WorldTour and the 'Wild West' – Are gravel and road cycling pros one and the same, or two completely different athletes?

At the 2022 inaugural UCI Gravel World Championships, nine of the top ten finishers were professional road cyclists. Among them were Mathieu van der Poel, Magnus Cort, and winner Gianni Vermeersch, riders who likely spent more time on the massage table than their gravel bike that season. The gravel community was confused, and many were frustrated because the UCI's new discipline, marketed as an alternative to traditional road racing, had been immediately colonised by the very athletes it was meant to offer an escape from.

What happened next was a divergence of sorts. Gravel racing moving in this direction, road racing going in the other direction. The road pros who showed up to win gravel races discovered, sometimes painfully, that winning gravel was not the same thing as surviving it. And the gravel pros with world-class engines learned there was a lot more to road racing than pushing 300w for eight hours.

When discussing the differences between road and gravel pros, we’re talking about a lot more than pure physiology. We’re talking about differing lifestyles, race schedules, financial benefits, and stability. Gravel racing offers freedom, but freedom is not always desirable when it means you become the athlete, manager, negotiator, and mechanic all wrapped into one.

Both gravel and road pros are some of the strongest athletes on the planet. We’ve seen more than a few cross over from one discipline to the other, often with great success. But how easy is that transition? The path from WorldTour road racing to gravel is heavily trodden, sometimes a bit stale. Yet so many riders continue to attempt it. It works out beautifully for some, and ends in less than 12 months for others. That failure rate says a lot about how the two disciplines relate to each other, and what it actually takes to move between them.

What is a professional gravel racer?

The modern-day professional gravel racer is someone who creates their own lifestyle. They live wherever they want to and line up at the races they want to compete in. They aren’t tied down to a specific team or country. In fact, many of them live on the road, spending a few months here and there while travelling between races.

Pro gravel racers tend to be privateers, meaning they have their own cluster of individual sponsors rather than being part of a fully-sponsored team. While there are some professional teams in gravel, such as the Specialized Off-Road Team, the majority of riders do their own thing.

That creates an immense amount of freedom for the professional gravel racer, but also an equal amount of instability. Instead of being signed to a multi-year contract with a significant annual salary, gravel racers often combine income from a variety of smaller sponsors to fund their lifestyle. Some sponsors pay cash, others provide products. Few sponsors offer support at races, and even then, it might only be for a handful of events each year. Only the wealthiest of gravel racers have the funds to hire mechanics and soigneurs to travel with them.

When a WorldTour team rolls into town, they have to find a big enough parking spot for their team bus, caravan cars, and mechanic’s truck. When a gravel racer flies into Kansas for Unbound, they are probably picking up a rental car, buying their own groceries, and building their own bike in a small hotel room.

What is a professional road racer?

In contrast to the ‘Wild West’ lifestyle of a pro gravel racer, professional road racers don’t do much other than ride their bike. That is what they are paid to do, so their focus becomes on-the-bike performance over everything else.

Professional road racers need not waste energy on cooking, cleaning, or organising logistics. When they’re not out on a five-hour training ride, they are probably lying in their hotel room or plopped on the massage table. The team’s chef is cooking dinner, the soigneurs are preparing the bottles, and the mechanics are fine-tuning their shifting for tomorrow’s race.

It sounds like a wonderful life, but the WorldTour lifestyle has burnt out countless riders. Being a professional road cyclist means that you show up and race your bike when and where your team tells you to. They are paying your bills, so you have to do what they say. Of course, superstar riders make their own schedules, but the majority of professional road cyclists are not this way.

If your team needs you at a race in France tomorrow, you pack up your bags and go. If they send you to a flat race in Belgium because one of your teammates got sick, you go – never mind the fact that you might be a diminutive climber.

No matter where you’re from, you will spend the majority of your years living on the road if you’re a professional road cyclist. A small calendar might be 40-50 race days per year, while a heavy calendar may have upwards of 70 race days. A calendar year has 365 days, so that doesn’t sound like a lot. But when you factor in travel time, training camps, media obligations, and sponsor events, most professional road cyclists spend 50–70% of their year away from home. It comes as no surprise, then, that some pro cyclists bring their families to a training camp, or meet them at a big race. Chances are, they haven’t seen them in weeks.

