Keegan Swenson (Santa Cruz Bicycles) has dominated the Life Time Grand Prix gravel series for a second straight season, sweeping the first four rounds in 2023 to lead series title and cash payout with a start at Big Sugar Gravel in four weeks. He will skip this weekend’s sixth round at The Rad Dirt Fest in Colorado, which has no bearing on his points total, and lead Team USA for glory at the second edition of the UCI Gravel World Championships.
So far Swenson’s 2023 has been pretty sweet. He has just about wrapped up a the overall Life Time series for a second time, only needing to take the start at the season-ending Big Sugar Gravel on October 21. He defended his title at SGT GRVL and then won the stars-and-stripes jersey at the inaugural elite men’s US gravel championships. He also put his name in the record books with a new course record at Leadville Trail 100 MTB, an event he won for a third time, smashing the seven-year standard by a little more than 15 minutes.
Swenson has a collection of national titles as a junior, under-23 and elite rider in cross-country mountain biking and a silver medal from UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in the 2019 team relay, and now the hunt for an individual world title moves to gravel.
“I’m going over there [Italy] with high expectations,” Swenson told Cyclingnews before his planned flight to Italy on Friday, nine days before the elite men’s race on October 8.
“I know it’s a little bit of a different race, a different style of racing. It’s a little more of a road race in some ways, but there’s a little bit more gravel this year which I think should suit all of us from the US a bit better. I feel the racing over here [in the US] is really competitive. But it’s also a little bit different style of racing than they have over there in Europe.”
Like all the other competitors soon to swoop into north-east Italy, Swenson has only looked at the gravel course in Veneto on paper and on the cycling app, Komoot. There’s a lot more climbing this year, up from 800 metres to 1,900 metres of elevation gain, and the final climb is just 5km from the finish at Pieve di Soligo. There is also a lot of pavement mixed with gravel ‘sectors’ and not a true North American gravel grinder.
“That’s the main difference, you know, that you’re racing on gravel for pretty much the entirety of the event over here. It seems with the UCI events, there’s been more pavement and a different ‘style’.”
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