Gravel Earth, a new globe-trotting race series for professional an amateurs has been unveiled for 2023.
The series will include 6-8 gravel events around the globe and end with the ‘Earth Final’, a championship style race at the end of the cycling season.
The series, organised by Girona based promotion company Klassmark is, they say, designed to reach a global audience.
Klassmark’s own endurance gravel event, the Traka, will get the series underway in April, and the Earth Final will wrap up proceedings in late October or November, also organised by the Spain-based promotion company.
The various other events are will be organised by a variety of different promoters across the globe.
Cristina Freixes, Klassmark co-owner, said that the idea and thinking behind Gravel Earth was to expose more cycling fans to off-road racing far from civilisation.
She said: “What we wanted is to choose different kinds of styles of races but all in amazing places.”
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“To provide more of an experience than a competition.”
Despite Freixes promise to make the event more of an experience than a competition, there is still a slight competitive element incorporated into the event.
A points system has been set up so that the top male, female and non-binary finishers of each event will be awarded a certain amount. Each gravel event will also be weighted differently depending on the difficulty of the course.
Gravel has boomed in recent years, with the UCI now organising its own Gravel World Championships. The event ran for the first time this year and was won by Belgian Gianni Vermeersch.
Belgian superstar Wout van Aert recently said that he was eyeing potential participation in the gravel worlds in the years to come.
With each event being rated differently, Gravel Earth provides the opportunity for riders to select events that particularly suit their riding style and skillset.
For example, victory at the Migration Gravel Race in Kenya will earn you 12,000 points whereas the The Rift and Nordic Gravel Series events in Sweden will get you 9,000 a piece.
Freixes explained that she and the Klassmark team took advice from riders such as Nathan Haas and Lachlan Morton to develop the points system. The overall ranking for the series will be determined by adding a rider's top two scores, as well as the result of the Earth Final, which will involve more points than the other events.
“This classification format rewards the most regular and versatile bikers of the year,” Freixes added.
After previously working in higher education, Tom joined Cycling Weekly in 2022 and hasn't looked back. He's been covering professional cycling ever since; reporting on the ground from some of the sport's biggest races and events, including the Tour de France, Paris-Roubaix and the World Championships. His earliest memory of a bike race is watching the Tour on holiday in the early 2000's in the south of France - he even made it on to the podium in Pau afterwards. His favourite place that cycling has taken him is Montréal in Canada.
