Me and all my gravel friends 🤝😮💨
"Someone like Van der Poel or Van Aert is of course also world class" - Gravel World Championships organizer happy with race's coverage
CyclingWednesday, 04 October 2023 at 15:00
The Gravel World Championships in Veneto take place this weekend and it will host a whole array of quality pro riders. From current world-class pros, former retired road riders and specialists on the discipline, the racing in the area will allow for an exciting spectacle where many riders will also enjoy and help the development of gravel racing.
"It will still be a success. There are absolute top rider at the start, of which Wout van Aert is one of them. Gravel is absolutely booming," Erwin Vervecken, race organizer, told In de Leiderstrui. "Last year there was some criticism of the course: that it was too much of a road race, too flat and not enough of a challenge. This year there is a lot more climbing meters and gravel, so it really is a typical gravel competition. That's why there are some top riders from America who were not there last year. This will also give it the international reputation it deserves.”
Gianni Vermeersch took the world title last year, with Mathieu van der Poel and Peter Sagan among the headliners for a packed event. Into this year, the race features another heavy packed startlist filled with stars, all riders who voluntarily joined the race and - in the same weekend as Il Lombardia - put the race up high on the priority list for spectators. The race organizer is quite happy with how the event has developed, and the potential that it carries into it's upcoming years.
"Someone like Van der Poel or Van Aert is of course also world class, put them in hundredth position and they will also participate. If Mathieu, Sagan and Van Avermaet had not been at the start last year, there would have been no live TV broadcast," he says. With an array of stars at the start line, it will surely be a very popular event once again with a set of rainbow stripes to attribute.
Read also
claps 0visitors 1913
Just in
Popular news
Latest comments
- WC hardly counts. - You couldn’t be further away from the truth.
UltimateOpportunist18-12-2024 - Well said! It's true, even for those of us who are older and slower now.leodis18-12-2024
- Is the BBC really so important?leodis18-12-2024
- The only way a cyclist can win SPOTY is to be British and win the Tour in a year when little else happens. But that's OK because the award is decided by TV viewers' votes, so it is basically meaningless.Renz18-12-2024
- There are billions of people globally who have never heard of the BBC and never will, let alone follow their “influencing”, it’s about time preconditioned citizens realised how insignificant some institutions really are. We are all biased from our environment growing up, there us much for adults to reset in their heads if they are to understand the order of things in the big world and realise what are real and perceived problems and injustices.Mistermaumau18-12-2024
- Exactly, most cycling fans are also active riders, another difference with many sports, we can actually associate with these people and experience many of the same feelings.Mistermaumau18-12-2024
- Especially now that they claim to be stopping CO treatment, but what else have they (and others) been trying, before banning it starts to be discussed?Mistermaumau18-12-2024
- The article gives a lot of food but lacks much thought. Cycling was PERMANENTLY damaged by one guy’s quest for invincibility and lost a lot of followers that were helping to make it more mainstream. The days of British glory (track, Sky, Wiggins. Froome, Ineos) which were also permitting Anglo media (the dominant form for global influence) to sell the sport as mainstream, are also dead. Many sports don’t have a season’s worth of events to report on, the media focuses on one huge event WC/Olympics and that’s sll that counts, cycling is the opposite, the WC hardly counts whereas traditional races are considered more noteworthy and riders pick and choose races according to a personal agenda, there is no single culminating event and each is more important to some and most important to a few, how is a general reporter to make sense of comparisons in such an individualistic structure? Awards are usually consensus based and there are just not enough people following cycling for it to score high across the board. Sometimes there is not a single or simple reason for things, it is just the cumulative effect of many effects influencing things and in this case, there are dozens. In most countries’ media a sport like cricket or darts or rugby or even the whole Commonwealth results would be completely overlooked too, this may not be the case in the UK or at the Beeb but it does highlight how different perceptions are from different places and people, sumo or wrestling, kayak, judo, karate, have any of these ever even been considered? I don’t know but probably boxing has. A sport has to be commercially popular enough to count, the problem with cycling is, it SEEMS popular but isn’t that just a bias because it’s kind of free? How many fans would really remain if you had to pay a 50€ entrance fee to look from the sidelines, and that’s the thing, the majority of people don’t really watch the SPORT, they enjoy being part of the event and moment and know very little about things. True followers are very rare as the number of commentators on websites such as this one show. Riders also just aren’t interesting enough personalities to interest mainstream media, they have very few newsworthy incidents and even when, the murdering of a wife remained largely internal to the cycling media. It seems as if the cycling powers that be don’t promote cycling news to the outside world, perhaps from lack of budget to persuade general media to report (and we know some sport federations have huge budgets to convince media and reporters to make space for them, look how many pages of national newspapers were dedicated to lower league sports results or even horse racing compared to cycling, gambling companies also influence this as they obviously have more interest in promoting data their clients are likely to be interested in. Anyway, these are just some more aspects the cycling federations should reflect on before ordering an expensive audit to understand why we can’t pull our weight on the global sport scene.Mistermaumau18-12-2024
- Tadej, unlike Armstrong, does not have cancer. Whenever they found something strange about Armstrong, he and his complice system, explained that they were innovative procedures for cancer, which is why he was able to fool around for so many years.
maria2024202418-12-2024 - Oh, Always this frustrated hater present, poor soul, his happiness is defame with falsely rational arguments, pure cheap sophistry. Calm down, go to holidays, maybe you could obtain a genuine moment of happiness.maria2024202418-12-2024