The Gravel Revolution: How Strade Bianche Met — or Made — Its Moment

Sometime around 1999 maybe, I took the start in a lovely race around the Maryland suburbs, starting in Poolesville, just up the Potomac from DC. The race had been run a couple times (and would shortly disappear) but this one memorable edition would feature about a mile on a dirt road, out of maybe a 15-mile circuit. I think we hit that stretch a couple times, and as exotic as it seemed leading up to the race, nothing too weird happened, and by the end I found myself actually accelerating on the dirt, probably out of nothing more than childish glee. This was in the early days of the internet, when stealing music on Napster was the only thing I can remember — years before people began making videos of stuff like guys doing flips or trials or MTB drops on their road bikes. Paris-Roubaix was about the only evidence that your road bike might be something more than the delicate thoroughbred you assumed it to be, but it was hard to relate to, and anyway they did actually break their share of wheels.

Fast forward to this week, when this image keeps showing up in my timeline:

Has it seriously only been a quarter century since road cycling relied primarily on skinny steel or maybe carbon tubes, components largely unchanges since the 70s, and tires the width of my index finger? What the hell happened to the gleaming, mostly Italian bikes of my youth? A lot of things, is the real answer, and you can find giant tomes on bike technology to geek out on. But also, and crucially in my opinion… a race:

Photo by Tim de Waele/Getty Images

Last week the Strade Bianche classic let us know that this year’s edition, set to run for men and women on March 2, will feature an extra loop that will insert four more sections of white-stone gravel in both events — the men’s race adding 30km in the process, to 215km total and 15 gravel stretches, while the women’s race will still be in the 130km range but with 11 white road sectors. This will make the race even harder, which it was already, and prompt more cries for it to be considered in everyone’s mind as the sixth Monument of Cycling.

I’ve never been at all in favor of the “sixth monument” thing, because the current five are still set apart from the rest in both execution and perception. Bump Strade Bianche up to 250km or so and you’d be talking… except its place on the calendar isn’t conducive to riding any more km than they already do. Cyclists aren’t robots (anymore). Moreover, the Strade Bianche only became a professional event, after a few years of cosplay on old Mercier bikes, in 2007 — roughly around when the actual Monuments were busy celebrating their centenary editions. History — or, more to the point, lived experience — still counts for a lot in my book, so I still don’t want to hear too much about how this newfangled Italian event is in the same class as the Ronde van Vlaanderen.

It’s still a beautiful race, a stroke of aesthetic and competitive genius, befitting a region in a country where cycling is still cherished for both its past and present. The part about wearing old-timey clothes and riding bikes with rod-activated derailleurs… to each his own. But Strade Bianche is a cool race for the pros. And it has a claim to fame that the old Monuments maybe don’t — it changed what and how a generation of people ride.

Before Strade Bianche, how often did people race on anything other than what we would call a paved road? I can only think of occasional departures from the rule that tarmac was required. Yes, the cobblestone races of Belgium and France were glaring exceptions, with the French versions really challenging the definition of a “road,” and yes, there are cobblestones on the Champs-Élysées, in numerous Italian towns, in the Netherlands, and so on. For roads with no pavement at all, aside from the Paris-Roubaix gutters I can only recall a few odd stretches like the Colle delle Finestre summit at the Giro d’Italia in 2005.

Photo by S Renaldini/Getty Images

There is ancient history of gravel roads at the Tour de France, and I may be forgetting an odd stretch or two in later times (before this year which has an actual gravel stage!!). There is Tro-Bro-Leon, the classic most famously beset with dirt roads prior to Strade, but only a few years prior as a pro event, beginning in 2000. The number of other days spent traversing gravel in the pro peloton before Strade came along is… not zero, but is approaching that. There was cyclocross, which… hang on a moment there.

Of course, the main reason from the pros’ perspective for not racing on gravel in, say, 1994 is that the peloton was all still on old-timey 23mm tires, or skinner ones, tubulars made with lightweight inner casings that were perfectly happy to explode on contact with any sort of a jagged surface. But technology started to evolve after the turn of the millennium, as it does in an industry that desperately tries to point to something new each year that you can’t get from last year’s bikes.

Teams often tinkered with their gear for Paris-Roubaix, for the obvious reasons (tires popping like popcorn in the Arenberg Trench) and also because there aren’t really any hills, so heavier isn’t necessarily a problem. Belgium supplies a lot of mechanics to the top level of the sport, and those guys started incorporating cyclocross tires of 25 to 28mm, so that by 2007 they were becoming commonplace, along with the wider forks and greater clearance and even v-type braking systems necessary to run the ‘cross wheels, shed mud effectively, etc. People tinkered with shock absorption in the head tube. The cognitive wheels were spinning already when Strade Bianche came along.

But going from the one-off Paris-Roubaix and the occasional Tour de France stage up Nord to a broader appeal involved a lot more incremental steps. I am proud to say that our friends at FSA and Vision have been among the pioneers of wider rims that offer both aerodynamic performance and the ability to handle first clinchers, with tubes and finally tubeless. To get a bit geeky (also feel free to add/correct me), tubulars were preferred because the rims are pretty minimal, just a curved surface to glue a tire onto, and they could hold high pressure. That beat early clinchers on both weight and performance. They are still the lightest option out there.

