Magnus Bak Klaris will be one of the two leaders in the red-and-white kits of the Danish team for elite men at the UCI Gravel World Championships in the Netherlands, competing alongside Mads Würtz Schmidt.
Klaris has two other red jerseys of significance, which he recently won as the overall champion of the Gravel Earth Series and a two-time Danish gravel champion, while Würtz Schmidt won a blue-and-gold emblazoned jersey at the European Gravel Championship. They'll be a force on a team with nine qualified riders, the two used to working together on the PAS Racing Team.
They're both in the hunt for rainbows, and Klaris said it will be a hard day of work, with not just a challenging course with a lot of turns, but with the influx of ProTeam and WorldTour road riders as well.
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"The level is higher on the road than on the gravel scene, so people coming from the road have a good chance of doing a nice result here. We've seen that the last three years, actually, all the [gravel] championships have been won by a road cyclist, and [Mathieu] Van der Poel is kind of cyclocross-road. So I think it's nice that the competition is high, but I also think it's a shame because I've never seen the World Championship jersey in a gravel race," Klaris told Cyclingnews on Friday.
"I think it's also a shame that many of the best gravel cyclists don't prioritise World Championships, because some really strong riders from the US are not coming here, and a lot of my teammates also don't really want to want to race here because it's so much of a 'road-gravel'. I think it's fine that the road guys are here, because it has to be open for everyone."
He said the course is technical in the sense that it has a lot of corners on the circuits. There is no chance of rain, so the dry track, of which almost 80% is on dirt, will be quite fast.
"This race is much more about positioning yourself, like in a road race, [rather] than in the gravel races in the US, which are really, really long and straight. This has a lot of corners and is twisty, with small kickers and stuff like that. So I think it would be nice with a smaller field.
"But I would like to see some courses [at future World Championships] that are more like rough gravel, so more like Traka, The Rift or Unbound."
Klaris has performed well on the longer courses with 'real' gravel, winning the two-day Santa Vall in Spain and The Rift in Iceland. At a trio of US races in May, he was sixth at both Rule of Three and Gravel Locos. Those are the tracks he finds are most challenging. His Unbound Gravel 200 effort ended outside the top 50 due to two punctures and a crash.
"In the US, I haven't succeeded yet. At Traka [200], I was in the front breakaway and had some issues - lost some bottles, some things didn't go my way - and I ended up eightieth. But later in Europe, It was pretty successful," he admitted, saying he'd like "revenge" at both The Traka and Unbound.
At a trio of UCI Gravel World Series events, which offer shorter courses, he won at Wörthersee Gravel Race and added runner-up spots at Turnhout Gravel and Blaavands Huk as a home race. With second place at Ranxo Gravel, he won the overall title at Gravel Earth Series.
But he said the UCI courses are quite different to what you get in the GES, and it is a UCI gravel course which has to be conquered on Sunday, as well as taking on an expected swarm of road riders, and a lot of Belgian talent.
"It's difficult because we don't really know the level of the road guys. I think top 10 is what I'm here for, and obviously I'm dreaming of winning, but I think it would be super, super difficult to beat guys like Tim Wellens and the Belgian squad.
"It's a super safe course, so that's really nice. But I would have liked to see some rougher gravel and a rougher course."
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