A year ago Monuments of Cycling, which hosts Belgian Waffle Ride events, paid out $32,000 to the top 10, five women and five men, with the lowest cumulative times for the four-race Quadrupel Crown of Gravel Series. This year the series expanded to seven races across North America, but the overall prize purse dipped to $25,000. All seven events had separate prize purses, ranging from $3,000 to $10,000, with BWR Mexico paying the highest amount. 

Other notable cash payouts this year go to SBT GRVL, with $22,000 for top 5 men and women pros fastest on the Black Course. And to encourage greater participation from women, Stetina’s Paydirt shifted all of its $5,000 prize purse and now only the top five women strike it rich in Nevada. 

The single largest payday for one gravel race, at least in the US,  is at a national championship, of all places. USA Cycling put up $60,000 for top five riders in elite categories at the inaugural US Gravel National Championships in Nebraska. Plus, the winners also earned funding to cover travel expenses as members of Team USA at the UCI Gravel World Championships in Italy. Big wow for a one-day race and for nationals. 

What's more, a solid prize payout seems to be a trend that is slowly filtering through beyond the United States as well, with an example being the FNLD GRVL and RADL GRVL races – organised by SBT GRVL, Valtteri Bottas and Tiffany Cromwell – offering a €20,000 prize purse for the race in Finland and a $10,000 (local currency) tally for the Australian event. (JBT)

Rising stars of gravel - Røed, Niewiadoma, Swift, Neefjes

Keegan Swenson and Sofia Gomez Villafañe continued to dominate many of the biggest races across North America, so who emerged from the ménagerie as riders to watch?

Norwegian Torbjørn Røed and Poland's Kasia Niewiadoma both emerged in the 2023 gravel season as unexpected top performers, both concluding the year with victories in the elite divisions at Big Sugar Gravel. Other not-so-usual suspects with gravel success were Briton Connor Swift (Ineos Grenadiers) and Dutch rider Tessa Neefjes.

Niewiadoma won the rainbow jersey in her very first gravel race and then after the UCI World Championship she proved by heading  to the United States and claiming Big Sugar, riding solo for more than 50 miles. 

She has been a force on the Women’s WorldTour riding for the past four years with Canyon-SRAM but her last victory had been in 2019. Her success on gravel changed per standing in the sport.

Røed had success with two Belgian Waffle Ride off-road events bookending 2023 - beginning with third place at BWR Arizona and ending with the win at BWR Kansas. 

Now a resident of Grand Junction, Colorado, after winning varsity national titles on the road, MTB and track at Colorado Mesa University, he gained attention with a stage win and third overall at Tour of the Gila in 2022. On a club team in 2023, he repeated with the Gila third overall and added second on GC at Tour of Szeklerland in Belgium. His powerful sprint to win Big Sugar made him the only elite male in the top 10 who was not part of the Life Time Grand Prix.

Swift showed that he is also well and truly capable when he heads off the paved roads. The 28-year-old first took victory at the Gralloch Gravel World Series race and then came second at the British Gravel National Championships before heading to the Gravel World Championships in Italy. There he made it completely clear that he could mix it with the best on the gravel, taking to the front of the race with Matej Mohorič (Slovenia) and Florian Vermeersch (Belgium). While the rainbow jersey was ultimately out of reach, Swift held on for a podium place and a bronze medal. 

Neefjes has thrived in the Gravel World Series right from the beginning, taking two round wins in each of the past two years. 

She finished atop the points table in the series in 2023 and was sixth at the European Championships. Her points from the Gravel World Series left her lining up in the front row of the World Championships field, stacked with road professionals. 

Though her initial perfect positioning was thrown out as three spokes broke on the first gravel sector and meant she also had to stop for a wheel change. That put her back in 63rd place and left her in for a long chase but even with her misfortune, she ended up coming 21st. Just imagine what the Dutch rider could do if everything runs to plan next time. (JT/SG)

Paving the way for the Aussie Armada

The Australian gravel scene has been bubbling away for a few years, with the nation among the early starters with a national championship in 2018. 

The low key events found in the nation are a long way, both geographically and in nature, from the international attention-grabbing scene in the US, with its healthy prize purses and strong sponsorships on offer for privateers. 

