You signed up for Iceland's The Rift in 2022 because the photos looked like another planet and the start list said you could line up beside whoever turned up. You arrived on your own bike, in your own kit, with two bottles and a frame bag. You finished in the top 25 percent of your age group, drank a beer with a former World Tour pro you'd watched on television in 2014, and went home thinking this was the version of cycling you'd been looking for the whole time.
You signed up again in 2025. You finished slightly faster. You finished much further down the list. The riders who used to be approachable were now in matching team kit being told what to do over earpieces. The pit stops looked like Formula 1. The conversation in the local pub the night before the race had quietly disappeared. Nobody was rude. Nobody had done anything wrong. But the thing you came to gravel for was no longer entirely there.
This is the conversation Anthony has with Nathan Haas on the Roadman Cycling Podcast. Haas — Australian, ten years in the World Tour, the first European pro to fully cross over to elite gravel, retired this year at 36 — is one of the most thoughtful voices on what is happening to the discipline he helped legitimise. The episode is honest. It is also a little sad. It is the kind of conversation cycling has not really had with itself since the early 2010s when the same questions were being asked about cross-country mountain biking, with answers that did not age well.
Listen to the full conversation with Nathan Haas →
What Was Won, And What Is Being Lost
Haas is unromantic about his own role in the shift. He was, by his own account, the first European World Tour pro to cross over fully to gravel. He gave the discipline legitimacy. He won The Rift the year Anthony raced it. He attracted other World Tour riders, who attracted manufacturers, who attracted money, which attracted teams. The professionalisation of gravel is, in part, his fault. He says so on the episode without much defending himself.
What he wants protected is not his own legacy. What he wants protected is the cultural texture that gravel was built on.
The early years he describes — riders sharing Airbnbs, travelling together, drinking together at the pub the night before a race, eating together after — are the texture that made gravel feel different from any other competitive cycling discipline. The OG European gravel scene, in his telling, was a moving group of about ten riders. Colin Strickland. Niki Cosgrove. Jasper Ockeloen. Petr Vakoč. Pawel Wiener. Themselves. The same group at every major event. Genuinely friends, genuinely fast, genuinely racing each other in the morning and genuinely sharing dinner that evening. Pro cycling does not do this. Mountain biking stopped doing this years ago. Gravel did it, and that was the point.
The contrast with what gravel is becoming is stark. The professional teams have arrived. The riders who join those teams stop doing their own race registration, stop showing up at the pre-race social, stop training with anyone outside their team because that is what team culture does. The community that was the entire selling point quietly disappears as the trophies multiply.
Haas's framing on this is the one cyclists should hold. Gravel was a counterculture sport that the cycling industry is now trying to professionalise into a mainstream one. As he puts it on the episode, telling the rockstar to put on a dinner suit and sing carols misses the point of why people loved the rockstar in the first place.
The Eight-Person Pit Stop
The most concrete illustration of what is changing is the Unbound pit stop story he tells.
The first time Haas raced Unbound, he pulled up to a folding table with his own kit on it, grabbed a hydropack, took two bottles, squirted some chain lube on, and set off again. His bike was still a filthy mess.
The same pit stop, for a fully supported rider, looked like this. The team pulled up. The rider hopped off. Two mechanics with cordless drills removed the wheels. Two new wheels — fresh, unticked, unproblematic — went on. A pressure washer ran over the bike. Someone changed the rider's glasses. Someone else handed them a new helmet. A new hydropack. A clean kit. Lubed chain. The rider rode out of the feed zone with a bike that was, for all practical purposes, brand new. The privateer rider rode out next to them on the same dirty bike from forty seconds earlier.
The structural problem is not that the supported rider is cheating — the rules permit it, the teams have built genuine logistical advantages, and the privateer riders have access to the same support model if they want to chase it. The structural problem is that the race is no longer the same race. One rider is doing one thing. The other is doing a different version of cycling that happens to take place on the same course.
Multiply this across UCI gravel races — and gravel UCI points now count toward riders' overall UCI totals, which is drawing more World Tour riders into the discipline — and the front of the field becomes increasingly inaccessible to anyone not on a fully supported team.
For the amateur perspective on what this means in practice, see our Unbound 200 training guide and the Badlands training guide. The mid-pack and the back of the pack at these events remain genuinely accessible. The front does not.
The Cat 1 Pyramid Has Lost Its Sky
The most cycling-relevant frustration Anthony brings to the conversation is the one most listeners will recognise from their own racing. He used to look at the front of a Cat 1 race and see a path. Train hard after work, get 10 to 15 hours a week in, race smart, and a podium was reachable. He used to look at gravel and see the same thing. Then the World Tour riders started crossing over, and the version of "competitive at the front" started requiring the entire architecture of a pro career — altitude camps, chefs, mechanics, support staff.
Haas does not soften this. He calls the escalation an escalator. Then he upgrades the metaphor — Elon Musk's rocket to the moon. The Cat 1 amateur who could realistically podium at a major gravel event in 2019 is, in 2026, looking up at a different sport. Not because they got slower. Because the competition built an entire support architecture they cannot match without giving up everything else in their life.
