The Landscape of Gravel Racing Has Changed Dramatically. Is There Room for Smaller Races?

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The landscape of gravel racing is dramatically shifting.

As the sport moves towards more regulations, more prize money, and more professionalization, it’s hard to not think back to the formative days of gravel. Gone are the days of finding a group of friends and riding 200 miles, self-supported, through Kansas’ Flint Hills, embracing the chaos of an unknown adventure, just for fun.

“I think in the beginning, gravel was so exciting because the only things people knew about it were from blog posts and WordPress sites and random stories and only a few people had ever done,” said Amanda Nauman, the 2015 Winner of Unbound 200 and the director of the Mammoth Tuff gravel race. “It became this new frontier for a lot of people.”

Now, that new frontier of gravel includes races that draw upwards of 4,000 people, like the Belgian Waffle Ride, the Mid South, and Unbound. Those events— once small and renegade— now have pro categories and sell out in minutes. The emphasis on personal challenges and triumphs has shifted as events have morphed into hyper-competitive races drawing thousands of participants from all over the world.

Although Nauman was part of gravel’s early genesis, she doesn’t necessarily feel that this is a bad thing. In fact, she believes the evolution of gravel is opening up opportunities to get more people into cycling.

“It’s cool that they have created a space that feels inviting enough for somebody to do it for the first time,” Nauman said. “It’s almost like gravel is this new exploratory discipline where people do it for maybe two or three years. They get the gist of it and maybe they move on to something else.”

Jess Cerra, a former professional road racer who now directs The Last Best Ride in Montana, discovered gravel in 2019, then on the cusp of its explosive growth, at the now-defunct Rooted Vermont event.

“It was just sort of this incredibly cozy and welcoming event yet it felt big because I came from the world of road racing, which is exclusive,” Cerra said. “People were eating creamies and drinking beer the night before the race at 8 pm. And I was like, ‘dude, this is really cool.’ I thought that’s what gravel was.”

Now, as race organizers both trying to put on events in the hyper-competitive gravel space, both Nauman and Cerra now see its progress through a different lens.

Gravel continues to be the fastest-growing cycling sector in the U.S. But with all eyes on the big gravel races, where pros fight tooth and nail to cross the finish line first, one could argue that the heart and soul of gravel has been overshadowed by intensely fierce competition.

For the tens of thousands of people who want to partake in adventurous gravel events without the crowds, all over the country, there are dozens of smaller events providing uniquely beautiful experiences that are sure to create lasting memories. Nauman sees this as smaller events’ draw away from the bigger bucket-list events.

“Branch out to some of these smaller events,” she said. “Which is what I hope happens in the future. More gravel travel – going to events as a good excuse to see some of these other places in the country.”

These small events embrace the core ethos of gravel: community, adventure, and passion. As the events are independently run by passionate individuals like Nauman and Cerra who want to share their love for their home gravel roads with others, they provide a more intimate and community-focused experience.

However, there is a cost to being the anti-Unbound: these smaller events often do not draw big field sizes. In comparison to Unbound this year, which drew over 4,000 participants, local events often see fields of around 500 participants. While participation in some independent events is limited by land management permits, sometimes the events have a hard time selling out the spots they are allotted.

For some organizers, this presents a Catch-22-type problem.

“If we don’t sell out our event no one’s gonna want to come,” Cerra said. “I think that’s a factor that works against the smaller races and I don’t know what that is. It’s like this energy – ‘we know it sells out so we have to sign up’ type thing.”

According to organizers like Nauman, it’s getting harder to attract the numbers to justify holding an event at all.

“I think we’re down 15 to 16 percent registration numbers from just last year,” Nauman said. “Which isn’t a huge number, but when we’re only talking about 500 people, it’s a lot.”

Why is it so hard for these events to draw in larger fields? What is it that keeps people heading to Emporia and Steamboat Springs instead of traveling to places like Mammoth or Whitefish?

As the professionalization of the sport has increased, gravel racing has become less about the adventure and more about being part of the bigger scene, where people care about bumping elbows with the who’s who of gravel.

