The Gravel Revolution: How Strade Bianche Met — or Made — Its Moment

Sometime around 1999 maybe, I took the start in a lovely race around the Maryland suburbs, starting in Poolesville, just up the Potomac from DC. The race had been run a couple times (and would shortly disappear) but this one memorable edition would feature about a mile on a dirt road, out of maybe a 15-mile circuit. I think we hit that stretch a couple times, and as exotic as it seemed leading up to the race, nothing too weird happened, and by the end I found myself actually accelerating on the dirt, probably out of nothing more than childish glee. This was in the early days of the internet, when stealing music on Napster was the only thing I can remember — years before people began making videos of stuff like guys doing flips or trials or MTB drops on their road bikes. Paris-Roubaix was about the only evidence that your road bike might be something more than the delicate thoroughbred you assumed it to be, but it was hard to relate to, and anyway they did actually break their share of wheels.

Fast forward to this week, when this image keeps showing up in my timeline:

Has it seriously only been a quarter century since road cycling relied primarily on skinny steel or maybe carbon tubes, components largely unchanges since the 70s, and tires the width of my index finger? What the hell happened to the gleaming, mostly Italian bikes of my youth? A lot of things, is the real answer, and you can find giant tomes on bike technology to geek out on. But also, and crucially in my opinion… a race:

Photo by Tim de Waele/Getty Images

Last week the Strade Bianche classic let us know that this year’s edition, set to run for men and women on March 2, will feature an extra loop that will insert four more sections of white-stone gravel in both events — the men’s race adding 30km in the process, to 215km total and 15 gravel stretches, while the women’s race will still be in the 130km range but with 11 white road sectors. This will make the race even harder, which it was already, and prompt more cries for it to be considered in everyone’s mind as the sixth Monument of Cycling.

I’ve never been at all in favor of the “sixth monument” thing, because the current five are still set apart from the rest in both execution and perception. Bump Strade Bianche up to 250km or so and…