So with some modest differences, key demographic pools appear to mirror the trends observed in the overall data set: the shift toward gravel is strong across all subsets with women showing the lowest rate of road racing attrition following participation in Rasputitsa (a data point that seems noteworthy given road racing’s struggle to attract more women to the sport).

Part Four: Conclusions on How Gravel Changes Road Racing

The math, laid out simply, tells this story: After riders first attend at Rasputitsa and start racing gravel, it’s likely that half of them will quit road the following year.

It’s at this point that we should make a note about not assuming causation because there is correlation. What this data does not say is “Gravel Kills Road.” What it does suggest is that around the same time that riders in this pool started to quit racing road and scaled back their race days, they also tended to do much more gravel racing. Is it possible that there is cause-and-effect at play here? Absolutely. But it’s equally possible that, as we note above, the reason why road declines is simply a function of coincidental burn-out in the already short racing lifetime of a cyclist.

One inescapable conclusion, however, is that Rasputitsa is doing something really right—something that is arguably missing from many road events. Perhaps it’s the production value: the views; the food; the camaraderie among an increasingly diverse group of participants. Or perhaps it’s that they’re trying to break down barriers around women’s participation and support charitable causes.

But real talk—the road racing numbers from this analysis and our other coverage portend a difficult future for the sport. We will continue to do more soul searching to explore what we, as road racers, can and need to do to reverse the trend. We’ll save those theories for future State of the Sport entries, but in the meantime you tell us: comment, Tweet, or email us your thoughts, and we’ll take them into account as we plot future essays. We already started another analysis that we expect to finish in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

Until then, see you on the road (and on the gravel—we’ll be on the start line at Rasputitsa 2019 in just a few weeks).

Transparency statement

BikeReg and Rasputitsa gave us permission to use the data with no qualifiers on the analysis that we ran or the opinions that we expressed. We had complete editorial discretion and greatly appreciate their support. The data involved was completely anonymized by BikeReg before we received it, and Rasputitsa agreed to the disclosure because they “are committed to growing cycling in all aspects and believe truth and data will only foster conversation and reflection,” said Heidi Myers, co-founder of Rasputitsa.

Definitions

The “gravel” category includes the following BikeReg event types: ‘Gravel Grinder,’ ‘Off Road’, ‘Fat Bike’, and ‘Gran Fondo’. We included ‘Fondos’ because they’re mass-start events that fairly count among the types of events we’re thinking compete against categorized races or conversely drive interest in racing; even though they aren’t explicitly “gravel” or “off-road” or “dirt” events. There are also only 979 total registrations for Gran Fondos from 2000 to 2019 among the total Rasputitsa population, across 478 riders—a relatively small percentage of the total population of gravel cohort.