As the North American gravel season gets underway each year with Sea Otter and Unbound, so too does the debuting of new tech to shake up the gravel grinding world, from hybridized hydration vest-cycling kits to a 13-speed groupset to solid helmet straps.
And yet, amid the bustling tech scene at these races, there are always a few reminders that at the end of the day, what’s important is finding joy in riding any bike at all.
The folks from the Colorado-based bike manufacturer Rodeo Labs tapped into the “spirit of gravel” by showing up to the Unbound 200 start line on…get ready for it… Walmart-brand beach cruisers.
Rodeo Labs’ Founder Stephen Fitzgerald shared the story behind this unique approach to one of the most arduous gravel races in the world via Instagram.
Like a few thousand fellow racers, Fitzgerald and the Rodeo Labs crew arrived in Emporia, Kansas, a few days prior to race day. The one key difference: Fitzgerald hadn’t brought a bike.
Instead, Fitzgerald and the Rodeo Labs folks purchased three $200 Kent single speed beach cruiser bicycles from the local Walmart in Emporia with the intention of riding them as far as they’d go on race day.
The Kent bikes feature a welded steel frame, hi-tensile steel fork, coaster brakes, alloy wheels, a “deluxe” padded saddle and a single-speed drivetrain.
Rodeo Labs stripped them of parts, painted them with “sick fades," and then reassembled the bikes.
Why go attempt a 200-mile,10,000-feet-of-elevation-gain route on some questionable Walmart beach cruisers?
“We aim to complete the Unbound 200 on these bikes, and moreover we aim to have fun along the way,” Fitzgerald wrote on Instagram before race day. “We do not know if either objective is actually attainable. Failure is possible, and depending on who you ask, probable. And therein lies the allure of it all: The absolute unknown of what [race day] holds.”
Taking on unique challenges is part of Rodeo Labs’ blood:
“Saying that we are a lab means we’ve got restless minds and we want to use them to try to make meaningful contributions to cycling,” says the team at Rodeo Labs. “If we have an idea and it is good enough, it becomes a lab project [which could be] anything: a race concept…a way to do something better…[or] an elaborate joke.
What likely started as an elaborate joke indeed turned into an emotional adventure for the three Rodeo Labs cyclists: all three finished the race - together - in 16 hours and 50 minutes with 15 hours of moving time, nearly eight hours after men’s elite winner Lachlan Morton crossed the finish line in 9 hours and 11 minutes and six-and-a-half hours after women’s elite winner Rosa Klöser claimed victory in a nine-woman sprint for the win.
Fitzgerald wrote on Instagram across two separate posts after the race: “Gravel started because it was fun, and today it felt like we touched just a bit of that live wire...Out there in those hills, everyone was equal. We were all just trying to get there. It’s never before been made that simple for me to understand.”
