I’ve raced in Belgium before. Road races with the UCI Continental team, circuits that feel like they were designed specifically to make your legs hurt in new ways. So I knew what I was walking into at Turnhout Gravel. I just didn’t know it would be quite this busy.
Two thousand, five hundred and thirty-four riders. Twenty-seven countries. The largest UCI Gravel World Series event ever staged. For something marketed as a gravel race, it was about as far from a remote mountain trail as you can get — but that’s the point, I think. Gravel racing is big enough now to fill a Belgian city centre, and that’s worth celebrating even if the elevation profile looks like a ruler.
Flat Is Not Easy
I want to be straight with you: I find flat races harder than climbing races. My body is built for long, sustained efforts on terrain that goes upward. When the road is flat and the field is enormous and everyone is fresh, it becomes something closer to a road race — position, tactics, drafting, timing.
The Kempen region gives you 437 metres of elevation across 144 kilometres. For context, that’s less climbing than I do on a short training ride at home. What it gives you instead is corner after corner, road furniture, sudden accelerations, and a constant scramble to stay in the right spot. By 60km in, my legs were fine. My brain was exhausted.
The racing was relentless. The field doesn’t thin out the way it does on climbing courses, so you’re managing 2,500 people’s worth of chaos for much longer. There were riders going down around me more than once. I kept the Ventum upright, stayed out of trouble, and focused on racing smart rather than racing heroically.
What I Took From It
Belgium teaches you things about bike handling and race reading that you can’t learn anywhere else. I came away with a much better sense of how to manage energy in a fast, flat, tactical race — because Unbound Gravel in May has long flat sections, and the Sea Otter course in California isn’t mountainous either. This wasn’t just a race. It was a lesson.
I also got to see how the UCI Gravel World Series operates at scale. The organisation, the atmosphere, the genuine international mix of riders — it’s the real deal. If you want to compete at the top of this sport, you have to be comfortable in events like this.
The Gravaa data from the day was interesting. Flat races expose your pacing choices in a way that climbing races don’t — there’s nowhere to hide behind a gradient. I’ll be going back through those numbers with Jacob this week.
Thoughts on the Course Itself
Turnhout is a good city. The people who came out to watch at 8am on a Sunday in March deserve some kind of recognition. Belgians understand suffering on bikes — they’ve built a whole culture around it — and they were properly into it.
The roads themselves were fast and mostly well-surfaced. A few loose gravel sections kept it honest, but anyone expecting Badlands-style terrain is going to be surprised. This is gravel racing as a mass participation sport, and it works. The atmosphere at the finish was genuinely brilliant.
Three Weeks, Three Countries
Santa Vall in Catalonia. Turnhout in Belgium. The Hills in Italy coming up next week. March has been relentless and I love it. This is what 2026 was supposed to look like.
Supported by Merlin Cycles, Ventum Racing, OGT, Gravaa, and Questa Financial Planning. Coached by Jacob Tipper at JT Performance Coaching.