“Cycling should be always fun, even if you’re a professional,” Greg Van Avermaet said on Friday evening as he caught a train to Brussels Airport. It was a thought to sustain him on the late flight south to Venice ahead of this weekend’s inaugural UCI Gravel World Championships.
Van Avermaet’s road season came to an end with fourth place at Binche-Chimay-Binche on Tuesday, but he opted to keep his campaign going for a few more days to tackle the gravel of the Veneto on Sunday. The idea was tentatively pitched by his bike sponsor BMC last winter, but it was all hypothetical until the middle of last month, when AG2R-Citroën gave their formal blessing.
“BMC asked me last winter if I might be interested in starting the Gravel Worlds and riding their new bike at it, and we said we’d see how it went through the season,” Van Avermaet told Cyclingnews.
The late confirmation meant that Van Avermaet’s opportunities to familiarise himself with his new steed have been limited. Rather than take delivery of the bike at home in Belgium this week, Van Avermaet instead fitted his old cyclo-cross bike with new tyres, and he will only test his new set-up for the first time on Saturday.
“It wasn’t going to be possible to get the bike built up before this week, and it didn’t make sense to bring it to Belgium to ride it for two hours and then pack it again for a flight, so we decided to send it directly from the service course to Venice,” Van Avermaet said. “Instead, I ordered some new tyres and I tried to do a little bit of practice with them on my old cyclo-cross bike, just to try to get a little more confidence on the turns. But it will still be new for me.”
Then again, novelty forms a sizeable part of the attraction of this first Gravel World Championships. At 190km, the elite men’s race is shorter than most established gravel events, which reward endurance and resilience above all. At least some of the surface between Vicenza and Cittadella, meanwhile, appears to veer more towards the chalk roads of Strade Bianche than the rock-strewn tracks of the gravel scene.
And, of course, the presence of so many WorldTour stars, including Mathieu van der Poel, Peter Sagan and Zdenek Stybar, gives this a very different feel to the mass participation events elsewhere - even if the decision to consider UCI points from road and MTB racing in the allocation of grid positions has caused understandable bemusement among the full-time gravel fraternity.
“Having the big names can only help to make the sport bigger, so I don’t see a big problem with that,” said Van Avermaet, who has twice placed second at Strade Bianche, an experience that ought to stand to him here.
“The route is flatter than Strade Bianche, but I think it’s also more technical, with some smaller roads and farm tracks. But road riders will still be good at it, because it’s quite long and it’s not too technical, and the gravel specialists will be up there, so there should be a good mix. And even though we ride in teams, you won’t really have teammates to protect you, because it should be an open race from the beginning. It’s a new adventure and I don’t know what to expect: but the start will be super hard.”
Yet for all the uncertainty around this new event and its countless permutations, a consensus has formed around the pre-race favourite. Despite his troubled expedition to Australia for the road Worlds, which resulted in a conviction for common assault, Mathieu van der Poel might yet end the year with another rainbow jersey to his name.
“I think with the skill that he has and the power he has in his legs, he’s the favourite. You cannot say anything else,” Van Avermaet said. “He has the technical skills of the best, and he has the strength of the best. When you tick all those boxes, it comes down to one name and that’s Mathieu.”
2023 and beyond
Van Avermaet has reason for guarded optimism of his own, even if his victory drought recently stretched out to three years. The Belgian’s season looked to have unravelled when he was left out of the Tour de France for the first time in almost a decade, but he has quietly stitched together a solid run of results in the weeks and months since, albeit at Off Broadway locales like the Tour de Wallonie and Tour de Limousin. Still, the upward trajectory was heartening after a Spring campaign that never really sparkled after his podium finish at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad.
“I’m getting closer to a win again, which is really important,” said Van Avermaet. “I did a lot of efforts in July in Spain to really reach my best level again. If that hadn’t worked, that would have demotivated me to continue for another year, but I’ve been quite competitive. This was a sign that it can still get better and that I can still do something really good next year in the Classics.”
Van Avermaet’s contract with AG2R Citroën expires at the end of 2023. The question of whether the 37-year-old will extend his career beyond next season may not be tactful, but it’s one that he accepts with good grace. Indeed, it’s one he’s been asking himself.
“No, it’s an honest question and it’s also something that plays on my mind. If I didn’t think about it, it wouldn’t be human,” he said. “I will see how the beginning of the Classics period goes and then I will see. I will take it more year by year now. If I still like it, and if I still feel the results are good enough to satisfy me – those are the really important things.”
When Van Avermaet pins on a race number on in Vicenza on Sunday, he will encounter some familiar faces who have already swapped the demands of riding for a WorldTour team for the autonomy afforded by racing full-time on the gravel circuit.
The idea is not one that tempts him, at least for now. Van Avermaet is now among the longest-serving professionals in the peloton, but he has never been left jaded by life on the WorldTour carousel, not even when Van der Poel et al shifted the lie of the land in the years since his 2016 Olympic title and 2017 Paris-Roubaix triumph.
“I still like road cycling, it’s not like I’m sick of it. I still like to push myself as hard as I can go,” he said. “The new generation puts me under pressure, but it’s a pressure to do better and prove that I can also challenge them. I look at it that way, rather than saying, ‘I’m empty and I just want it to stop now.’ And I love the big races, like Flanders and Roubaix. Of course, I’m not motivated for every race like I am for those big ones, but I still have that motivation.”
Sunday’s World Championships may not be quite the Ronde, but it should be quite the occasion. It may even be fun. “That’s always been the key for me,” Van Avermaet said. “The fun should always be there. If you don’t have fun anymore doing your job, it’s hard to continue.”
