S13: KM0: Gravel Dust & Rainbows (available here for a limited time)

This episode was released for Friends of the Podcast subscribers at the start of the year and, with the 2025 UCI Gravel World Championships taking place in Maastricht in the Netherlands over the weekend, we're making the episode available for everyone to listen to in the build-up to the race.

So, let's go back to October 2024...

(This episode is part of our Friends of the Podcast series. It will be available on our regular feed until the end of the weekend. To sign up as a friend go to thecyclingpodcast.com)

Last October, Lionel Birnie and Simon Gill went to Leuven in Belgium for the third edition of the UCI Gravel World Championships.

They'd made the journey across the channel to the Flanders Classics many times but this was their first trip to a gravel race and they were keen to see what this overnight sensation (which was more than a century in the making) was all about.

They meander through the history of gravel racing, examine where gravel and road converge, and take part in the Rainbow Gravel Ride, the sportive for amateur riders held on the finishing loop of the World Championship course.

In this episode we hear from two American riders, Ian Boswell and Larry Warbasse, about their experiences of gravel racing, Colin Clews, the organiser of the Cicle Classic in Britain – a road race with gravel that preceded the current trend by a decade or so – and Connor Swift, who was in the thick of the racing in Leuven.