Thomas is the host of Gracing, a gravel racing podcast by Autsaid. After having founded and run a sports-focused SaaS startup, he is now doubling down on his passion for off-road cycling. You can connect with him here.
I'm a big road racing fan. I also love gravel racing. I have a confession to make: I find watching racing on gravel more appealing than road racing. (Case in point, the best road race this season so far was Classica Jaén, essentially a gravel race.)
But there simply isn't enough gravel racing brought to my screens, in decent production quality no less, to satiate my appetite for cycling. Thus, road racing remains a big part of my diet.
Now, there are certainly various reasons as to why I follow gravel racing. Some of which may be highly individual and likely not apply to others. Gravel is my preferred type of riding. I host a gravel racing podcast. And I've always found niches more interesting than the mainstream: I'm a German following the NBA, not football (⚽); I prefer Android over iOS; I think The Wire is better than Game of Thrones.
And yet, I don't believe that I have super weird taste. Rather, things I enjoyed often became popular later. Not always (see my smartphone choice) but regularly.
So, on the chance that I may in fact be early rather than on the wrong side of history, allow me to make the case as to why gravel racing may well be the future of bike racing.
In fact, I believe that gravel has the potential to grow as big as road racing is today. The big If being that the organizations and people in charge of gravel need to take the right decisions in the upcoming years. Right now, we are at a decisive moment.
Road racing used to be about adventure and daydreaming
To argue my case, let's go back in time and investigate how and why bike racing became popular. It's a well known fact that many of the biggest bike races, including the Tour de France, were launched by newspapers – back when they were ‘the media’ – in order to have exciting stories to tell.
It's even fair to argue that the early days of bike racing had many of the qualities that (ultra-distance) gravel racing has today: the races were crazy adventures over insane durations taken on by riders who had to repair their bikes themselves and didn't mind having a beer (or various other bottles of booze). The stories written back then were, essentially, adventure tales.
Once television started showing the races from the 1930s onwards – initially highlights shows recapping the action and then later live footage – cycling slowly turned into a mix of sport and aspirational viewing.
People who watched cycling in the early decades also happened to be the first generation that traveled for leisure. It's easy to forget that mass tourism is a very new phenomenon in the history of mankind. Traveling was hard before the arrival of modern means of transport.
And even once we had cars, trains, and airplanes, traveling was expensive. I was born in 1985 and even in my childhood I never went anywhere by plane. I remember well that it felt very special if someone we knew did fly somewhere. Meanwhile, my kids are two and a half and four years old and I can't count the times they boarded a plane on one hand.
Back when road racing started to grow in popularity, car travel, likewise, was by no means as commonplace as it is today. In the mid 1960’s, car ownership across European countries was at around 150 cars per 1,000 inhabitants. By 2022, this number had almost quadrupled to 560.
Road racing TV coverage – especially the modern variety that started in 1963 when, for the first time, all stages of the Tour de France were broadcast live on television – didn't only enable people to follow a race. It also allowed them to daydream. Of traveling foreign roads. Of French chateaus and Italian vineyards. Of the unknown. While the average watcher at home might not have opted to ride the Tour’s route by bike, they likely got inspiration for where to drive to on next year’s summer holiday.
We now live in a different world
But the world has changed dramatically over the past few decades. When we think of roads, we think of traffic jams. Travel has become so normal that many people I know (including my wife) think that it's not normal if you don't go on holiday twice a year. People today don't need to watch a bike race to dream of traveling, they just travel.
Meanwhile, the way we work and live has transformed as well. Many of us no longer perform hard physical work outside. Instead, more and more people spend their days sitting in front of screens.
As a result, we aspire to different things than our parents and grandparents. Today, we dream of nature and the wild. The ‘outdoors’ has been a huge and growing trend for years now.
Gravel fits the bill perfectly. A gravel bike enables us to explore. It takes us off the beaten path. Gravel riding is better aligned with today's generations’ aspirations than road cycling.
If you listen to the mumblings about bike sale figures in the last three to five years, the popularity of gravel bikes is evident. But what about gravel racing as a spectator sport?
What should a gravel racing package look like?
While certainly growing in popularity, gravel racing is by no means anywhere near road cycling. There are many reasons for this.
It's hard, and partially impossible, to follow gravel racing. To my knowledge, the UCI Gravel World Championships are the only gravel race that's broadcast on TV. Now, we can discuss if TV still matters in 2025 but let's say it's an indicator.
There are increasingly more races you can watch on live streams. Klassmark puts a considerable effort into live streaming the marque races of their Gravel Earth Series. Last year's Garmin Gravel World's set a benchmark in gravel racing live coverage. The Life Time Grand Prix, meanwhile, has (so far) opted for Instagram-based live coverage combined with race-recap-meets-documentary YouTube videos released soon after the event.
