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…