Take6 days ago
Gravel Worlds set for Oct 10-11 in Nannup, team tactics loom
The 2026 UCI Gravel World Championships run October 10 and 11 in Nannup, Western Australia. The men's race covers 144 km with 3,713 m of climbing, the women's 125.6 km with 3,179 m of climbing, on a course over 80 percent gravel modelled off the UCI World Series' Seven Gravel Race. Race director Stephen Gallagher compares the elevation and demands to Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
The provisional women's start list has just 54 riders, thinned by the long, costly trip to Australia and a clash with the LifeTime Grand Prix. Qualification follows a triathlon-style model: a top-25-percent finish in your category at a UCI Gravel World Series event qualifies, national federations can hand out five wildcards per gender, and the host nation gets five more on top. By one count, if every qualified rider showed up without wildcards, there would be 310 elite women and 570 elite men on the start lists. Most gravel riders qualify individually, and national federations have very little say in selection, in most cases sending no support at all. At the 2025 UCI Gravel World Championships, three Dutch jerseys chased down a lone Dutch leader after Czech rider Julia Kopecký, Lorena Wiebes' trade teammate, helped close the gap. Wiebes later said: «I was lucky that Julia Kopecký was still with me… But you don't just give away a world title in the individual discipline that gravel is.»
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