So, coverage is improving. But it is still far from ideal - and certainly not easy to find for the uninitiated.
In a recent podcast, I likened being a gravel fan to being an NBA fan in the 70’s. Back then, you couldn't simply unlock your phone and have tons of content at your fingertips. There were hardly any nationally televised games. To see star players from other teams, your only opportunity was to attend your team's home game against that team. And you had to read a ton of different newspapers and magazines to get an understanding of the entire league.
Gravel racing is much like that, only in the digital age. To be in the know, you need to follow a myriad of Instagram accounts and YouTube channels. While that might be cool and edgy, it's not accessible. What gravel lacks is what I dubbed “packaging”, i.e. a fan-friendly presentation and a few central entry points. If those existed, I argue, people would tune in, given the aesthetics of gravel (well, Unbound aside maybe!) and how aligned they are with modern daydreams.
Luckily, people are working to improve the package. These people include organizations behind the big series I mentioned before, alongside some emerging media from the scene, who both aim to reduce the entry barrier. There are unique challenges, for example live streaming from often remote locations, but there have been improvements every year.
Gravel the disruptor?
Notably, gravel has one big advantage over road cycling: the UCI plays a but not the role and the A.S.O. is nowhere to be seen.
Life Time has their hypothesis of how gravel should be presented, Klassmark has theirs and (maybe) the UCI has yet another one (so far the UCI Gravel World Series is the worst in terms of presentation in my humble opinion and seems to rely mostly on the appeal of the World Championships).
Having multiple ambitious players means we see more experimentation and quicker progress.
Now, there's no guarantee that we'll arrive at a package of mass compatibility. But I think the odds are pretty good if – and that's the biggest if for me – if gravel racing can establish a sustainable business model that supports both promoters and riders aside from the mass participation registration fees and a super fragmented sponsorship market.
The current discussions in road racing, with the One Cycling project at its core, show that even gravel’s big brother has significant challenges (admittedly for various different reasons). It's by no means an easy feat to create a sustainable business model in sports. Failure is an option, including for gravel.
But you can look at it from the other side as well. Gravel’s relative immaturity also presents an opportunity to design a “healthy ecosystem” from the get go and to avoid making the same mistakes. In some sense, it may be more realistic to build the beautiful Two Cycling utopia in gravel than to redesign road racing.
Could gravel end up being the agile disruptor and road racing the slow incumbent?
The Gravel Czar’s master plan
Like most people, I enjoy a tad of megalomania from time to time. So I daydreamed a bit and envisioned being the “Gravel Czar”, i.e. he who controls all of the sport (and comes equipped with some seed money to get this thing off the ground). Yes, I'm shamelessly stealing Bill Simmons’ gimmick here, in case you were wondering.
As Czar, I crafted my master plan for growing gravel into a sustainable sport with broad appeal. Here's what I came up with.
1. Bring teams to gravel, but make them awesome
First, I'd be highly concerned with making gravel sustainable. The current structure - which is centered around privateers and a mix of teams with small budgets and very different definitions of what “being a team” actually means - certainly isn't.
The most successful gravel privateers, monetarily speaking, are presumably those with the biggest reach and established connections. Think the Ted Kings, Dylan Johnsons, or Pete Stetinas of this world.
This system has various issues. The more riders there are looking to compete professionally in the sport, the harder it gets to get those sponsorship dollars. After all, the brands annual budgets are capped and, as a result, sponsorship is a zero-sum game.
Given that sponsorship is a marketing spend, those dollars naturally gravitate to where brands expect the biggest bang for their buck: established riders with an audience. Thus, it is very challenging for young talent to find the support required to compete in gravel (travel costs, equipment, tire plugs - it all adds up quickly), especially as the bike industry is in a time of crisis.
As a benevolent Gravel Czar, I'm of course aware of that. I also realize that a constant inflow of new talent is a prerequisite for an exciting spectator sport. Which is why I take a few measures to encourage the formation of teams.
Unlike brands, teams can massively benefit from identifying and investing in talent. They enable riders to fully concentrate on the sport. And they bring an additional dimension of excitement and rooting interest to fans.
But I would ensure that teams are introduced in a way that fits the ethos of gravel (see what I did here?) and doesn't repeat the same mistakes we find in road cycling. Here's how I implement them:
- There is a limited number of team slots available in the pro competition (in the open mass start races, there can be unlimited teams). Initially, we start with a small number of teams and increase this with regular extensions until the sustainable maximum is reached. We are effectively looking to build a US-style league, yet are growing there organically.
- Teams become shareholders of the series
- Teams need to meet minimum budget criteria
- Teams need to have their own brand identity, sponsors can have secondary naming rights at most.
- Riders below 25 who want to ride for a team for the first time need to be drafted at an annual draft.
