At the 2022 inaugural UCI Gravel World Championships, nine of the top ten finishers were professional road cyclists. Among them were Mathieu van der Poel, Magnus Cort, and winner Gianni Vermeersch, riders who likely spent more time on the massage table than their gravel bike that season. The gravel community was confused, and many were frustrated because the UCI's new discipline, marketed as an alternative to traditional road racing, had been immediately colonised by the very athletes it was meant to offer an escape from.
What happened next was a divergence of sorts. Gravel racing moving in this direction, road racing going in the other direction. The road pros who showed up to win gravel races discovered, sometimes painfully, that winning gravel was not the same thing as surviving it. And the gravel pros with world-class engines learned there was a lot more to road racing than pushing 300w for eight hours.