A professional gravel racer, on the other hand, might race 15–25 times per year. If you’re a Life Time Grand Prix athlete going after the biggest annual prize purse in off-road cycling, then you have six goal races a year. Add in the National Championships, maybe the World Championships, and a few other key races, and you are looking at 10 key events per year.

Each race is so long and hard that you will probably need a week or two to recover before your next event. While a WorldTour team might force you to race when you’d rather be at home on the couch, the gravel lifestyle allows you to recover between 200km races.

There are many aspects of the pro road and pro gravel lifestyles that are different, but there are just as many similarities. At the end of the day, you are a professional cyclist, so your goal is to be fast on the bike. You know what to make for breakfast in the morning, how to get through a tough training session, and how to travel to a new city and still perform at your best the following day. When it comes to physiological performance, road and gravel cyclists are not as different as you might think.

Are pro gravel and road racers the same?

Read through the start list of any professional gravel race, and it won’t be long before you recognise 10 or 15 names from the WorldTour. Riders like Mads Würtz Schmidt, Romain Bardet, Lachlan Morton, and Petr Vakoč have all made their way from the top echelon of road cycling to professional gravel racing.

The switch is easy for some, such as Bardet, who won his first pro gravel race in August 2025 after retiring from professional road racing just two months prior. They say the engine is the biggest physiological piece of gravel performance. Those who succeed need to ride hard all day. Not for three, four, or even five hours, but upwards of eight hours in some of the world’s toughest gravel events.

Rosa Klöser won The Traka 360, finished 5th at Unbound, and raced the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in the span of three months this season. The German didn’t just ride the Tour as a stand-in, either. She finished in the main peloton more often than not, and crossed the line in Nice in 43rd overall.

When it comes to the physical demands of road and gravel racing, they are not so dissimilar in the damage they do to your legs. Many of the hardest road races in the world are 4–6 hours long. The toughest gravel races in the world are a bit longer, more like the 5–8 hour range. But gravel races are almost always one-day events, meaning that riders arrive fresh and ready for one massive day of racing.

Professional road racers often compete in stage races, lining up day after day, smashing themselves for hours on end. In terms of the overall load on the body, you could argue that road racing is tougher than gravel racing if you’re referring to stage races. Riding six hours on Stage 18 of the Tour de France is a lot different than riding six hours at Unbound when you have been training and resting for the past three weeks.

But there is a glaring difference between gravel and road racing that also relates to the differences we see in rider size: bumpy terrain.

Gravel racing terrain can mean almost anything. Some races have creek crossings, others have miles of single track, some have 4,000m of climbing, and others are flat as a pancake. But the one thing that every gravel race has is, obviously, gravel. In contrast to the smooth, high-speed tarmac of road racing, gravel roads can wreak havoc on the body. Many gravel roads are chunky, bumpy and sandy. Some have small rock gardens, thick tree roots, and slippery sand pits.

Gravel racers are typically larger than road racers, and that’s because their entire body needs to be equipped for handling off-road terrain. Not just for an hour, but all day. Some gravel racers spend more time in the gym building their core and upper body muscles; others simply develop these muscles by riding off-road all the time.

Road racers are often lean, especially when their focus is climbing and hilly races. It’s often worth shedding a kilo or two for the Tour de France, which includes more than 10,000m of climbing across three weeks of racing. Gravel typically rewards raw power and durable bodies. It’s rare that an elite gravel race includes mountains, which would reward power-to-weight over raw power.

We mentioned gym work and bigger muscles on gravel racers, but what about the rest of their training plan – do they differ from a professional road racer’s plan?

Both gravel and road racers train 15–20 hours per week, including VO2 Max intervals, tempo, threshold, and Zone 2. They both do heat training and gym work, as well as some sprints, especially in winter. But the further you dive into the details, the more their training plans start to diverge.

A professional gravel racer has lots of time to train – this brings us back to the conversation about annual race days. If there are 1–4 weeks between every race, the pro gravel racer has time to rest, recover, and put together another training block in between races. The pro road racer, on the other hand, likely has 2–3 training camps a year, with the rest of their schedule being packed with races. Once the race season begins, pro road riders are often jetting from one race to the next. There is little to no time to train in between, let alone rest before building up again.

When it comes to specific training blocks and goals, the pro gravel racer is likely to focus on fatigue resistance more than anything else. An 8-hour race is never won in the first hour. It’s after 5–7 hours of racing that the strongest riders finally come to the fore and make their winning move.

