Filippo Colombo (SCOTT-Sram MTB) and 2025 African Gravel Champion Hayley Preen (Honeycomb 226ers) won The Ceder in South Africa, each making their decisive move on the Uitkyk Pass to secure solo victories at the first UCI Gravel World Series event of 2026.
For 2025 Cape Epic winner Colombo, the victory came at his first-ever gravel race.
“We were here for training camps, and this race shows up. So why not racing? Always love to race, also while training. And was no better occasion to also test out this new discipline for me,” Colombo said before the race.
“It wasn’t really an attack.,” Pritzen said. “Alex wasn’t rolling through, and I kept on rolling with Filippo. And then I think as I rolled through, everyone was looking at Alex, and I just continued on going. And then they gave me a gap, and you didn’t have to ask me twice to go off the road. So I just kept on going. I realised very quickly that it’s going to be a very, very long day, and it’s exactly what it was.”
“It was very hard, but it’s nice, nice scenery. The race developed not really in my favour,” Colombo said, “but then I tried my cards on the toughest climb, and I got to be the strongest there, and I could bridge the gap.”
“Every single climb I tried to face it as well as I could, but not enough time on the gravel bike, my body was just taking so many shots, lower back was killing me. So congratulations to Filippo for a strong ride,” Pritzen added.
In the elite women’s race, Preen, Lisa Bone, and Daria Pravilova pulled away from the field early on, cresting the summit of Uitkyk Pass together, with Preen doing most of the pacemaking at the front of the trio.
“I think I worked quite a bit. The harder it…
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