The gulf between the two has been so large, that until recently the Australians putting in a showing at some of the big gravel races were largely confined to those who were already established in the international cycling scene, like Lachlan Morton or Nathan Haas.

Still, with gravel becoming more prominent the local race calendar and the new UCI Gravel World Series offered Australian riders the opportunity to grasp a result on home soil that carried some clout internationally. 

The winner of the first-ever UCI Gravel World Series race held in the nation at Nannup in Western Australia in early 2022, Adam Blazevic went on to try his hand in Europe and then the next year in the US. By then the floodgates had really started to open and the Australian armada seemed to be building toward an all-out assault on the world’s top gravel events. 

Brendan Johnston, with the 2022 Australian gravel title and Dirty Warny win in hand, secured a place in the Life Time Grand Prix series this season, as did 2023 Nannup Gravel World Series Tasman Nankervis and Ella Bloor. They were part of a wave of new riders heading over to the United States in 2023, and it turns out to be a growing one.

Nankervis and Johnston will both be returning to the Life Time series, with its generous prize purse offering a chance to make the trip more viable. Also joining them in 2024 is Peta Mullens, who has won Australian championships across a wide range of cycling disciplines and has a staggering total of 12 titles. And that is certainly not where it ends with plenty of other also planning to make the trip, including two more from Bendigo, the winner of the Gravelista World Series round in Beechworth Courtney Sherwell plus Australian champion and fellow Gravelista winner Connor Sens.

“It was good to have Tasman and Trekky going over to America as our guinea pigs,” joked Sens in an interview with Cyclingnews. 

“We’ve been able to pick their brains on does and don’ts. To have them there again next year, along with Peta Mullens, in the Life Time Grand Prix, it will be super handy to all be in a similar area doing the same thing and possibly travelling together.”

The gates have swung open, now let the Australian stampede begin. (SG)

Surge in series and spin-offs

When most people think of gravel events, it conjures expectations of rock-strewn roads, dirt paths and rolling countryside. Depending on the region, the hours of pedalling could pass through wet forests, by desert cacti or between free-range cattle - wild west sort of stuff. 

Now race series are springing up around the globe and expanding, with antelopes and kangaroos or volcanoes and icefields now strewn about the terrain. 

The Belgian Waffle Ride un-road family of events expanded to Canada and Mexico, and after seven stops Adam Roberge won the men's Quadrupel Crown while Flavia Oliveira Parks won for the women.

Across northern Europe, the Nordic Gravel Series held its fifth season with six events. The popular SBT GRVL in Colorado launched a spin-off in Finland this year, FNDL GRVL, with Australia for next year. 

The Gravel Earth Series launched in 2023 as a traditional series, with six existing events across Europe and South Africa providing category-specific points based on difficulty of each event and the Earth Final in Spain. 

Organised by Klassmark, the operators of The Traka and Earth Final, the series combined one-day and stage races for a true global challenge, won by Britain’s Annabel Fisher and Italy’s Mattia de Marchi. There will be a series cash purse in 2024, offering just over $10,000 in US currency.

While still not expanding beyond the US, the Life Time Grand Prix added a seventh event in 2023. The races stay domestic but the field expands with more international participants. USA's Keegan Swenson won the men's series for a second season and Argentina's Sofia Gomez Villafañe won the women's division.

The UCI Gravel World Series expanded in its second season with 17 events across four continents for amateur and elite riders. Rather than participants accumulating lowest race times or series points for overall winners, the objective focused on the individual stops, which provided qualification for various age groups to compete at the 2023 UCI World Championships. Because of Worlds qualifications, the series continued to thrive and look to expand in 2024. (JBT)

Guitars and swords among best trophies

While some of the gravel events might offer cash rewards in the hundreds of dollars, not thousands, most seem to bank on unique trophies and ‘bragging rights’ as inducements for top competitors.

Unbound Gravel leads the way, with winners of all divisions earn a locally, hand-crafted wood medal created by Wes Poe and made from local Kansas wood. In 2023 it was wood from local Mulberry. 

"Gravel is all about the meaningful trophies. Gravel Worlds (the original one in Nebraska) awards a pirate sword. At the Rift, I received a custom hand-knit sweater from Icelandic Sheep's wool," Peter Stetina told Cyclingnews about the top trophies he has received. 