Road racers also focus on fatigue resistance, but they are more likely to emphasise short and sharp efforts in training. These are the 1-minute, 5-minute, and 20-minute efforts that you make in a road race. Whether it’s to make the breakaway or win on the final climb, this type of explosive effort is crucial in road racing.

Gravel racing is more of a long grind. Gaps are typically made when riders slowly start to crack, not because Keegan Swenson did 600w for a minute on a climb. Often pro gravel races turn into fatigue resistance time trials. That means: race hard for six hours, get a tiny gap, and then time trial for an hour to the finish. No one is putting up impressive power numbers eight hours into Unbound. Sometimes, all it takes is 550w for a few seconds to open up a gap. Whereas in road racing, riders are putting out nearly fresh numbers at the finish line.

But there is a lot more to gravel and road racing than putting power into the pedals. The number of pro road racers who earned a mechanically induced DNF at Unbound must be in the hundreds. Gravel racing requires preparation and mechanical know-how. There are a million things that could go wrong, and there isn’t a team car to save you. Most pro gravel races allow zero outside support, which means you need to bring all of the necessary tools with you. Feed zones are often 50 miles apart, which is why you’ll see riders’ pockets loaded to the brim on the start line.

Despite the challenges, riders continue to switch from road racing to gravel. A few have gotten offers to go the other way, but few gravel riders have fully transitioned into full-time road racers.

How easy is it to switch from road to gravel, or vice versa?

The standard take on gravel versus road is that 'gravel is for riders who couldn't make it in professional road racing', or 'who burned out on team dynamics and wanted independence'. That certainly could be true for some, but it is not the only force bringing road racers to gravel.

Professional road racing is like working at a big corporation. You sign a contract, you show up to work, and you do your job. Your boss has a boss, and their boss has a boss, and that person probably pays your bills. Whatever the team says goes (for the most part). You won’t get to choose half your race schedule, and the majority of the time, you’ll be trying to help one of your teammates win the race. You will be flown and bussed around the world, and there are probably a few destinations that you’d rather not visit.

Being a professional gravel racer is like running your own business. You get to call all the shots, but that also leaves you with all the responsibilities. If you’re not able to delegate, you have to do everything on your own. That includes a lot more than pedalling your bike, which causes many riders to burn out after a single year attempting gravel racing. At the end of the day, you’re not earning a paycheck to show up at the start line. You need to make money some other way. For many riders, that means appearing at the top of the results page and spraying champagne on the podium. For others, that means posting five Instagram stories every day and hosting a sponsor event the night before a big race.

The switch is easy for some, impossible for others. Freedom is wonderful for those who want it. Stability and structure are often the other end of the spectrum. Rosa Klöser currently does both, while Mads Würtz Schmidt went from Israel-Premier Tech to Specialized Off-Road racing in just two years. Countless other road racers will take the leap and try to become professional gravel racers. Many will fail, but some will succeed more than ever before.

Are road and gravel pros the same athlete? Their power numbers say yes. The race-specific skills, nutrition strategy, equipment knowledge, and self-sufficiency required to succeed in gravel racing say no.

Both disciplines are evolving at a rapid rate, so it shouldn’t be surprising to see the two converge in the near future. But right now, gravel racing rewards a different skill set compared to professional road racing. If the sport continues to evolve and money continues to pour into gravel, things will change.

One of the biggest differences right now is that pro gravel racers don’t get the same level of support compared to road racers. But take the Specialized Off-Road Team, for example. They have multiple mechanics, soigneurs, managers, coaches, and support staff at every race. Sometimes, there is even a chef at training camp. If gravel continues in that direction, it will become more and more like professional road racing every year.

We’ve already seen some pro road riders win gravel races in the middle of their road season. Wout Van Aert won the UCI Gravel World Series - Marly Grav Race less than a month after winning Paris-Roubaix, and four weeks later he won a stage and the team time trial at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. Soon the question might shift away from: are gravel and road pros the same? Perhaps we should be asking ourselves, how can a rider succeed in both gravel and road at the same time? The financial backing is strong, and there are plenty of gaps in each discipline’s racing calendar. Gravel and road used to be completely different disciplines, but you could make a strong argument that both the disciplines and their athletes are becoming the same.