This has led smaller events to try and find creative ways to navigate the challenges.

The Grasshopper Adventure Series, which Miguel Crawford started in northern California 28 years ago, has been a community staple for early-season racing. The series began as a passion project for Crawford, a full-time high school teacher, structured around convincing his friends to prepare for road season by riding Sonoma County’s mixed terrain roads. Now with six annual events, the Grasshopper Adventure Series has experienced its fair share of hurdles.

“The first biggest challenge has been finding a place to ride that kind of fits the Grasshopper bill, that is adventure, that is unknown,” Crawford said. “Rider safety is huge for me. So going to areas that don’t have the traffic but have the support of the communities has been a real challenge for us.”

Building routes that are safe often means utilizing land managed by different agencies. The permitting process is lengthy and hard to navigate, especially when there are 8-10 land managers involved.

“I can go through the county,” Crawford said. “But also if I want to use a piece of State Park land, it’s really prohibitive and almost impossible.”

Crawford has focused on building a strong community around him to support his events. He often creates courses that go through private property, which allows for safer routes and less red tape. He also has built a core community of riders from the Bay Area to attend his events, as opposed to trying to pull from national-level participation.

“I want to keep the base of riders that are coming from the Bay Area,” he said.

Not trying to compete with the big-time promoters who put on what are now considered major gravel races is a key to success for other small events.

Events like Coast to Coast Gravel in Michigan and Core4 in Iowa have chosen to lean into creating strong community events. Core4, an event in Iowa City that falls on the same weekend as SBT GRVL, has carved out a niche in the Midwest.

“The majority of riders are from the five states around Iowa,” said race director Alex Buheyer. “One-third of ridership is from the Iowa City metro, the other third is the state of Iowa, and the last third is national pull.”

While Core4 has worked hard to grow its event to almost 1,000 participants, the focus is on community rather than competition.

Michigan’s Coast to Coast has followed a similar model.

“We emphasize memory making rather than money making. No prize money means we won’t get the top riders which is all good with us,” said race director Mark VanTongeren.

But what draws people to gravel races? Is it the intimate, community experience that events like Grasshopper Adventure Series and The Last Best Ride work so hard to cultivate? Or is it the thrill of being part of the scene and mixing in with the pros at events like Unbound? And how do you grow the sport and keep it sustainable if local races can’t survive?

“So there’s this weird economic thing right now where the events that don’t need to be for-profit are kind of messing up the budgets and financials of the events that need to operate that way,” Nauman said. “As an independent race organizer, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to compete with the big companies that put on events.”

Organizing and running a successful gravel race is no small feat. Race directors spend countless hours planning courses, recruiting volunteers, and working with multiple land managers to obtain permits for an event.

Most independent race promoters run events because they are passionate about the sport and want others to experience their favorite places. They often aren’t doing it for profit and, sometimes are contributing huge sums of their own money into the event to get it started.

“Sam [Boardman] and I put in $12,000 of our own savings [into The Last Best Ride], which was everything at the time and it was super scary,” Cerra said. “And we basically convinced all of our local vendors to do everything without down payments. So we weren’t building it around ‘how is this going to support us?’ And, ‘how is this going to grow?’ It came from a very different place.”

Nevertheless, even the most passionate race organizers need their events to be financially sustainable.

And while the Field of Dreams axiom of ‘If you build it, they will come’, may sound appealing for race organizers looking to create a new race, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Becoming a mainstay event on the gravel calendar takes time and a lot of energy. It’s not something that will happen overnight.

The first iteration of Unbound in 2006, for example, only had 34 people, and it took almost a decade for people to acknowledge it on a national level. But it just goes to show, when a race can solidify its place, it builds a following that will have people returning year after year. The landscape of events is ever-evolving and race organizers are learning how to navigate the new discipline.

“It’s a relatively new discipline,” Crawford said. “People are getting into bikes – where gravel bikes are the first bikes they’ve ever ridden because there is a lot of community doing it.”

Maybe, that is the key to success for these smaller races: build a community. Create an event that is exciting and engaging and about exploring a new place.