The unofficial world championships, the all-encompassing Tour de France, the Paris-Roubaix of gravel – I’ve heard it all about Unbound Gravel. I wouldn’t call it the romanticism like we attach to the age-old road races we hold so dear, it’s more of a “hell yeah”, boot-stomping, American gladiator vibe we feel when people talk of Unbound. It’s raw, it’s hardcore, and yes, the dreaded word ‘epic’ – how overused that word is in cycling.
But the question is, why is Unbound so highly regarded? How did it come to be? Is it even hard as everybody suggests? Or is it just marketing? Let’s dig in…
Gravel City
When I first drove into Emporia, the unassuming mid-west town, I was taken aback by just how ‘country’ the town was. It has a main street as wide as the day is long, diners, guitar stores, colourful doughnut shops, and the town divided in two by an open railway that can have you waiting for an age as the coal trains pass through. It was like stepping back in time, back to the good old days of Western movies.
Central to the identity of the town is the first bike shop I’ve ever seen that is devoted only to gravel. Gravel City, the beating heart of the Unbound week, houses the first-ever winning bike of Unbound. I began to feel that Emporia is not as it seems, a town whose recent history had bucked the trend from the traditional road bike era, and just gone 110% all in on gravel. It’s like a religion in that town, and that shop, the church.
It was only here did I begin to understand why Unbound is perhaps in a league of its own in the calendar. It’s totally in the middle of nowhere, the closest airport is over two hours away. Kansas is not known for much more than corn, so maybe it was just a vacuum? Maybe it was just something to do? I guess that’s well within the spirit of gravel.
If I’m honest, I don’t like ultra events, anything over 6 to 7 hours is pushing the friendship for how long I like to ride on a bike. Some love it, but for me, yuk. But why do I dream of winning this race?
Does it have epic single track? No. Does it have epic climbs? No. Does it have a nice surface? Absolutely not. The flint stone is just about the worst surface you could imagine for rubber tires. It’s sharper than a knife and looser than an Australian tourist in London. It has absolutely no landmarks of note. You can look down at…
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