Gravel racing has come a long way. It has long since moved beyond the free-for-all ‘spirit of gravel’ days – in fact, if anything it is seen as being too professionalised. Yet the fact remains that gravel is still mostly an individual pursuit, with riders having their own setups and their own goals.
MAAP sponsors five gravel racers as part of its Privateers programme: Russell Finsterwald, Freddy Ovett and Ivar Slik on the men’s side, and Rosa Klöser and Haley Smith on the women’s side.
Klöser and Smith’s stories in particular are polar opposites, and their schedules rarely have them on the same start line, but they’ve both made their way to the very top of pro gravel racing all the same.
Haley Smith
2022 Life Time Grand Prix winner, Olympian
Haley Smith comes from a cycling family. Her dad and brother raced mountain bikes and she got involved herself when her brother needed a girl for a relay team at a high school race.
‘It meant that I got to skip a day of school if I joined, so that’s what I did and I didn’t look back,’ she says.
That chance encounter turned into a professional cross-country mountain bike racing career on the UCI World Cup circuit, and Smith would go on to represent Canada internationally, winning bronze at the 2018 Commonwealth Games and competing at the Tokyo Olympics.
But it wasn’t all rosy. She had issues with anxiety and anorexia as a teenager and used the bike to help process what she was going through, falling in love with cycling along the way. The Olympic cycle wasn’t easy on her mental wellbeing, however.
‘The couple of years leading into it were rough, and I was burnt out on XCO mountain biking. But I’d always loved endurance racing and after the Olympics I had the chance to switch over to this half-gravel, half-endurance mountain biking thing. It was a fresh start, an emotionally free place without all that Olympic baggage. So I jumped in.’
The ‘half-gravel, half-endurance mountain biking thing’ she’s referring to is the Life Time Grand Prix. The season-long series of events started in 2022 and is essentially the American gravel series, comprising seven of the country’s biggest gravel and long-distance mountain bike races, including Unbound Gravel and the Leadville Trail 100, with 30 men and 30 women selected each year to compete for a $300,000 prize purse – making it the biggest prize in gravel.
Post-Olympics, however, Smith didn’t go in with any expectations. ‘I was just trying not to be depressed anymore,’ she says, ‘I wanted to figure out if I actually liked riding a bike and if I could be functional and healthy.’ Despite her lack of a fixed target, she won the overall title in the first year.
‘I think it was mostly just because I was consistent, while other people were really good sometimes but struggled at other times.’
Smith’s success was a sponsor’s dream, plus the prize money helped with her mortgage. She’s been one of the big name regulars in the series ever since, yet the less intense nature of gravel racing means there wasn’t an overload of pressure to repeat her 2022 success – she finished third overall in 2023 and fifth in 2024.
As well as being a MAAP Privateer, Smith is part of Trek’s DRFTLSS squad, which is closer to being an actual racing team despite there being plenty of friendly faces at events.
‘I’ve studied the concept of transient teaming, where you come together in the moment to accomplish shared goals and then shake hands aftewards and say “battle’s back on”. That can be anyone, but I think you do feel a sense of pride and camaraderie when other people represent the same brands as you do, whether that’s MAAP, Trek, Coros or any of my other sponsors.’
Smith regards herself as only ‘half a privateer’, given that the Life Time Grand Prix is a fixed series that doesn’t afford complete freedom in the races she does, but there’s nothing half-hearted about how happy she is to be
a MAAP Privateer.
‘I really resonate with the brand image: going two feet in, going hard and seeing what happens. And they don’t say that because it’s results-oriented, it’s more like, “We want you to race as hard as you can and have fun doing it.” That just feels aligned with me.’
As for her career goals, Smith says, ‘It’s been a challenge to try and find performance goals that are meaningful in the same way the Olympics were. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded at that yet, but I want to be happy. That said, the moment I don’t have performance goals and I’m not trying to improve and win, that’s the moment to stop racing.’
Rosa Klöser
Unbound Gravel 2024 winner
Rosa Klöser only fully got into cycling during the Covid pandemic.
‘I lived in Copenhagen, which is a cycling city with amazing infrastructure, and I’d seen lots of very active people riding around the city centre on road bikes and thought I should do that too, since it saves so much time,’ she says.
‘The first time I ever had any indication of my own performance was when I bought myself an indoor trainer at the start of 2021 because the weather in Copenhagen was really bad,’ she says. ‘I saw that you could do races, and on the first one I looked at there were only five or six women, but I joined – and of course I had no idea about tactics so I just rode as hard as possible from the start. I managed to win, and I had fun, so I thought, “Maybe
I have a little bit of talent for it.”’
After a few months of Zwift races, Klöser happened to see the former team of 2016 World Champion Amalie Dideriksen while out riding with her boyfriend, and decided to join. After a harsh Danish winter she was convinced to take part in her first road race in April 2022 at a time when she was trying to squeeze training around everyday responsibilities, including studying for a PhD. She won it.
It would be another year before she took part in her first gravel races – at
a very muddy, local event in 2023.
‘It was a mixed race with both women and men but it was such a cool community, and I did really well in the first one,’ she says. ‘Then as I was waiting to start the second race I turned to the side and saw Annika Langvad, former six-time mountain bike World Champion, standing next to me.
‘I got to know her and we started cycling together; she gave me a lot of advice. That’s when I got the real sense for gravel racing and signed up for my first international gravel race, which was the Traka in 2023.’ She came eighth, despite crashing ‘like six times’ and finishing with one working gear and no saddle. ‘From then on I decided to take it more seriously and signed up to the UCI Gravel World Series.’
With a string of good results leading to qualification for the World Championships, Klöser started to gather sponsors, and for 2024 was ready to take things a step forward. Third at the Traka in May was followed by second at the 3Rides World Series race in Germany – just behind Lidl-Trek’s Lucinda Brand. Then came Unbound.
‘I felt really good the entire day. People were falling out of the front group steadily until at around 150km the group was maybe 12 or 13 riders.’
But some 50km afterwards, things got complicated. ‘I hit a rock really hard with my front wheel and crashed. I got to the last feed stop [with around 100km to go] with a two-minute deficit on the group but my sponsors’ crew did this super-fast wheel change and I made it back after a good hour chasing.’
Some 50km later, Klöser was part of a nine-woman group heading into the final sprint for the finish line.
‘The run to the line is long – 450m – and I knew I had to be mid-bunch to have a good position for the sprint and entered third or fourth wheel. I opened my sprint really early, with maybe 300m to go. I could sense that no one else was coming but I kept pushing and managed to take home the win.’
As one of the first sponsors to get behind Klöser, it’s safe to say her Unbound success was great for MAAP, especially as a lot of the team had travelled to Kansas to be there.
‘Everyone was really happy for me,’ she says. ‘And I think it validated them, giving underdogs a chance.’
A percentage of the proceeds from the MAAP Privateer jerseys goes directly to the Privateers to power their ongoing adventures. Get yours at MAAP.cc
