Is Nannup delivering the first 'real' UCI Gravel World Championships?

It is clear that Nannup in Western Australia is going to be a UCI Gravel World Championships unlike any we have seen before, with it hardly possible to make a bigger detour in location after four European-based editions.

The change, however, runs far deeper than a position on the map, with the race also taking full advantage of its remote location, which offers one crucial natural resource in abundance: endless gravel roads.

It delivers a course that fits a more traditional archetype of what a rainbow-jersey race in the discipline should look like. That has created expectations that, after years of domination by road professionals since it started in 2022, the rainbow jersey could, in fact, end up on the back of a rider who races the discipline as their bread and butter this October.

"It's being dubbed as the first real Gravel World Championships in terms of a course. I think it's exciting for it to be somewhere new," Sofia Gómez Villafañe told Cyclingnews, with the leading player in the unsanctioned world of gravel who skipped the world title race the last two editions, this time turning it into a key target for the season.

She won't be the only one switching from a calendar largely filled with more traditional gravel events, with Specialized Off-Road teammate Matt Beers returning to the race for the first time since the opening edition, while Keegan Swenson is also back after skipping the 2023 and 2024 editions.

They will also be joined by the in-form men's gravel rider of the season, Mads Würtz Schmidt, who earlier this year said: "I think a World Championships with an Unbound peloton would be pretty special, so I hope the guys will come over and see the opportunity that it is to have a really cool, actual Gravel World Championships."

The flow of riders mentioned as starters does, in fact, include quite a number of Unbound Gravel 200 winners and podium finishers, from this year's victors Würtz Schmidt and Villafañe to previous years' Swenson, Rosa Klöser, and Carolin Schiff.

However, the top gravel riders certainly won't have the field to themselves, as plenty of others from across disciplines also think it's worth the trip. That includes the prolific rainbow title winner Marianne Vos, defending champion and WorldTour rider Florian Vermeersch, and riders who frequently mix road and gravel, like Tiffany Cromwell and Connor Swift.

"Hopefully, with the demands of the course, everybody sees an opportunity that they have not maybe seen in the previous years, with the European type racing, which has, let's say, a more singular dynamic as regards to the person who can win it," the Nannup UCI Gravel World Championships race director Stephen Gallagher told Cyclingnews in the weeks before the event.

"This year has a lot more variance around the type of rider who can win."

What's different? Gridding, course and more

When Nannup first applied for the World Championships, the event's popularity and format were unknown, but with a big slab of road riders joining the gravel specialists. Even from the first edition of the UCI-sanctioned Worlds in Italy, it was well attended and fiercely competitive. It was then – and has continued to be – one where the podium is dominated by road professionals.

Initially, there was controversy over the way the start grids worked, with UCI points deciding the positions even though there were no points at that stage on offer for the UCI's own gravel series, and certainly not for the US-based, non-UCI gravel events.

That meant road, mountain bike and cyclo-cross riders hit the front row while the specialists were allocated spots down the back of the grid, although some last-minute lobbying meant some were moved up into the second and third row, but ultimately it was still a system which put gravel riders at a considerable disadvantage.

That situation has since changed, with riders like Nicole Frain, who are sitting right near the top of the UCI Gravel World Series, likely to get a position at the front of the field, as now the series allocates points and riders from other disciplines, where often there are far more race days packed into a season, get half their points taken into consideration. That, of course, still doesn't help riders who race a gravel calendar that largely focuses on the unsanctioned events, like Life Time Grand Prix participants Swenson and Villafañe.

What they do have running to their advantage this year, however, is the shape of the race, both in terms of the course and the participants. For a start, this year the gravel roads are wide, which means far more opportunities to work the way up through the field.

Plus, the field isn't likely to be as large in the first place, with the location outside Europe making it far more of an effort for the road professionals based there to just duck into the discipline for the weekend, or as dominated by teams from one nation.

For example, last year in Limburg, 279 riders started the elite men's race: 45 from Belgium, 36 from the Netherlands, and 32 from Germany; in the women's field of 107, Dutch riders made up nearly a quarter of the starters. Based on the registered riders, it looks like the field will be far more evenly balanced this year.

The next factor is the type of terrain and road surface riders will be facing. Other years have delivered a significant amount of the race off traditional smooth paved roads, but never as much as what will be offered on October 10 and 11. On top of that, this year those surfaces are actually all gravel roads, with previous editions including cobbles and single-track in the unpaved portions as organisers had to make do with what was available in the more heavily populated areas where the events were held.

Around the remote township of Nannup, however, organisers were spoilt for choice as they carved out an elite men's course with the 144km route, 85% gravel and 3,713m of elevation gain and an elite women's race with 84% gravel across the 125.6km and 3,179m of elevation gain.

"It's in a forest. It's endless gravel roads. So it's a cross between what you can find in parts of Europe and what you find in America," said Tiffany Cromwell, who won the SEVEN UCI Gravel World Series race on the course earlier this year.

"It gives more the feeling that it's not about positioning; it's not about short accelerations. The course is relentless, the climbs are steep, it's a lot of climbing – total climbing, but it's not long climbs, they're just steep – and I think that kind of hard draining course makes it more towards what typical gravel races usually are."

Cromwell, who is also a race ambassador, certainly wasn't going to be drawn into the narrative of it being the first 'real' UCI Gravel World Championships as "gravel is always interpretation of what you have in the place that you're in".

But she did make it clear that she believed that there is something on offer in 2026 for her retirement race that, as a rider who has competed in every edition of the UCI Gravel World Championships, she hasn't seen before in the rainbow jersey battle.

"It's the first time we're going to potentially see a gravel rider maybe win," Cromwell told Cyclingnews. "It's the one that feels more like a gravel race than a Belgian Classic."

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