Park City racer is on the front end of the gravel bike boom

One problem with racing on gravel is the dust. As anyone who’s ever driven, raced or ridden down a dusty back road behind another vehicle knows, the grime gets everywhere, even with the windows closed. It coats the skin, stings the eyes and clogs the nose and throat.

Slowing down is one way to make touring a dirt road less dusty. The alternative? Get out in front.

Keegan Swenson chooses the latter. On the regular, the professional Heber City bike racer can be found in the front of the pack in one of the growing number of gravel events nationwide — like Saturday’s Crusher in the Tushar near Beaver — especially if the finish line is in sight. And in doing so, the one-time Olympic hopeful has gotten out in front of what has become one of the fastest growing sectors in cycling.

“At first I wasn’t so sure about it,” Swenson, 29, said of gravel racing, “but it’s kind of gotten to be also my favorite discipline.”

For a man who spent most of his formative years on a mountain bike, and who became skilled and astute enough to be named Team USA’s first alternate for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, that’s high praise. Swenson said he likes that gravel racing allows him to mix the bike handling skills and quietude native to mountain biking with the social aspects and racing tactics of road riding.

That same combination, plus the benefit of mostly getting away from cars, has convinced bike riders of all abilities to put knobby tires on their road bikes and veer onto the unbeaten path.

Bicycling participation hit an all-time high in 2022, according to data compiled by the Outdoor Industry Association. The gravitation to gravel riding was a key reason. While interest in road riding dropped a bit from a pandemic-driven high in 2020, interest in both off-road/mountain biking and BMX increased. In fact, the nonprofit People for Bikes reports that of the nearly 70,000 bikes sold in the first quarter of 2023, almost 40% of them were gravel or cyclocross bikes. That’s up from 11.1% in 2017.

Michelle Duffy is the senior marketing director for the fitness brand Life Time, which owns the Crusher in the Tushar. She said one of the aspects of gravel racing is that it can be done anywhere. Between 80% and 90% of roads in the U.S., she said, are not paved. The United States Department of Transportation puts that number closer to 36%.

“Gravel events typically happen in these smaller, less heard of communities,” Duffy said. “Part of the adventure is traveling to an unknown territory, places you would otherwise not be without the bike.”

Like Emporia, Kan., for example.

That’s the site of the world’s largest gravel race, Unbound Gravel. A 200-mile grind over farm roads and through corn fields, it takes the most elite racers nearly 10 hours to finish. Life Time acquired Unbound in 2018 in its first step into the then little-known world of gravel racing. Since then the event has doubled in size, admitting 4,000 riders of all levels, most of whom got in via a lottery.

The camaraderie draws them as much as the competition.

“Gravel today is a bit like what mountain biking was in the ‘90s …,” Duffy said. “Mountain biking started to develop from hobby into sport and then experienced this big boom where lots of folks that maybe were like ripping on trails in their hometown started to be inspired to race their bike and cross the finish line. That began happening with gravel as well.”

Seizing on the boom, Life Time bought the Crusher in the Tushar as its second gravel event in late 2019. The race had been challenging brave riders for a decade by then. At 69.9 miles it was relatively short for a gravel race — which had become mostly endurance events of 100 miles or more — but it packed a wallop with its 10,000 feet of elevation gain and 10,000-foot finishing elevation at the Eagle Point Resort ski area.

Then, last year, Life Time packaged Unbound and Crusher with four other races — some of them mountain biking, some gravel — to create the Life Time Grand Prix. Featuring 30 professional men and 30 professional women and a series purse of $250,000, it has quickly established itself as one of the marquee off-road biking series in the world.

World domination wasn’t Life Time’s original plan, Duffy said.

“We believed it would end up a bit more domestic,” she said. “But just looking at how that impact has grown from two years ago to today: We have fans spanning multiple countries now following along with the Life Time Grand Prix. We have elite cyclists that are messaging us asking how they can be a part of the series next year.”

The athlete most fans want to follow and most athletes want to test themselves against is Swenson.

Last year, the Park City native won the men’s series title by finishing as the top Grand Prix rider in four of the six events. In one of those, the Unbound, he actually finished second to non-series racer Ivar Slik in a photo finish after more than nine hours of sweat, pain and dust. That sting drove the Santa Cruz Bicycles-sponsored racer as he trained for this year’s Grand Prix, to impressive results. Swenson won both of the first two series races of the season — the Sea Otter Classic cross country mountain bike race in Monterey, Calif., and a mud-slogged Unbound.

Now he has returned to his home state to take on the Crusher in the Tushar, a race Duffy called “sadistically challenging.” It’s four hours, minimum, of white-knuckle, quad-searing, dust-huffing torment. Or, as Swenson might call it, fun.

Then it’s on to the Leadville Trail 100 and the Rad Dirt Fest in Colorado in August and September and the Big Sugar Gravel, the series’ finale in Arkansas, in October.

Swenson said world domination also wasn’t his intention when he got into gravel racing.

His first gravel race was the inaugural Belgian Waffle Ride in Cedar City in 2020. At the time, Swenson was one of two men who could be selected to race in the Tokyo Olympics, which would be delayed a year by the COVID-19 virus. So he was looking for a live event as a way to stay in race shape after spending the first months of the pandemic racing virtually.

“I had a good time and I won and I was like, ‘Oh, this is fun and I’m pretty good at it. Maybe I’ll try to do a bit more.’ That’s kind of how it happened, I guess.”

A year later, USA Cycling chose Christopher Blevins of Durango, Colo., to represent it in Tokyo. Swenson turned to gravel racing as a way to stay on his bike but also break out of the mountain biking box.

“I was a little bit bummed at first but I found a new path and something that I was kind of more stoked on doing,” Swenson said. “For so long, I was always just chasing down the Olympics, my mountain biking dreams. That’s kind of all there was. That’s all I knew.

“And then I discovered this other world.”

That world is rapidly expanding. Even Swenson has noticed the number of races growing and the competition getting not only tougher but more diverse. In fact, last year UCI established the Gravel World Championships. The second one is set to be held Oct. 7-8 in Veneto, Italy.

Swenson could be there wearing a stars and stripes jersey and lining up as one of the favorites.

All he needs to do is continue to stay out in front — and let the competition eat his dust.