Gralloch UCI Gravel World Series, 20 May 2023

There was a lot of hype around this race as it was the first UCI gravel race to be held in the UK and there was also worlds qualification up for grabs if you finished in the top 25% of your age group. This was my first gravel race and I was lined up with some pretty well-known names on the gravel scene. I didn’t go into the race with any particular goals in mind as I really wasn’t sure how the race would pan out. I just wanted to have fun and ride hard and hopefully finish in the top 25% of my age group. 

The race began and I had a really good start and was positioned well for the turn off the road onto the beginning of the gravel. The pace was really high, and I knew the climb was long, so I began started riding at my own pace. I very quickly lost contact with the lead group, but I could also see there was a big gap to the riders behind me. For the first half of the climb, I was riding solo but could see that people were being shelled out of the first group and I was catching them quite quickly. I managed to pick a few riders off up the remainder of the climb, and I found myself riding with someone else in my age group. We worked well together and began picking up more people and I was soon riding in a group of four.  

This is when the first disaster struck and on one of the descents my chain fell off and got jammed meaning I had to stop to get it sorted causing me to lose contact with the group I was in. Luckily, I got it sorted fairly quickly and managed to bridge the gap back across to them on the next uphill section. In the time I was away from the group it had picked up a couple more riders and we were riding for 8th place overall. I was really enjoying the race; the pace uphill was comfortably hard, and the descents were fun too well at least until I got a double puncture on a really loose rocky section. I managed to seal the front, but the back sidewall was really gone. So much so that when I put a tube in the tube poked out and when I got back on, instantly went flat again.

I walked my bike down the rest of the gravel sector to the road, then rode with a flat back tyre to the technical zone where it got fixed well enough to ride back to the finish along the road. Unfortunately, that was my race over which I was really disappointed about as I riding well and having so much fun. The group I was riding in ended up being the group riding for 3rd overall which added a little bit more salt to the wound, but it was also good to know that up until I had mechanical problems the legs were there.

Kim Baptista