"A lot of the guys who are racing here would do well in the WorldTour" - Thomas De Gendt stunned by the high level of gravel competitions

Thomas De Gendt hung up his road bike at the end of last season to set out for a new adventure - gravel. Previous weekend, he took on his first serious competitions in Girona, Spain. How did it go?

"I need to learn everything again. But that's actually really nice. In road cycling, I couldn't really do anything for the first time anymore, as I'd done all the important races multiple times. So while it was always exciting to start a Grand Tour, it was less so when I had to start Paris-Nice for the 14th time," De Gendt writes in his column on Cyclingnews.

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New faces

It's a completely different peloton compared to road where De Gendt knew every bloke by name. "Here, though, everything is new - even the riders. You've never seen most of them before as they were never in road cycling."

Not only the environment is unfamiliar to the Belgian ex-pro. He now needs to get to know his bicycle very well. And as the gravel races often come with techanical problems such as punctures and dropped chains, De Gendt needs to step up his mechanic game too.

"How you work with the bike itself is different, too. You have to take care of it yourself and think about things like tyre pressure and tyre choice. Plus, when I had a flat like in the second race, there was no car behind me giving me a new wheel. I had to figure out how to fix the tyre myself and pump it up, too."

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High level on gravel

At the moment, gravel is still far from having the commercial reach of road cycling, but De Gendt quickly found out that the top riders could well compete on road and that coming to gravel as with 16 years of road experience doesn't mean anything on a single-track trail.

"For the first hour and a half on Saturday I was pushing 350, 360 watts on average so it's not just like being in a bunch, cruising around. It's a really hard tempo. A lot of the guys who are racing here would do well in the WorldTour as well and it surprised me a little bit that the level was really so high."

De Gendt had to settle for 29th place in his first race. But it was mainly about learning. The next day he tried to put all the experience of previous day to practice, but ill-timed puncture put him out of contention for even distantly valuable result.

"The biggest lesson for next time, at least for races where there's a lot of uphill and downhill: always stay on the front," he concludes.

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