“Cycling should be always fun, even if you’re a professional,” Greg Van Avermaet said on Friday evening as he caught a train to Brussels Airport. It was a thought to sustain him on the late flight south to Venice ahead of this weekend’s inaugural UCI Gravel World Championships.
Van Avermaet’s road season came to an end with fourth place at Binche-Chimay-Binche on Tuesday, but he opted to keep his campaign going for a few more days to tackle the gravel of the Veneto on Sunday. The idea was tentatively pitched by his bike sponsor BMC last winter, but it was all hypothetical until the middle of last month, when AG2R-Citroën gave their formal blessing.
“BMC asked me last winter if I might be interested in starting the Gravel Worlds and riding their new bike at it, and we said we’d see how it went through the season,” Van Avermaet told Cyclingnews.
The late confirmation meant that Van Avermaet’s opportunities to familiarise himself with his new steed have been limited. Rather than take delivery of the bike at home in Belgium this week, Van Avermaet instead fitted his old cyclo-cross bike with new tyres, and he will only test his new set-up for the first time on Saturday.
“It wasn’t going to be possible to get the bike built up before this week, and it didn’t make sense to bring it to Belgium to ride it for two hours and then pack it again for a flight, so we decided to send it directly from the service course to Venice,” Van Avermaet said. “Instead, I ordered some new tyres and I tried to do a little bit of practice with them on my old cyclo-cross bike, just to try to get a little more confidence on the turns. But it will still be new for me.”
Then again, novelty forms a sizeable part of the attraction of this first Gravel World Championships. At 190km, the elite men’s race is shorter than most established gravel events, which reward endurance and resilience above all. At least some of the surface between Vicenza and Cittadella, meanwhile, appears to veer more towards the chalk roads of Strade Bianche than the rock-strewn tracks of the gravel scene.
And, of course, the presence of so many WorldTour stars, including Mathieu van der Poel, Peter Sagan and Zdenek Stybar, gives this a very different feel to the mass participation events elsewhere – even if the decision to consider UCI points from road and MTB racing in the allocation of grid positions has caused understandable bemusement among the full-time gravel fraternity.
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