Welcome to Escape Collective. Please select your language.
Please note that this is an automated translation and it will not be perfect. All articles have been written in English and if anything appears to not make sense, please double check in English.
When gravel racing gets big it can begin to feel as if it has surpassed a race and instead become something more like high school prom. Everyone comes out for the race, but the festivities on either side of the event seem equally important.
Lycra kits and bicycles replace tuxedos and limos, with every rider allowed to express themselves with the bikes and components they – or their sponsors in some cases – choose.
SBT GRVL is a clear example of this as it takes the gravel community, transports it to a notoriously glamorous Colorado ski town, and goes to great lengths to make its umbrella big enough to attract folks from all corners of the cycling world. Like your high school prom, with its rich kids, jocks, hipsters, and nerds, the SBT expo has it all and that’s visible through the bike everyone parades around.
To dig into the race and get a sense of some of the tech that makes up these big events, I took the afternoon before the event to stroll the streets of Steamboat to find everything from the newest pro builds to the best of the deep cut, hipster stuff that defines gravel tech in 2024. Here are some of the things that caught my eye:
To start, we found this beautiful Lightspeed Appalachia and its pilot Bo Hou. I would like to say it was spotted amongst the crowd at the expo, but in reality, it was heard as the Ritchey hubs buzzed away with a crisp tick from somewhere outside of my viewfinder as I clicked photos of a different bike. Eventually, I found Bo and got to chatting about this titanium beauty from 2000. Bo, from Boston, got into cycling a few years ago after two of his buddies convinced him to give it a go. One of his friends was a racer who encouraged him to get something fast. The other was a mechanic who argued for something cool. You can figure out who won. In total, Bo has five Litespeeds, including this 2000 Appalachia which is tricked out with a full chrome set of Ritchey components and a SRAM Force mechanical groupset. The rims in particular were a source of pride for Bo as it took him a while to find a set of chrome, tubeless-compatible, rim-brake rims. Yup, sometimes a person can have it all. While the rig did manage to escape many of the trappings of modern gravel bikes, the treads were ultimately where the practicality of modern technology seemed to win out. You know what they say: death, taxes, and Pathfinder Pros at gravel races are the only certainties in life. Gotta love a good headbadge. Here’s a bike on the far other end of the SBT build spectrum. Haley Smith of the Trek Driftless team is riding perhaps the newest bike at the event since the Trek Checkmate was unveiled the day before the expo. While the Trek crew has the new SRAM Red XPLR available to them, many of the SRAM pros opted instead for a Mullet option with large chainrings and XX Eagle derailleurs. That pairing helps to offer a wide range for the steep terrain new to the SBT course this year, but also to retain an efficient chain line for the faster stretches of “Champagne Gravel.”Haley is also one of the four pro gravel athletes who have been a part of extensive testing of the new Coros head unit. The Trek riders began this season on Bontrager tires, however, things appear to have changed as each of the four Driftless athletes have different tire options. Haley has the 45 mm Maxxis Reavers which makes sense for the Canadian who was a Maxxis factory rider just last year.
