The races will be broadcast on FloBikes beginning at 10 A.M. On Sunday, we shall see the likes of Alex Howes, Peter Sagan, Nikki Terpstra, Greg van Avermaet, and Mathieu van der Poel battling out on the gravel roads. I certainly am excited to watch some of the athletes that will be in attendance, like Pauline Ferrand-Prévot-looking for a fourth rainbow jersey to claim this 2022,-Argentinian gravel racer Sofia Villafañe Gomez, and Americans Lauren De Crescenzo and Sarah Sturm who are leading the U.S. Bicycling reached out to Vervecken for comment, but he has not responded to our request.Īnyway, let’s see how this new gravel format pans out over the weekend. Instead of taking something that works and learning from it, the Union Cycliste Internationale takes one step forward and two steps back when it comes to bringing cycling into the modern world.Īs for the prize purses, in theory, they should be equal between the elite men’s and women’s fields, but the amounts have yet to be disclosed by the UCI. races because you filter out a lot of leisure riders which we want to have as part of the Series.” Something that most American gravel events have managed to do without affecting the quality of the elite races.Īll this, in addition to other UCI-related controversies-like when they decided to ban cyclists for giving water bottles to fans, the instances in which they ignored riders’ safety, and that time they denied press credentials to investigative journalist Ian Treloar in Wollongong, Australia for no apparent good reason-goes to show that, in fact, the UCI has nothing good to offer to gravel racing. I wouldn’t say short, but not extreme like the U.S. It should be more or less four or five hours. In an interview conducted by Cycling Weekly, the manager of the UCI gravel series, Erwin Vervecken, shared: “We don’t want to do 200 miles that’s too long. Van Vleuten, Evenepoel Claim World Road Race Wins.Ivar Slik and Sofia Gomez Villafane Win Unbound.It would be like taking Ironman and making the courses shorter for women. But you’re taking a discipline that exists and reverse-engineering it to be sexist. “I don’t know why I find it so stunning,” added Yeager, “I shouldn’t. And yet, here we have the UCI, in what seems to be an attempt to make gravel more marketable to their European audience, has also chosen to make it more unequal from the get-go. In the last fifteen years, gravel racing has shown the world that women can do ultra-endurance rides of 200 to 350 miles and excel at them. Every single human does the same course,” shares Selene Yeager, Bicycling contributor, and seasoned athlete. Sure, 50km (30-something miles) is not an enormous difference, except that in gravel tradition-much like Ironman-men and women race the same distances. In comparison, the men’s elite field is the only race to cover the 194-kilometer-long course with 800m (2,625ft) of elevation.Īnd, to add insult to injury, there is a 166-kilometer medium-length course with 750m (2,460ft) in elevation, but only for men ages 19 through 49. The women’s categories-including the elite race, plus men ages 50 through 69-will race this 140-kilometer course with 700m (2,300ft) of climbing. All races will start in Vicenza and finish in the walled city of Cittadella, with three courses available: 140km, 166km, and 194km-all with a large percentage of the “white roads” that are familiar to Strade Bianche. Netflix Series Features Paris-Roubaix Femmes.
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