As Gravel Grows Up, New Riders Are Getting Ready to Star

In the cooldown tent on Yampa Street in downtown Steamboat Springs, Henry Nelson had to take a second. It wasn’t much more than a beat, but as he started to recount his race at the 2026 SBT GRVL, his lip quivered. He paused, and then he started talking.

“It’s a long time coming, honestly, like just screwing it up over and over again. Crashing, missing feeds, all of last year was just awful. I just couldn’t get it figured out.

“This year, I have been self-coached, and I have been working on the process to become a professional. Finally, it started to come together, but yeah, today, everything was finally in line.

“My legs showed up, I was good tactically, the bike setup was great, tire choice too. I rotated through all day—I felt like I belonged at the front, and I am just really proud of that.”

Henry Nelson was talking to us after a close-fought fourth place at SBT GRVL. The 23-year old from Kansas by way of Durango has finally arrived at the table. Around him sit: Keegan Swenson, firmly at the peak of his powers; Adam Roberge, a gambling breakaway stalwart; Alexey Vermuelen, an innovator in the gravel world as a storyteller and rider; and Peter Stetina, one of the foundational gravel professionals.

Making it in gravel cycling might be something too elusive to claim, but Nelson has surely made a step up. And in a sport like gravel cycling‚ where there are 101 ways to screw it up, steps up can feel like mountains to climb.

Yet, Nelson is not alone. Cobe Freeburn is another one of those riders who has also arrived at that metaphorical table in the cool-down tent. Freeburn is riding a similar path, trying to find success in the discipline as a self-made gravel-specialist, but is just a bit ahead, having won Mid South earlier this year. Yet, even between the two rivals, it is energy that can feed off itself.

“Seeing Cobe really like pop off last year and seeing it’s like Durango’s just a cool place to be to watch people succeed and be like, why not me?”

The unique challenge of finding a pro career in gravel racing

Behind the scenes, gravel is starting to reckon with a building existential question. What is going to happen when the sport’s biggest riders, and in turn, biggest earners, retire? The question isn’t upon us—all three places on the women’s podium were riders over 30, and Swenson and Vermuelen were one-two for the men—but it is nevertheless coming.

When they go, what will happen to the literal hundreds of thousands of sponsorship dollars that they will leave behind? Will new riders inherit the wealth, or will it simply go away? In an individual sport, that question is fundamental to what the future could mean.

And when you pull away, the question seems unsettlingly open. No one knows.

From the inside, it seems as if the success of these young riders—Henry Nelson, Cobe Freeburn, Daxton Mock, Ruby Ryan, Kylee Hanel—will determine so much of what to expect. And the prospect of their success is truly daunting in ways that are hard for outsiders to understand. Broadly speaking, the path to success is narrow, and the path to failure is very, very broad.

In gravel, even though team structures are starting to exist, it really only exists for the rare, chosen few. Salaries exist in the same way: a handful of riders make over six figures, the vast majority of the rest are reliant on prize money and bonuses to put them above minimum wage.

Through that combination of aspects, young riders are not only less experienced than older pros, but they also often end up having less support, worse equipment, and less bandwidth to train as they balance the training schedule with work or school.

In some ways, this is a classical sports conundrum. In other ways, it is compounded by the immense personal pressure and individualistic way in which gravel racing exists. Unlike developing riders in the WorldTour, there is no narrow role to play, learning experience to be had, or moral victories. There are results sheets, return on investment, or worst of all, Instagram followers that dictate success and failure.

All things considered, when it comes to young gravel riders with all of those concerns swirling around, there are so many ways to screw it up.

Finally, young riders are finding success

Nevertheless, as in most things in life, a mark of most successful strivers is the ability to endure. Many people enter with a dream and a passion, few continue to the point of a paycheck, and even fewer make it a career.

Gravel cycling is no different, even in this infantile stage, where a gravel career isn’t a fully conceived idea. We really don’t know how long these careers should go, we don’t know how they should start, and we don’t know how to build who comes next.

But what we do know is it sure is a career, it undoubtably is a profession, and this crop of young riders pouring their lives into it is going to have a huge impact on what happens next. Thankfully, things might finally be starting to click.

“I felt like it was just going to take one race where everything clicks,” Nelson said about how it felt trying to break through to that higher echelon of success. “The people who support me said that over and over again. All last year and the whole start of this year it was like, ‘it’s coming, man, it’s coming. Don’t worry, you’ll get one.’

“But the racing—it’s just favors people with a lot of years and a lot of miles in their legs. I only really started training for cycling two years ago. I was a runner until I transferred to Fort Louis in 2022. So it’s just kind of a serious process of getting my teeth kicked in for a while and slowly figuring it out.”

Now, more than ever, a path is emerging where the younger gravel racers will start to do the kicking.