He said the best one this year was won by pros Alexey Vermeulen and Lauren De Crescenzo at The Rad Dirt Fest - guitars.

De Crescenzo has two guitars from the Rad Dirt Fest in Trinidad, Colorado, which are among her most-coveted awards, one a six-string hand-painted acoustic guitar from 2021 and a decorated electric guitar that was new for 2023. 

Why a guitar? Organisers selected this for a nod to the music and arts culture that exists in Trinidad. She also said her two swords from Gravel Worlds were special, both proudly displayed in her apartment, "one for each hand". 

In addition to his electric guitar won at the Rad Dirt Fest, Vermeulen noted that all podium finishers earn bricks, the surface used on streets to start and finish the event in the mountain town. He counts his ice trophy for winning the 30-mile off-road Iceman Cometh Challenge in Michigan as "the most iconic" of all the prizes. 

Yes, the award is made of ice and comes with a $6,000 check, but the lasting impressions never melt away. (JBT)

Women get more dedicated starts

Equality for women in gravel races does not mean they need to share all the miles from start to finish in wheel-to-wheel fashion with the men. 

While equality in prize purses is a growing trend, there is a change taking place at the beginning of the race too. As 2021 Unbound Gravel 200 champion Sofia Gomez Villafañe told Cyclingnews earlier this year, “Equality means having equal opportunity for us [women] to show what we’re capable of”.

She was talking about the elite women’s division having a completely dedicated race. For now, there were separate start times at many of the big races, such as Unbound Gravel 200, Crusher in the Tushar and Big Sugar Gravel. 

Some of the overseas races, like The Rift Gravel and Octopus Gravel, still had mass starts for combined elite fields. Gravel Worlds in Nebraska created a semi-hybrid mass start, with all elite riders in a special corral and the women at the front. The Grasshopper Adventure Series in northern California varied mass start procedures depending on the courses - Huffmaster gave pro women a dedicated start after pro men, but Low Gap had a mass start and let an early big climb separate the fields.

While the UCI World Championships offered the elite women a dedicated route and a separate race day from the elite men, they still shared space with master’s mens age groups, who started 10 minutes back, so not all the women had their own race all day. 

“It did not impact the front of the race, but it surely did impact the third chase group and back,” she said about the 10-minute gap at Worlds. 

"I made a choice to not draft off any of the men, but there were a lot of women that did."

But so many races did provide separate starts for elite women in 2023, and that was progress.

"A women’s start is the natural evolution of our sport," Lauren De Crescenzo told Cyclingnews about one of the biggest improvements to the discipline in 2023.

"The women’s field is deep and super competitive. We need our own start to have our own race. The guys make the race unnecessarily dangerous for us in the first 60 minutes.

“I hate how in a mass start, our race is influenced so heavily by the men and the strategy always ends up being to stay with the men for as long as possible. Plus, being in a peloton of such mixed abilities just doesn’t feel as safe as being in a peloton of women with similar abilities." (JBT)

The big 'that can never happen again' moment 

There are many elements of setting up a UCI Gravel World Championships where there was clearly a benefit in being able to draw from the lessons learned in other disciplines, there was however one extremely obvious exception.

 The off-road disciplines of mountain biking and cyclocross have long delivered easy access to live coverage of the women's racing alongside the men's, but for road racing it's been a longer and rockier path to make sure that top tier events have live coverage. 

To make sure viewers could at the very least tune into the top tier of racing, the Women's WorldTour, organisers have to commit to at least 45 minutes of live coverage if they want to be part of the category and for the Road World Championships the UCI guarantees live television production, at its own cost via its production partner.

It seems the requirements for live coverage were a lot more relaxed when it came to the new UCI Gravel World Championships. Bid guides for the organisers that sought to host the rainbow jersey race, right through 2028, didn't include any requirement for television production, specifying under Appendix D that “television production is not compulsory”.

That left the door open for a situation to evolve when there was a live broadcast for the elite men's rainbow jersey race on Sunday October 8 but none for a spectacular edition of the elite women's race on Saturday October 7, won by Kasia Niewiadoma. 

It was a reality that was revealed just before the event, and while it was too late to fix it for the 2023 edition, the UCI quickly realised a repeat would not be tolerated.

