Take a look through the winners of the UCI Gravel World Championships since its first year in 2022 and one thing stands out, both in the men’s and women’s races: road riders, often the biggest names, have won every single edition. Gravel started out as road’s cooler, more chic brother, but as it’s become mainstream and professionalised, the road scene has begun to shape it towards its rules, its influence and its specialists. But events at this October’s Gravel Worlds indicated that gravel is not going to inherit all of road racing’s practices.
In the women’s race, Shirin van Anrooij of the Netherlands was leading with only a few kilometres remaining, when her Dutch teammate Yara Kastelijn chased her down, reeling her in with only 400m to go. Lorena Wiebes – the best female road sprinter of all time? – duly won, beating Marianne Vos in a two-up sprint. The reaction to the tactics from the Dutch team was one of near-universal disbelief and outcry: why did the Dutch go after their own rider?
Laurens ten Dam, the national team’s coach, refuses to criticise such tactics, telling Rouleur that road and gravel are separate disciplines with individual identities and their own strategic approaches. The criticism, he says, was unjustified, and represented a lack of understanding of what gravel racing is. “I understand that it looked strange if you looked through the eyes of a road race, but this was not a road race,” says Ten Dam, who is one of the pioneering figures of gravel racing, after making the switch from WorldTour road racing in 2019. “It’s still an individual sport and that’s what journalists don’t understand.”
Ten Dam points out how riders qualify individually for the World Championships – they are not selected by the national federation. Currently, UCI regulations do not put a limit on the number of riders per country who can compete in the Gravel World Championships, meaning of the 103 competitors in the women’s race, 22 were from the Netherlands. In the women’s Road Race Worlds, the number of riders per nation is capped at seven. Additionally, riders pay for their own travel, accommodation and often on-site support. That makes the prospect of getting every rider to work for one unified goal a near-thankless task.
“It’s difficult for me as the national coach as I’m basically just facilitating,” Ten Dam says. “I try to make a team out of it but I can’t put pressure on them. I cannot select people. In the road race I select eight [seven - ed] girls and before I select them I say to them, ‘This is the role I see for you, and if you don’t agree that's OK but then I don’t take you’. But in gravel you can qualify for yourself and race for yourself, which I understand.”
A deceptive image: the Dutch riders looked like they were riding in unison, but in reality they were riding for themselves.
Rather than subscribing to the view that the Dutch tactics at the Gravel Worlds were wrong, Ten Dam actually thinks that his riders deserved praise. “I don’t agree. If we raced as a team with 30 girls in one race, then there wouldn’t have been a race because with only two [non-Dutch] girls nobody would have chased. Lorena was marking Marianne all day and that means they were working for themselves. Who worked as a team at the Gravel Worlds? Nobody. The Belgian men said they were all in for themselves.
“That’s how gravel racing is. In the morning you get your orange jersey, and it’s not like then you have to race for your country’s team. No, it doesn’t work like that – everyone’s got their own sponsors, they pay you and for the accommodation you stay in. It’s a difficult situation but that’s what the UCI created. What I don’t understand is the journalists that think it’s not a different sport – it is a different sport. The only appointment I gave them [the Dutch women] was to make sure they won the race and they did.
“You see four or five Dutch girls racing for the win and you need to be proud of that. Now they’re all bullshitting, but in the end we won the race. We’ve had four Gravel World Championships, we’ve won three of them and were second in the other. For sure I understand that Shirin was disappointed, and I also don’t think what Yara did was the smartest thing, but in the end the three strongest were on the podium.”
Lorena Wiebes added gravel glory to her road and track success.
According to Ten Dam, road fans who become gravel fans will have to accept the realities of the discipline's nuances and racing. Gravel cannot and will not become an off-road clone of road racing. What the UCI can do, though, is impose a cap on the number of representatives per country. “You can either race in the colour of the UCI teams as individual riders, or you have a limit of 10 riders [in any given national team],” Ten Dam suggests. “Like that I can select 10 riders, and the others are in the age group categories. But the UCI says it won’t work like that, and I understand that because for me gravel is an individual sport.
“I don’t know if you really want to get gravel closer to road racing. We’re all little boys and girls who love to race our bikes. Some guys turn out to be good and they become [road] pros, and some become gravel pros who are maybe not good enough for the road or they choose a different path. In the end, we all love to race our bikes, so why would we say no to people who love racing their bikes?”
