Whether it is due to gnarly course conditions complicated by mud or the burgeoning rider fields that have stiffened the competition, the defence of a title at Garmin Unbound Gravel presented by Craft Sportswear is on the verge of extinction.
Sofia Gomez Villafañe, the elite women’s champion in the 2022 Unbound Gravel 200 and race favourite this year, fought the mud and the fray regardless. Villafañe battled to second place, 15 minutes behind the new victor Caroline Schiff.
On Saturday there were 57 top-notch elite women who stormed across the 205.5 miles of the Flint Hills of Kansas, winding their way across mud pits, through occasional downpours in the sultry heat and then navigating to the finish amid the 4,000 or so others, elite men and tons of amateurs, to the finish back in Emporia.
“I think anybody that finished, it’s a huge achievement. It was crazy,” Villafañe told Cyclingnews an hour after the finish, adding to her lead in the women’s division of the Life Time Grand Prix series.
“Like the mud section from the beginning. We’re running and I am a professional cyclist. I’m not a professional runner. And, you know, a lot of people’s races were kind of over in the first hour of the race.”
Sporadic heavy rainfall in the days leading up to Unbound Gravel turned sections of the rustic dirt roads and low-lying undulations of the prairie terrain into a quagmire. It was not sandy soil at the first hill outside of Emporia at mile 10 that caused disruptions and chaos, but the area became two to three miles of muck.
By the time the elite women’s field, which started two minutes after the elite men for the first time at Unbound, hit D Hill, they had caught the back of the 116-rider elite men’s field, and a good chunk of the 1,154 eager amateurs who took the same course eight minutes after the women’s dedicated sendoff. So there were a lot of bodies and bikes struggling to make it through the early obstacle.
Did one or two muddy areas really impact the race? Well, it took Villafañe 12 hours, 1 minute and 50 seconds to complete Unbound 200 for second place, which was more than one-and-a-half hours longer than a very similar course in 2022. But it wasn’t all about the course conditions.
“It wasn’t my best day, but I gave it everything I got and to walk away with second, it’s pretty solid. But I think I’m definitely ready to have a women’s-only race for sure,” said Villafañe, offering her take on an improvement for future races in Emporia, keeping the times on the course similar for men and women in elite fields.
“My idea is we race 175 miles. So by the time the elite women finish, it’s perfect. We don’t have the same numbers, they [elite men] have 140 or so and have less. So we would actually start Friday morning for women only. And then when the women finish, the XL 350 will have just gone off, right? And then the pro men have their own start [Saturday]. Then amateur women can pick, do they want to be part of the women-only start, or do they want to race the whole 200?
“For me, equality doesn’t mean that I can do the same thing as a man. For me, equality means having equal opportunity for us to show what we’re capable of. And I think the race here is still too long, that we don’t have the strength in numbers to be out there for 12,13, 14 hours. So I think I would advocate for a shorter race.”