This matters because the whole point of gravel — the structural reason it captured the imagination of working amateur cyclists in the first place — was that it was the last frontier of competitive racing where you should not have to give up your entire life to do it. That sentence is Haas's. It is the cleanest framing of what is at stake.
If competitive gravel becomes another version of competitive road, the ladder it provided for serious amateurs — the Cat 1 ceiling pivot where road racing's ceiling closed and gravel opened a new horizon — closes too. The amateur cyclist still has a place at gravel events, in the same way the amateur cyclist still has a place at marathons, but the racing aspect — the chance to actually contest the front of a serious race on a working life's training budget — quietly ends.
What Cross-Country Mountain Biking Already Showed Us
The cautionary tale that runs underneath the entire conversation is cross-country mountain biking.
A decade ago, the same conversation was happening around XCO. The teams arrived. The buses arrived. The professional model came in. The discipline got faster, more technical, and more sterile. The public, by Haas's account, largely tuned out. The casual amateur ecosystem that supported the sport's mid-tier shrank. The race coverage got smaller. The bike sales eventually softened. What had once felt like a vibrant scene became, in many regions, a small professional bubble surrounded by a much smaller amateur audience than the previous decade had supported.
Haas is not arguing this is a guaranteed future for gravel. He is arguing that gravel is sitting on a cautionary tale the cycling industry has already lived through once and could choose not to repeat. The marketing teams launching gravel programs in 2026 are reaching for the same playbook that hollowed out cross-country mountain biking by 2018. The economic logic looks identical. The cultural cost looks identical. The historical evidence is right there to be ignored or learned from.
The fact that gravel currently represents a very high percentage of non-ebike bike sales — a number Haas references on the podcast — makes the commercial pressure to professionalise even greater. It also means the downside of getting it wrong is bigger. Cycling does not have many genuinely growing categories left. Burning down the cultural appeal of the one that is growing fastest, in pursuit of short-term commercial wins, is a particularly unforced error.
For more on the broader cycling-industry conversation Anthony keeps returning to, see our piece on the Trek-LeMond doping dispute and the Peloton rise and fall breakdown — both of which explore similar moments where the cycling and fitness industries chose short-term commercial logic over long-term cultural durability.
What Defending The Privateer Model Actually Means
Haas's positive case is for the privateer model. Independent riders. Their own calendars. Their own logistics. Direct equipment and kit deals with manufacturers. Showing up to races as part of the broader community rather than isolated from it.
He is realistic about what the privateer model can and cannot deliver. It cannot consistently beat fully supported teams across an entire season. The wheel-change and feed-zone advantages of a team setup are real. Strong privateers will lose races they would have won under a privateer-versus-privateer format. The financial ceiling is lower than a fully supported team contract.
What it preserves is the soul. The privateer at the pub the night before the race is the rider the Cat 1 amateurs identify with. The privateer at registration handing in their own paperwork is the rider who keeps gravel feeling like a community rather than a closed shop. The privateer who races their faces off and then has dinner with five other riders that night is the rider who makes gravel different from road, mountain biking, or cyclocross at the elite level.
Haas's argument — and it is the structurally correct one — is that the sport needs both. Let the teams form. Let them run their pit stops. Let them chase UCI points. But protect the privateer model in parallel, because the privateer model is what keeps the next generation of Cat 1 amateurs believing that gravel is a sport they can actually participate in rather than just spectate at.
What This Means For The Amateur Cyclist In 2026
If you are a serious amateur cyclist who came to gravel because road racing's ceiling closed for you, three things to take from the conversation.
One. Pick your events with eyes open. The biggest UCI-pointed events are increasingly closed at the front to non-team riders. The smaller, more community-driven events still feel like the sport you joined. There is nothing wrong with racing the big ones — they are spectacular and the experience is real. There is also nothing wrong with skipping them in favour of events that still have the texture you came for. See our gravel cycling beginners guide for the broader landscape.
Two. Race the way you came here to race. If the privateer rockstar model speaks to you, run it. Show up. Drink the pre-race beer. Eat dinner with the riders next to you. The cultural soul of the sport survives because individual riders keep choosing to live it. The pros Haas describes — the OG ten that built the European scene — were not waiting for permission. They built the texture.
Three. Notice what gravel has given you and protect it. The amateur cycling discipline that genuinely allows a working person with a family to compete competitively at the top of their region is not common. Gravel is currently that discipline. Window is open. Window may be narrowing. Use it.
If you want help structuring a gravel season around the realistic version of "competitive on a working life's hours" — Badlands, The Rift, Unbound, the European calendar — the Roadman coaching system is built for serious amateurs who want to race the front of accessible events without giving up the rest of their life. For a faster answer on a specific question about gravel training, fuelling, or event prep, ask the AI coach.
Listen To The Full Conversation
The full episode with Nathan Haas — including the World Tour pivot story, the Pete Stetina conversation, the unfiltered take on UCI points and team formation — is on the Roadman Cycling Podcast. For more on the modern gravel and racing landscape see Ben Healy's fuelling strategy and the road racing is dead conversation.
Gravel did not die. It changed. The version that brought you in is still available if you choose to ride it. The version the industry is building is the version cross-country mountain biking already tried and abandoned. Choose carefully which one you race for.
