LEFT TURNS is where I go off script. No brief. No angle decided in advance. Just a thought that showed up on a ride or in a feed and wouldn’t leave my brain. Off the back. On purpose. Still GRAVITYHILL. Just further out
You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.
I gotta be really honest here. I really don’t like Instagram. I use it because I’m kinda forced to. You know how it is, you’re trying to get something off the ground so you need a social media presence. Make a few posts, try to get it popping (never works). But also, it’s where cycling culture lives right now and if you are not on it, you are not in the conversation (I don’t think im part of the conversation btw). So, I am on it. Scrolling more than I would like to admit.
A few days after Unbound Gravel I opened the app and my feed was wall to wall Kansas mud. Riders I follow, brands I follow, accounts I had never seen before, all of it gravel. Even the podcasters were talking about it. The algo was spitting gravel in my face like I just raced the damn thing. Way more content than the Giro got. One of the biggest races in the world, one of the most beautiful races in the world, three weeks through Italy, and Unbound had way more presence on my feed. It seems like you can’t be a cycling influencer if you didn’t do Unbound…
I do not have a problem with gravel. I want to be clear about that.
I would ride it if I could. But right now, that means putting my bike in a car and driving 45 minutes out of Montreal. The terrain around here is road terrain. Gravel riding for me is a logistical decision before it is a riding decision and most days, I dont have the time or the patience for the logistics of it all. Traffic in this city has gotten so bad that I can’t imagine waking up to put my bike on the rack and take a drive to ride some gravel (although one can make a serious case for buying a gravel bike for road riding since we’ve got potholes the size of swimming pools). That said, something interesting has been happening in Quebec over the last couple of years. Gravel events are popping up everywhere. Good ones. Gravelooza. Big Red. Events that are drawing real numbers and building real community. Road rides? Almost nothing (I do understand that logistically its easier to close gravel roads than it is to close regular roads, but still). The organized ride infrastructure in this province is being built entirely around gravel right now and road is barely in the conversation
Gravel used to feel like something. Something that was new. Not too long ago. There was an energy around it that road cycling was missing. Looser. More open. Come as you are, bring whatever bike you have, nobody is going to look sideways at your kit. Wear a bib, throw on a tee, tie a scarf around your neck. That was kinda the whole point. Ride some dirt and drink some recovery ales. It positioned itself as the antidote to everything road cycling had become and people showed up in massive numbers because they believed it.
I even almost bought a gravel bike instead of a new road one two years ago cause the vibe around gravel seemed spot on.
This year though I wanted to pay attention to gravel racing. There seemed to be a lot of hype around these races so I figured I should watch some. Traka. Badlands. Unbound. There was a circus around it. Specialized dropped the Crux 5 two days before Unbound 2026. Tarmac SL8 tube shaping, Tarmac SL8 seatpost, full aero overhaul. Their own marketing called it ‘going full Tarmac mode.’ 48 hours later that bike swept the podium. Five of the six pro podium spots across the men’s and women’s races. The timing was not accidental. Nothing about it was accidental.
But the bike launch is really only part of it. The bigger thing is who was riding it and how. Specialized Off-Road is being called a super team, and that framing is accurate. Keegan Swenson, three-time Lifetime Grand Prix champion. Sofia Gomez Villafane, also three-time Lifetime Grand Prix champion. They are married to each other. Mads Würtz Schmidt, European Gravel Champion, won Unbound outright. Matt Beers, three-time Cape Epic champion. Annika Langvad, five-time mountain bike world champion. This is not a brand sponsoring a couple of athletes. This is an operation, resourced and coordinated the way a road team operates, racing with team tactics that the sport has never seen at this level.
Right now there are maybe 15 to 20 riders making six-figure salaries in gravel. The drop beneath them is steep. Some riders finishing inside the top ten of the Life Time Grand Prix are not making a cent. The Life Time Grand Prix prize pool is 590,000 dollars in 2026, up 55 percent from last year. The series winner takes home 50,000. The opportunity is real but so is the gap.
