Gravel Locos Hico

My American road trip started in Texas. I am here in the USA for exactly four weeks to race three races. Gravellocos, Rule of Three and Unbound. This all culminates in a four week “American roadtrip” while visiting old friends I made last year and making new ones along the way.

Thomas Dekker is my partner in crime for the whole trip and “Hossel” Dennis Bruin accompanied us the first week. We arrived Wednesday night and went straight to the “car barn” of Fabian. The race promotor of Gravel Locos.

Fabian is the most characteristic promoter I ever met. He became a good friend after I attended last year’s event and takes care of everything. Literally everything. The guy takes care of my housing (actually for the whole month), makes the Gravel Locos race trophies himself, cooks dinner for 1500 people, arranges all the reststops on the spot and creates a three day unique atmosphere where all the pros meet at dinners and lunches together. In stead of the world tour approach of being on your own all day arranging your own stuff, he encourages us to mingle for three days, share a laugh, drinks and food and race our balls (or boobies) off at the end. Then after the race finishes, he opens the music festival himself by taking place behind the drums. The amount of energy he has is incredible and admirable.

I started Gravel Locos with number one as I won it last year and I felt good Friday morning. The jetlag was gone and I couldn’t wait to race the next day. And then after a podcast I did with Ian Boswell, where I was the guest on his ‘Breakfast with Boz’ series, some really bad news reached us. Moriah Wilson, the rising star of the gravel scene, a 25 year old girl who was living in San Francisco was reported to be shot in an Austin house Wednesday night. She was supposed to race Saturday and making her way to Hico when it happened.

A dark cloud entered my brain. I met her briefly last year around Leadboat (the combined races of Leadville and SBTGRVL) when our Sprinter campervans were parked next to eachother to camp before the races. We met last April again before Sea Otter Classic, a race she won and on top of that, she became my colleague as she earned an ambassador contract at Specialized, the company she worked for as a demand planner. She was nice, humble and a bad ass on the bike. Cycling seemed so irrelevant to me that Friday. I couldn’t get my head around what happened. A human tragedy in the gravel scene.

Her family was in contact with Fabian and urged him to let his event continue as Mo would have wanted. So we did and after a really emotional start and a procession to the first river crossing at 12 km into the race, we started after a moment of silence. Fabian did a fabulous speech that gave all of us goosebumps and it was the most impressive tribute I ever experienced during my life or career.

My head wasn’t into racing and I saw my friends around me having the same problem. It took 20 miles before the first attack happened. It was an attack out of pain for Mo - fellow friend and ambassador Ian Boswell did the attack en we slowly started racing at km 30.

The level this year seemed to be a lot higher than last year when I won. My presence in the USA last year inspired training buddies Jasper Ockeloen and Ivar Slik alias the Slikmeister to experience an American adventure for one month, doing exactly the same races. Ian Boswell was there, Kiel Reijnen, Pete Stetina and a bunch of strong Texan mountainbikers. But that didn’t mean the race was faster. The size of the front group was big and that caused negative racing for a while. Nobody wanted to split turns evenly and tried to sit on wheels. That’s why the race felt slow.

But the weather changed things up. After 10 am the temperature raised close to a burning 40 degrees Celsius and people started to degenerate of that. The first mandatory reststop where everybody had to stop for 2 minutes was reached with a big group. At the second stop after 170 km we were left with only 12 guys. The final could begin.

I felt surprisingly good after the depressing beginning and decided to “ride like Mo’. I was literally thinking ‘What would Mo have done?’ before launching attack after attack in the final 30 km. But unfortunately my legs were not good enough to succeed. I could get small gaps but after like 2 /3 minutes trying to go solo every time, the group came back. I hope it was caused by the hot weather and not by a lack of form.

The best shot for the win was when I closed a gap on the Slikmeister and the two of us rode away. I counted already a 1-2 for the “Dutch Maffia” but Peter proved why he ruins gravel as he pulled us back at last moment ;)

Then Jasper did a strong attack with three miles to go and immediately we knew: that’s the one. We rode for second place and I don’t know if Mo would have done the same but I settled for 8th. I couldn’t get my ass out of the saddle to sprint.

This was the weirdest start to my American adventure I could imagine. My legs are good and I am proud of my level of racing after last year’s crash in September, but all this seems so irrelevant now. And race life goes on, up to the next event. How I would have loved to see Moriah crush it.

All photo credits go to Marc AR