“As of the next edition of the UCI Gravel World Championships, UCI will make it mandatory for event organisers to provide TV production for both the Men Elite and the Women Elite races," said the organisation.

The UCI had cited considerations of disrupting already in place plans with organisers as among the reasons for phasing in the U23 women's category in the road World Championships, but there were no such qualms with making an immediate change to alter the untenable broadcast situation. 

There now appears to be guaranteed live coverage as well as bid guides for 2029 and beyond that clearly outline that "the event must be produced" so the uneven coverage should be a moment that remains a regrettable page in gravel history – one that is never again repeated. (SG)

More national champions

The origins of gravel as a grassroots event seems to have meant that it has taken a while for some of the trappings that come with official recognition of a discipline to roll out, like National Championships. 

The momentum seems to be finally rolling through, with early comers to the party, like Australia and then Britain, Italy, South Africa and the Netherlands now having extra company. Those joining the ranks this year included Canada and Belgium. What’s more, there was a European Championships as well.

It’s a clear indicator of the growing prominence of the discipline, with the implementation of a UCI Gravel World Championships drawing a more uniform international gaze. A sure sign of its impact is that it has even lured the United States – where gravel growth has flourished on a gloriously informal path – to opt for a formal title and even deliver the winners of it a supported trip to the rainbow race.

Arguably, though, it's riders in the nations that aren’t home to such a thriving gravel scene that have most to gain from the formal recognition. The evolution and growth of the Gravel World Series – which delivers events across Europe, North America, Australia and Africa – certainly helps as an avenue for riders outside the gravel heartland to gain some recognition. Still, there is nothing like the lustre of a National Championships win to help draw the eye of potential sponsors or open the door at top races, and with that comes the chance to deliver a result that can make a career. 

The 2022 British Champion Danni Shrosbree and 2022 Australian Champion Brendan Johnston both found a spot in the Life Time Grand Prix Series in 2023 after claiming their titles and now Connor Sens, who claimed the Australian title in 2023, has capitalised the momentum to set up his own privateer team and map out a plan to race in the United States in 2024.

With the international gravel stakes on the rise, no doubt there will be a few more nations in 2024 that give their riders a chance to launch on to the gravel scene in the kit of a national champion. (SG)

Tech trends

From a tech standpoint, 2023 saw gravel bikes further diverge into distinct categories. We saw those aimed at gravel racing double down on this end use, and those bikes that have no business in a gravel race appeared to be freed up to focus on comfort, haulage, and utility. 

The easiest example to call upon is perhaps 3T’s gravel offerings - last year the Italian brand offered the Exploro, which catered for everyone from bikepacking addicts to racers, with an ability to run 700c and 650b wheels. Now it has the Racemax Italia, very much with a focus on racing, and the Extrema Italia, which is on the cusp of becoming a mountain bike.

One thing that is also clear this year is that 650b, particularly for race-use, is a dying standard. The additional roll-over of 700c, plus its ubiquity, seems to have nailed it on as the diameter of choice, along with a move to slightly wider rubber; the creep from post-cyclocross 35mm tyres has continues, with most speed-oriented bikes coming as standard with 40mm or larger. 

Naturally course specifics will dictate tyre choice, but it does seem from anecdotal evidence that the sweet spot is around this point, with tread and casing durability a greater factor than width. (WJ)

Missing pieces

Finally, there were a few things that went missing in 2023. 

First it was bar extensions, also referred to as clip-on attachments or 'comfort' bars. Many events said 'no' to the items for safety reasons in the large fields of riders. And many athletes just preferred not to use them anymore. There was not a large chorus of discontent.

With the rise in popularity of gravel riding and racing, there has been a lot of talk about added strength of long-standing events and even new ones springing up around the globe. The Grasshoppers in California have been going on for 26 years! 

What was sad to see this year was the demise of Gravel Locos in Pueblo, Colorado. It was the fall follow-up to Gravel Locos in Hico, Texas, now a major event used as a tuneup for Unbound Gravel. 

There was a scheduling conflict with GL Pueblo and the Rad Dirt Fest, so the GL organiser pulled the plug. Maybe it will return, as it was a major fundraiser for the Red Creek Volunteer Fire & Rescue Department in Pueblo. 

Calendar co-ordination as gravel racing grows and develops is a vital piece of the puzzle. (JBT)