I’m sitting in a small town less than an hour from where we finished the race in Cittadella, Italy, nestled into the back corner of an old stone-built homestead restaurant. Sipping the last of my after-dinner grappa, this traditional digestivo seems the perfect pairing to digest the event I’d just ridden; the first moment to reflect, to zoom out, and to try and make sense of the first ever UCI Gravel World Championships.
Perhaps it’s the overzealous pours of wine, perhaps it’s the warm hug you feel from the incredible bigoli – a favourite pasta of mine – or perhaps it’s the buzz from the grappa. Who’s to say? But I find myself sitting here with a smile.
It’s a smile that transcends the moment, one that belongs to a mood that began to take shape from the early hours of that morning, one that could only have been inspired by the experiences of that day.
Had all my biases and preconceived notions of the UCI Gravel Worlds been wrong? Was this smile my way of acknowledging that I was perhaps a bit hasty in pre-judging the event?
It had been a big day on the bike.
I started out with a crash inside the first 30k, which I later learned broke my pinkie finger, but I wasn’t giving up that early and fought back up. As the kilometres rolled by, two escapees went clear of the main pack gained an advantage of over five minutes – a significant lead on-off road parcours.
We raced, we yo-yoed, we fought, and eventually the winner came from that group of two off the front. I placed 16th, a result I can say I’m proud of. I left nothing in the tank, finishing my first full gravel season at a new, different event.
Re-wind 24 hours and, in all honesty, things did not start on a good note.
At the technical meeting we learned that the WorldTour riders, most of whom had never even ridden a gravel bike, were given, based on their fame and road rankings, the front row at the start. Yes, the start of the GRAVEL World Championship. Priority was also given to mountain bike and cyclo-cross riders as, it was argued, they too have UCI points.
And what about the gravel riders? As it turned out, the UCI’s Gravel World Series, which myself and many others had built our seasons around, and which even formed the basis of a qualification system for Worlds, carried no ranking and no points. We were told we would…
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