- Teams have eight slots on their roster. A minimum of five riders have to be drafted riders (it doesn't matter which team originally drafted a rider). This ensures new talent gets opportunities.
- Teams can have a maximum of five riders in any given race.
- We limit the advantage teams have over privateers by having only one aid station with legal outside support per race (and a second station in races longer than 250 km).
- Teams grant the series media and (limited) marketing rights so that I have a lot of flexibility to create a compelling product for fans and brands alike. More on that in a bit.
2. Revenue Distribution
We bake the pie together, we eat the pie together. That's the philosophy my series operates by. So, we introduce a revenue share model that aligns the interests of all actors to create the best possible product for fans.
Specifically, all revenues my series makes from sources other than registration fees and concessions - so in particular sponsorship and media revenues - are partially distributed to teams.
I also distribute a percentage of earnings to riders so that privateers get their slice of the pie as well. This is done in two ways: First, by having prize money at every race that pays 20 deep. Second, the top three riders at the end of each season receive an allocation of shares.
3. Semi-Privateer Scheme
My plan also provides an entirely new option to riders who don't want to race on a team but also aren't looking for the full privateer experience: the Gravel Czar’s Semi-Privateer Program™.
Across sports, fandom is increasingly centered around the athletes. In team sports, it's a noticeable trend that many fans from younger generations follow individual players to whatever team they are on. As a result, brands crave more access to the athletes too.
That's why football clubs introduced so-called 360-degree player contracts: the player grants certain rights to the club, such as posts on their personal Instagram or commercial photo shoots. The club, in turn, can sell those to its sponsors.
My gravel series brings that model to gravel riders. Riders who become part of the Semi-Privateer Program grant me rights which I use to create more attractive packages for my partners. In turn, I pay them.
4. Eyeballs - digitally native
With that sustainable foundation in place, we now can bring gravel to the people.
There are a few guiding principles my series adheres to. First and foremost, we are building a platform for storytelling. We have all the ingredients: the races, the athletes, great adventures, and all the non-pro riders who participate as well.
We leverage all this to ensure that gravel matters beyond the hardcore cycling crowd. Gravel has some very zeitgeist-y qualities and a distinct aesthetic. Many of the athletes are great personalities and natural storytellers. I don't want to dumb any of this down in the way, arguably, other sports do.
To the contrary: I think a certain edginess and a willingness to be more than an athletic competition is the foundation for a sports entertainment product that works in the digital age.
My play for gravel, the spectator sport, is not to bet on big checks from TV companies. At its current size, we'd likely have to pay to get broadcast. And who cares about TV anyways?!
Instead, we go for the full digital playbook.
In steps 1-3 we created the foundation to do so sustainably. We now have direct access to the personalities that drive fan interest and their individual reach. And we are sitting in the same boat: their success is ours, and vice versa. We also introduced teams and a sustainable talent pipeline along with the tools to tell stories around them.
What we do next is, essentially, optimizing the media ecosystem that has already naturally formed around gravel. We take what's there, make it easy to navigate for fans and easy to buy into for brands (yep, we bundle).
Here are the key steps:
- We live stream all our races on YouTube.
- We create race recap videos of the Life Time Grand Prix 2024 variety for all races (which, for reference, have between 120k and 660k views).
- All racers in the pro competition have to run an action cam in the race. All footage is pooled and all riders and teams can use all the footage. As can we.
- We establish a digital production unit that helps teams and riders to make better audio and video content.
- We create a website that acts as a curated aggregator of all the content our teams and athletes create (many already have podcasts or YouTube channels, everybody is on Instagram).
- We work closely with cycling creators and invite relevant YouTubers and podcasters to visit and ride our events.
- We purchase Escape Collective memberships for all our employees and riders - under the condition that EC launches a “how the gravel race was won” podcast (working title). [Ed: step into our office, Thomas].
What we effectively did here is we created a media network with a sizeable “digital footprint” that we can now market and monetize by different means such as:
- Sponsorship and advertising.
- YouTube and Spotify advertising revenues.
- Merch sales.
If the plan works, maybe some day Netflix or Amazon cut us a nice check for our live rights. Until then, we do it ourselves as a digital media business.
Czar Mode: Off
Alas (or luckily), I'm not the Gravel Czar. So, whether or not gravel racing will end up becoming a significant spectator sport depends on the powers that are.
Luckily, it seems to me like the big three (Life Time Grand Prix, Gravel Earth Series, UCI) have ambitions and a playbook. Especially on the media and audience side, two of the three strike me as well equipped. The aspect I miss is more structure designed for longevity and the avoidance of common cycling missteps.
So we'll have to wait and see if one of the big series will manage to turn gravel racing into a sustainable endeavor. But I'm hopeful. And if they succeed, I wouldn't be surprised if, say 15 years from now, someone saying “I'm a cycling fan” would naturally imply being a gravel fan.
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