The money is real and growing. The gravel bike market is projected to hit 5.8 billion dollars by 2028. Unbound pulled over 500,000 views on the YouTube livestream this year. The sport is not niche anymore and the brands know it. Where the money goes, the products always follow.
So now, what happens to kit design when gravel is where the money is?
Gravel kit has always been more functional than road kit. More pockets. More storage. Room for a rain jacket, a tool, nutrition for ten hours in the dirt. The aesthetic built around that utility was part of gravel’s identity. Earth tones, looser fits, the visual language of someone who is going far and needs to carry things to get there. Kit brands have been running parallel lines for a few years now, a road collection and a gravel collection, different aesthetics, different briefs. But if the money keeps moving the way it is moving, that hierarchy could flip. Gravel becomes the primary design brief. Road becomes secondary.
You can already feel it in the new summer collections from the top brands. Look at Pas Normal Studios. Their Mechanism gravel line and their road line are converging fast. Same type of fabrics, same aero logic, same very very tight silhouette. Same-ish colors. Yes, the kits are looking great, but its getting harder to tell what separates the road collection from the gravel one other than the marketing language. Why release two collections when the only things that change are the number of pockets and the colors?
The UCI just made this more interesting. From July 1 2026, internal front jersey pockets are banned in road racing. The rule was triggered by riders stuffing hydration bladders and nutrition into front pockets for aerodynamic gain, a practice that became very visible at Unbound. The UCI cited aerodynamic advantage, sporting fairness, and rider safety, the argument being those aero gains lead to higher speeds and more severe crashes. The UCI rules on clothing apply to road, track, cyclocross and mountain bike. Gravel is not on that list. Gravel riders can still run whatever pocket configuration they want. Road kit is getting more restricted at the exact moment gravel kit has the most design freedom it has ever had. A kit brand paying attention to that gap has a very interesting few seasons ahead of them.
New brands should be emerging that skip road entirely. Gravel-first from day one. It hasn’t really happened yet, not at scale, but the conditions are definitely there. The audience is built. The money is moving. The design space is wide open. And if there is one thing happening in the clothingscape right now it is that specialists are winning. The brands that do one thing obsessively are pulling ahead of the ones trying to cover everything. A gravel-only brand with a clear point of view and the right community behind it has a real opening right now. Someone is going to walk through it.
We can even see it with the bikes. Road bikes have always been the main attraction in the sport. Magazines revolve around them. The cyclosphere loses its mind over a new road bike release. But in 2026, gravel bikes are getting as aero as road bikes. The geometry just as aggressive. So why not just buy a gravel bike and run two sets of wheels? It is starting to feel like the right move.
Joe Laverick (you should give him a follow on Substack) made an observation in his post-Unbound piece that stopped me mid-read. He noted that ultra racing in 2026 looks a lot like gravel did pre-2020. Niche, growing, sponsors starting to circle. Then he caught himself and wrote: ‘Wait, isn’t that what we said about gravel.’ Someone who’s inside the sport is noticing the same cycle start again. That line has been sitting with me since.
None of this makes gravel bad. Some of what is happening is genuinely good. More prize money means more riders can make a living doing something they love. More investment means better equipment and more events and more entry points into the sport. That matters.
What I keep sitting with is something smaller than an argument and harder to shake. Gravel felt like something specific for a while. The energy was different. It wasn’t about speed. It was about freedom. And I am watching that energy change in real time, post by post, product launch by product launch, super team signing by super team signing. The feed after Unbound felt less like a community sharing something they loved and more like an industry that had found its moment.
Maybe that is just what growth looks like. Maybe every scene that finds a real audience goes through this and comes out the other side with something worth keeping. I want to believe that.
I do not know where this goes. But I am watching the design space of it all closely. If gravel keeps pulling the money and the talent and the attention, something will shift in how kit gets made and who it gets made for. It will be interesting to see who moves first.
To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.
Super article! Beaucoup de bonnes réflexions
Nice write up. As I just sold the only bike I own, a tri bike, I am now on the hunt for a drop bar bike and it'll almost certainly be a gravel frame that I have two sets of wheels for.