It was interesting to see how the 45 mm tires matched with the new Checkmate frame which has a stated tire clearance of 45 mm. As you can see, that is a conservative limit which is good in this day and age where gravel tires seem to be getting wider at a rapid clip. The only thing that Haley said was bespoke to SBT was the bar bag for snacks. SBT GRVL is a 125-mile (201 km) “no stopper,” so packs and tall bottles were standard amongst the pro field. The top tube bag, which uses Trek’s many attachment points, is a slick addition to Haley’s kit which should lighten the load in her pockets. The new frame retains Treks’ IsoSpeed decoupler.Third place in the elite men’s race, Alexey Vermeulen and his Enve M.O.G.Alexey is a Shimano athlete who alternates between 1x and 2x options with mechanical 12-speed GRX and an electronic 12-speed 2x setup in his stable. In both cases, the former road racer needs a bigger gear than the GRX range offers so he will include a Dura-Ace compact crankset or Wolf Tooth 1x ring with a GRX mechanical rear derailleur. Another treat that comes from Alexey’s main sponsor Enve is the unreleased “Tadej Pogačar” bars. The result is a slimmed-down front end that would catch the eye of even the most gravel-agnostic Irish cycling tech editor. Big bottles, however, are a constant regardless of the make or model of bike at SBT. A prototype tyre from Kenda. All the bikes here are rigs that were brought to Steamboat to be raced, except this one. This Sanitas titanium bike was made for Twisted Spoke CBD who had a booth at the expo. The bike caught my eye for a couple of reasons. First, the paint. White accents can be tricky, but the white here brought attention to a couple of things. Like these Onyx hubs laced with Berd spokes. Or these TRP levers strapped to a white internally routed cockpit. These levers are a favorite for the single-speed community since they are sans shifting paddles. For this build that has gears, the shifting is handled by some SRAM blips underneath the inside of the hoods. Another headbadge worthy of showing. No blips were present on this gem of a build, however. Kai Addae is from New Haven, Connecticut and is here as a part of the Ride for Racial Justice team. This is her first time racing in Colorado and she comes ready with a steel build from Elephant, a one-man band out of Spokane, Washington. Kai’s bike is the National Forest Explorer which she has had since 2022. Kai is affiliated with the Bradley Street Co-op in New Haven which is where she was able to get her build up and running. Connecticut is a vibrant cycling community with a ton of grassroots community-based bike projects that offer easy access to cycling. Aided by the resources and expertise of the co-op, Kai put together a splendid build mixing retro geometry and tech with some modern moving bits. Those moving bits include a pair of 26-inch Continental Race King tires. While the rest of the gravel world is starting to come around to wide tires on gravel, Kai is already there. Someone else who is certainly in the same school of thought is Tobin Ortenblad. Tobin is a part of the Santa Cruz htSQD. Along with his teammate Keegan Swenson, who won SBT for the third time in a row Sunday, the team is pushing the boundary on the tech side of things with big tires, big chainrings, and plenty of tinkering. Tinkering which includes some new rubber from Maxxis. With the adventure-oriented Santa Cruz Stigmata as a base, the team has used the Maxxis ST 2.25″ tires on a couple of occasions this year. The only hiccup?The bike does not have 2.25 inches of clearance on the rear and the Aspen ST does not come any narrower. Instead, the htSQD has taken some clippers to a standard Aspen that goes down to a 2.1″ width. The team is hoping for a 53 mm version of the Aspen ST in the future. My guess is Maxxis will try to honor that request. While teammate Swenson used the full SRAM Red XPLR group (including 10-46T cassette), Ortenblad ran a Mullet build with the 10-52T mountain bike cassette and derailleur.A Ritchey WCS Carbon Solostreem one-piece road cockpit sits up front. Nevertheless, putting wider than two-inch tires on a gravel bike is a challenge even for the roomiest of frames. A look at the rear triangle of the bike provides a good example of the extreme lengths these riders are going to find speed. Clearance on either side of the chainstay is as tight as can be as elite riders look to have their proverbial cake and eat it too with gravel bike maximalism. One of the companies that is enabling the experimentation is SRAM and the company was out in force at the SBT expo. A few of the employees also were lining up to race and brought their own unique builds as cycling insiders. Here is Andrew Gardner with his Firefly titanium gravel bike. Andrew is one of the founders of Velocio and has continued to work for the brand now that its under the SRAM umbrella. He is also a proud New Englander which explains how he managed to come to own a custom titanium bike from the Boston-based frame company. While he is running a previous-generation system right now, Andrew is about to get a UDH upgrade after SBT as he will send the bike back to the builder so they can swap out the rear dropouts to an option that can handle the new derailleur system. Andrew was on the regular Zipp 303 Firecrests (25 mm internal width).One bike that certainly needs no updating is that of Nico Deportago-Cabrera. Nico is a former messenger and fixed-gear racer who now works at Zipp. He was racing the 125 miles of the SBT Black Course on his steel Squid Gravatron gravel bike. While he has raced gravel fixed this year, SBT is a bit of a tough cookie to crack without gears and brakes so Nico has gone with all the modern trappings including the new SRAM Red XPLR groupset. If you aren’t going to race with one gear, you might as well race with 13. Nico is also riding the new mega deep, mega wide Zipp 303 XPLR wheelset. What’s more interesting is that he is testing a pair of 47 mm Teravail Washburn tires with the wheel. Strictly speaking, this tire is not officially compatible with the wheel, however, if it’s on Nico’s bike it could be making its way to the Zipp-approved list soon. Nico only had good things to say thus far. Not to be outdone, Squid provided another splendid headbadge.
