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Opinion: How to fix the Gravel Worlds’ teething issues
This weekend saw another edition of the UCI’s latest blue riband event, the UCI Gravel World Championships. The elite events saw the Dutch dominate, with Mathieu van der Poel and Marianne Vos adding a gravel world title to their existing mountain bike, cyclocross and world titles.
The third iteration of the championships, held in Belgium, was heralded as a success by many, with even more eyes watching gravel racing than ever before. Despite a lack of live UK broadcasting, the race still managed to court headlines, mainly due to the A-list road star winners as well as disgruntled vox-pops from gravel specialists who are still frustrated with the championships’ format.
This begs the question: how can we possibly improve the UCI Gravel World Championships for the years to come? What’s broken and what needs to change for the event to grow at an equal pace to cycling’s gravel scene?
Gravel sector quotas
There is much talk every year surrounding the route of gravel’s new prestige race. Is there enough gravel? Is there too much gravel? It’s a hard balancing act for organisers. However, the route designers rarely share the actual percentage of gravel on the World Championships parcours.
With the race dictated by its niche surface type, the Gravel Worlds needs to stay true to its name. That’s a given. To silence all these debates about the amount of gravel included, the UCI should ask gravel riders to decide on a baseline quota for this top-level race. Then, we can finally stop arguing about whether the race is ‘truly gravel’ or not.
A 60% gravel/non-gravel ratio seems to be the lucky number. The past two editions have been near this figure and were met with relatively positive responses. If we have this baseline, it will give route designers clear-cut criteria to work with backed up by the UCI rulebook, rather than local organisers having to decide for themselves.
Put an end to wildcards for road riders
The current UCI qualification process allows a quota of wildcard entries for non-gravel riders to participate in the discipline’s World Championships. These are usually handed out to riders from the WorldTour road scene, cyclocross or mountain bike spheres.
Wildcard entrant Lotte Kopecky, the silver medallist in the women’s race, even outlined last week that she had never raced on gravel before. It doesn’t do the whole gravel scene any favours having a rider jump into a new discipline and immediately land on the podium at the most competitive gravel event in the world. It’s ludicrous.
I understand that having these top-flight names helps bring new eyes to the relatively new addition to the UCI calendar. This name recognition also helps to leverage TV rights and mass media coverage for this fairly underground scene. On the other hand, it does feel a bit silly that road riders can be parachuted into these races and defeat riders who spend all year embedded in the gravel circuit.
Here’s one solution: eradicate the wildcard selection. Instead, WorldTour road riders, like the gravel specialists, have to race at least one UCI Gravel Series event or national championship. If they reach the top 20% of race finishers, their entry to the UCI Gravel World Championships is guaranteed just like any other rider in the pack. It’s not particularly egalitarian if a non-gravel rider is able to bypass the usual qualification standards only to steal the rainbow jersey come October. If anything, the current system undermines gravel specialists who get sidelined in favour of glitzy names from the Tour de France who don’t participate in any other gravel races.
Making sure non-gravel specialists race even just one gravel event prior to the Worlds could help avoid the farcical cameos that have dominated the event in the past three editions. To date, no gravel specialist has made the podium of an elite Gravel Worlds race since the event’s inception in 2022. Even if these roadies dabble in gravel just once, it at least provides some legitimacy to their World Championships ticket.
How to solve the issue of teams and countries
Other UCI World Championships – such as the road and track events – revolve around teams and national federations. However, it has been explicitly clear since the inception of the UCI Gravel World Championships that riders are competing as individuals. If grouping riders into national teams isn’t supposed to affect the dynamic of the race, then why do it? Why not have riders competing as individual athletes instead?
The ambiguity of the current setup came to a head this weekend when Belgium’s Jasper Stuyven lamented his compatriots Quinten Hermans and Gianni Vermeersch for working in favour of Dutch Alpecin-Deceuninck trade teammate Van der Poel. Despite wearing the same Belgian national kit, there were fierce disagreements. For the average viewer tuning in, this strange dynamic of trade team cliques and national incohesion detracts from the viewing experience.
The rest of the gravel season is raced by riders individually – it’s part of gravel culture. Why blur the lines by introducing the team dynamic? The privateer spirit is at the heart of the gravel scene, so why not replicate that in the discipline’s biggest event?
Improving the broadcast, importantly with live UK broadcasting
Perhaps the distribution of TV rights isn’t within the UCI’s remit. It is, after all, the TV stations that buy out live race images. That said, the lack of live broadcasting did detract from the event, particularly in the UK.
British viewers were left to watch highlights packages on Eurosport after the event. In comparison, Belgian broadcaster Sporza monopolised live viewers as one of the few TV channels showing the race live. Discovery+ didn’t even stream the event on digital platforms, instead favouring Giro dell’Emilia and Paris-Tours road races over the weekend.
Given the lengths the UCI has gone to broadcast the race and send TV motorbikes down these treacherous off-road paths, the race broadcast should be given higher priority as a means of spreading the word about the event and, in turn, the exciting gravel scene, which is rapidly growing across Europe and North America.
One solution is to live-stream the race on the UCI’s YouTube channel. This already happens for the UCI’s Track World Cup, BMX Racing World Cup and even the body’s own gala congress. It may not be the most profitable way to gain new viewers, but it would certainly help to capture some attention from countries outside of the host nation, particularly if they host UCI Gravel Series races, as the UK does.
It’s not all doom and gloom
The UCI Gravel World Championships have shone a spotlight on the discipline. To some purists’ disdain, the gravel scene has been elevated thanks to the new event. Gravel is no longer at the hipster fringes of cycling. With UCI recognition, gravel has moved closer to taking its place in the upper echelons of cycling alongside cyclocross, track, mountain biking, BMX and road.
Despite being a new event, the novelty hasn’t worn off. The Gravel Worlds generate traction within cycling circles, capturing the attention of many of those who rarely keep up with other gravel races such as Unbound. With the iconic rainbow jersey on the line in some of the sport’s most celebrated locations, the Gravel World Championships have been a success for the sport, and for the UCI.
Yes, some work needs to be done to improve the event. Some teething errors still remain. Given how gravel’s rise has happened almost exclusively outside of the UCI’s remit, this is understandable. Some rules need ironing out and some adjustments still need to be made, such as to introduce under-23 and junior events like in road and cyclocross. That said, I expect the UCI to work these issues out in time. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
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