Photo by Dario Belingheri/Getty Images

In recent years better design and materials has led to wider clinchers, which create a wider shape for the tire, reducing lower rolling resistance. But that pressure didn’t work on tubed or tubeless clinchers until manufacturers figured out how to make the bead wall strong enough to withstand high tire pressures, and to stay strong when the brake pads started to cook the rims. [The latter concern went away with disc brakes.] Now, tubulars are worse from an aero perspective, like a balloon in the wind compared to sleek tubeless designs, and while they are still lighter, there are other ways for riders and their bikes to shed weight. I would guess you can still find some pros on tubulars, especially on climbs, but mostly the peloton is on tubeless tires and disc-braking wheels — another change which came along slowly in 2018 but is ubiquitous now.

[Can I just pause and say that I am probably not doing this justice? But it’s a longer topic, and in the interests of time, let’s keep moving.]

Bike manufacturers will make specialty equipment sometimes, but it can be very expensive to do so — creating factory systems around the special specs — so it’s critical that they be able to sell stuff to the public if these new technologies are going to be worth pursuing. And this is where Strade Bianche becomes a big piece of the puzzle. The old Eroica version showed that there was an interest in older riders to celebrate the sport’s history by riding on pre-modern roads, but they were hardly alone.

In the US especially, but all over the world too, mountain biking had already transformed how people saw the bicycle as a way to really get free — riding the endless fire roads and forest roads of the American outdoors, bike-packing and touring… the wide-wheeled/shock-absorbing world was already onto these ideas. Of course, even early MTBs weren’t great for the road, and the MTB technology evolved into more specialization away from roads, as trail riding and even downhill racing took hold. There was little in between a road bike and a mountain bike, neither or which could do what the other one did. Hybrids popped up for people to use for touring and less intense exercise, and cyclocross bikes captured a small audience for intensive use. These were the baby steps to where we are now.

And by that, I mean the gravel bike.

Photo by MASSIMO FULGENZI/AFP via Getty Images

No doubt this will keep evolving, but the gravel bike might be King of the Bikes for a while. It is kind of a cross bike without the knobby tires — a road rig with better clearance underneath and in the tire spaces. Gravel bike frames can be more road-geometry or MTB-leaning, which you can pick out based on whether the manufacturer’s soul lives on road or dirt. Mine traces its ancestry to Litespeed, and therefore is roady in nature. If you want to know all about the geometry evolution, talk to a hand-builder. The custom bike world is where a lot of this evolution happened before it showed up in your LBS.

Either way, gravel rigs come with road wheels but then MTB-style brakes (disc now), and MTB-style drive trains and components. From a roadie’s perspective, the bike just got more rugged, and in the process the cost came down a lot, since cheaper steel and less delicate components took hold. Sure, you can trick out your gravel rig right back into the bike-pricing stratosphere (hi!), but you don’t have to.

There is always a chicken-and-egg thing with bike technology, whether the manufacturing takes off before or after the public decides they want it. Gravel bikes were coming along in the 20-teens but it was COVID that pushed them to a whole new level of popularity and sales. Suddenly people were stuck in place, looking for a way to get outside, and bikes, as always, were the simplest solution. But in much of the world, road biking is getting harder for anyone without top skills and confidence, thanks to the whole car thing, which will never get better. Mountain biking has even more ways to get injured, albeit less tragically. Gravel bikes are the perfect solution, because gravel riding is the perfect solution. They can go on the road just fine, really well actually, if that’s a reasonable option, but they can go off road if you live near any of the 2.2 MILLION MILES OF GRAVEL ROADS IN THE US, and elsewhere around the world. They can switch back and forth. They can handle mud and other situations. They do all of this well. You don’t need five bikes anymore! [Emphasis on you, not me.]

And they fire the imagination. Gravel riding is not unlike the whole MTB thing in that the point is to feel free, free of the tarmac and traffic, free of the closed loops of cyclocross, free from humanity if you’re fit enough to keep going. For people marketing the bikes, you know how hard it is to make gravel adventure cycling look unbelievably awesome? Not that hard.

Photo by: VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

[Random internet photo, before the marketing department gets involved.]

So the technology and the public demand ramped up over time, and dramatically. But the third leg propping up this stool is racing. Showing that these bikes are like the ones the best riders in the world sometimes ride is no small part of bike marketing, presumably for good reason. And as a racing fan, I feel very comfortable just appreciating the evolution of the sport. Like I said above, some of the evolution can be traced back to the cobbled classics and cyclocross, but it was Strade Bianche that took gravel racing into the realm of both acceptability and appreciation. After just one edition of the UCI-level race, held in October, 2007 and won by Alexander Kolobnev, the race switched to its early spring calendar spot and took off like a rocket. Fabian Cancellara won the second edition (and 6th and 10th ones), giving it both a popular stamp of approval and a reason for the other Classics stars to try it. Strade has been a star-studded and exciting affair ever since, and a huge draw for fans in early spring.

This taste of gravel racing has expanded into full-on gravel events. Unbound Gravel, formerly Dirty Kanzaa, started attracting some pro-level riders, recent retirees until EF Education sent along active riders Lachlan Morton and Alex Howes to ride Unbound and the Leadville 100 in Colorado in 2019. More boundaries crossed, more acceptance, more more more… culminating in a UCI gravel cycling discipline, with World Championships and everything. Oh and also this:

Strade Bianche did this. Yes, of course it had help, but no other moment in time combined people’s enthusiasm for rugged, throwback-style cycling with an impetus for innovation that would take over a very large share of the gear market. Specialized “Roubaix” aside, no other race has driven changes to what and where we ride like the White Roads event has. Strade Bianche is where Italian romanticism meets the worldwide thirst for adventure and innovation. I still don’t think it’s a Monument. But its impact on the sport of cycling is astonishing, sudden, and like no other race.