GRAVEL BIKE OF THE YEAR

Cycling Weekly's recommendations for the rough stuff

Having recently unveiled our selection for Race Bike of the Year, the time has now come to take this show off the road - and onto the trails! Welcome to Cycling Weekly's 2023 Gravel Bike of the Year awards.

The very first thing to note is that gravel is in the process of ascending from being a sub-category of drop-bar bikes - think endurance, aero, lightweight, etc - to sit atop of a genre of its own. Just as mountain bikes can be split into crosscountry, enduro, downhill et al - each getting progressively burlier and more capable the same is true for gravel bikes.

At the lightest and fastest end of the gravel spectrum, we have 'all-road' bikes, which feather the transition between endurance road bikes and those solely focused on the off-road. These tend to have wider clearances than road bikes - and generally have more scope for attaching various elements of luggage and bikepacking bags.

Towards the middle of the spectrum we see a split. On the one hand, we have 'adventure' gravel bikes. These models are burlier than all-road bikes and come with a more relaxed geometry and (where possible) even more mounts. On the other hand, we have those models designed with the UCI Gravel World Champs in mind. These tend to be more similar to all-road bikes in their weights and their more 'sporting' geometry, but the tyre clearances of gravel race bikes are usually rather more generous for more technical courses.

Finally, at the extreme end of gravel, we have the biggest and burliest of builds - although these themselves can be split into two distinct subspecies: long-distance, expedition bikepacking bikes and trail-shredding, monster-cross bikes essentially drop-bar mountain bikes, by any other name.

Middle of the fire road