2024 SBT GRVL: Champagne Wishes

The classics are anointed classics largely because there’s something unique about them. It could be the altitude. It could be the substrata, whether it’s rocks, sand, pavement, cobbles—or a mix of all the above. It may be the technical aspects—or the lack thereof altogether. Gravel isn’t just gravel.

This takes us to beautiful Steamboat Springs, Colorado. High in the Colorado Rockies, Steamboat Springs is a bucolic town best known for its winter skiing. But in the spring, summer, and fall, it’s a farming town, with peaks spread apart by long, wide valleys of rolling hills. And for one week of the year, it’s the location of a gravel classic: SBT GRVL.

What makes it a classic? After all, the race has only been around since 2019… that’s half a decade; how can it be a classic? Well, consider that gravel as a category is young in and of itself, only just recently meriting its own UCI Gravel World Championships. Look at gravel racing like you do at cat years; we’re only getting started, but we’ve been around for a while.

The event has also earned a reputation as one of the most inclusive in cycling. The organizers have leaned heavily into community outreach, from All Bodies on Bikes to Ride for Racial Justice, ensuring that, well, everyone is out there on race day.

Because it’s a destination that draws folks from not just Colorado, but across the country—and the world—the SBT GRVL expo area was a mad throng of activity. The main aisle was packed with every iteration of bike brand, apparel company, nutrition purveyor, and computer shiller… if it was bike-related, it was there, and athletes were lapping it up.

OBED was there as well; on display, we had it all, centered by our now-familiar mechanic Michael, spinning wrenches to dial in OBED athletes' bikes ahead of the race. We saw lots of rear derailleur adjustments, a bottom bracket re-greasing, and basic bolt torque checks for safety.

Bikes? We had ‘em, right in the middle of the expo. We unfurled our compelling OBED range, from our $1,999 Boundary (“That’s the frame or complete?” was the common refrain, and yep—that’s a complete bike with Shimano GRX) to the bike that’s our centerpiece gravel racer, the GVR.

We also had our new endurance road model, the RVR, on display in its gravel livery, and it gained heaps of attention. Yeah, it was resplendent in white, shod in 35mm Panaracer GravelKing tires, and set with HED V45 carbon wheels—voluminous enough for traction and footing on the loose-over-hard sections that dotted the Steamboat Springs course, narrow enough to be incredibly fast.

Race day? It was as you would have expected—would have dreamed. A cool but not cold start. Dry but not at all dusty. Warm, but not too hot. There were no mid-race deluges of rain that can and have happened in the past on race day. Even the famed Cow Creek section that closes every ride was tamped down from many of the babyhead rocks we’d seen there in the past. The roadside-grazing cattle (and cow poop that splashed up on this writer’s downtube and legs) were still there in full force, though.

Altitude? Well… there was nothing they could do about that. All riders who weren’t altitude-acclimatized (raise your hand) felt great until there was a big close-that-gap effort or a big climb, at which time the heart rate spiked to levels usually reserved for horror movies, and there was no choice but to back off and let it come down to a sustainable level.

That left everyone straight up enjoying the day—chatting with packmates, stopping at the aid stations for refueling (whether that was electrolytes and gels or bacon, bourbon, and Skittles, which were doled out at a few select stops).

So… classic? Yeah, we think so. If you’ve not put this one on your list, we highly recommend it. 6,867-foot highly.

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