7 Takeaways from Mid South Gravel
Pro race Friday, an emphasis on fun, and safety rears its head.
After a year away due to wildfires, Mid South Gravel is back.
Based in Stillwater, Oklahoma, the just-over-100-mile race is gravel’s Opening Weekend. There are races before it, of course, but once Mid South rolls around the season suddenly feels real.
As is becoming tradition, here are my takeaways.
1. All pro races should be on Friday.
Professional sport is entertainment. That’s the game Mid South understands.
Rolling out with thousands of people cheering, finishing with the final few hundred metres lined multiple people deep. Fans are what make bike racing special. The pros love racing in front of crowds, and the crowds love watching the pros. It’s a win-win.
The course is safer with fewer riders on it, and it gives organisers another major moment to advertise. Every major gravel event built around mass participation should do this.
It was also nice rolling down to the start the next morning with a group of riders who had raced the night before, drinking coffee and cheering on the amateur event. Everyone wins with this format.
2. It’s the best bike event in America.
Mid South is for the people. It’s about fun. Critically, this is not an event designed for pros. Notice I say event, not race. From live music to the event village, shake-out rides, and multiple course options, the entire weekend is unapologetically built for the people.
Yes, the front of the race will always race. We love that part too. But the goal of this weekend is to appeal to the many, not the few. It’s one of those I, ironically, struggle to put into words. Just come and experience it for yourself next year, and thank me later.
3. The course is class.
The Mid South course is a reminder that you don’t need craziness to make a good race.
It feels like a Belgian or Dutch spring classic. Endless small moments that gradually wear the field down until the strongest riders remain. No crazy single-track. No questionable corners. Just a proper racing course.
Too many organisers design courses to challenge pros and then make everyone else ride them regardless of skill level (side-eyeing a race in Girona here.) Mid South does the opposite. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or a first-timer, the course is safe and fun.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy either. We’ll all attest that it’s one of the hardest races of the year. A good course encourages good racing.
4. We gotta talk safety - again.
I write this in every recap. Safety is non-negotiable.
In the pro-women’s race, a media buggy made a major error and almost crashed out the two lead women.
With the push for livestreams and media coverage, there are more vehicles on course than ever. They encourage drafting, throw huge amounts of dust into the race, and sometimes make dangerous moves.
Safety should always come first. Even one ‘dodgy’ moment is too many.
We are racing fast, and there’s serious money on the line with contracts and sponsorships. Organisers need to talk to riders. If something is unsafe, they have to listen. I’d love to open a dialogue with LifeTime and Klassmark about this, because they are two of the biggest offenders.
That said, credit where it’s due. The Mid South crew owned the mistake immediately, issuing an apology and saying: “We will learn from this and do the work required to make it better.”
5. The Euro-US pro pendulum is swinging
Perhaps the pendulum in the Euro vs US gravel debate is starting to swing.
Mid South is one of the American classics, but it’s fair to say that in both the men’s and women’s races, the start list lacked depth this year.
I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe budgets are tighter and riders are becoming more selective with their travel. Maybe Mid South simply isn’t one of the new-age gravel pro-races. Or perhaps riders are focusing their early season around Sea Otter.
It could also be positioning: US gravel races tend to present themselves as events, while European races are unapologetically races. Semantics, but important.
The US will always have strong gravel pros, and certainly the best funded ones. But European races are starting to show more depth. Santa Vall, is a much smaller event with none of the cultural pull of Mid South, but the pro field is significantly deeper.
The only real explanation is convenience. Santa Vall sits on the doorstep of Girona, where a huge portion of the pro peloton trains. Riders can show up, race, and be home the same evening.
Mid South should arguably have one of the deepest fields outside of Unbound. It’s one of the most enjoyable weekends on the calendar and a race that riders genuinely love attending. Maybe depth isn’t always about prestige, but logistical convenience.
6. Gravel has no race rules, and that’s okay.
I had a mechanical out of the lead group which left me in no-man’s land with one other rider who had been dropped. We caught the front group when they were held-up by a train crossing.
One older rider in the lead group insisted we had to wait two minutes before restarting. I asked what about the group behind us, who obviously wouldn’t wait. No reply.
The lead group rode off, and fifteen seconds later, the organiser buggy exclaimed, “this race has no rules, just go.” Situations like this are messy.
It’s frustrating for the lead group. But with me having mechanicalled and the other rider already dropped, we were hardly a threat. Add in the fact the group behind wouldn’t wait either, and there wasn’t really a clean solution.
Sometimes racing incidents just happen, and some riders need to remember it can’t be one set of rules for the front group and another for everyone else.
7. Bobby f**king Wintle.
The man that started the whole thing, the lead organiser, the guy that will hug over two-thousand people across the weekend. Bobby is the guy that remembers my name and thanks me for coming to his event even though we’ve only met a handful of times. He’s the life of the party, and has turned Stillwater, Oklahoma, into the most fun weekend in the gravel calendar.
Bobby, thank you.
How did my race go?
After a nightmare travel - I arrived Wednesday night after a Monday morning flight cancellation - I was praying the racing God’s would smile on me. The race started fast. The first 50km was a tailwind and oh boy, we RACED.
I checked my shoulder after thirty minutes thinking, ‘fuck this is hard’, there were only fifteen of us left. We rode, and rode, and rode. It was one of those flow-state moments, no thinking, just pedalling.
After an hour, I had a rear derailleur mechanical and bid farewell to the lead group as I hopped off to fix it. Derailleur fixed, I was in no-man’s land with one other rider until the second-group on the road finally caught us.
I lost my head. Pissed off at the mechanical, and how it just felt we were commuting to the finish line, my mood got pissy. I’m blaming jet-lag here too.
With an hour to go, it was lights out. I was dehydrated, sleepy, and tired. A split occurred in our second-group, and I had nothing. I rolled to the line P16.
I do want to say how stupidly hard we raced those first few hours. Almost half of the original front-group blew up in the final hour and crawled home. The roads of the Mid South Gravel had riders finishing in ones and twos all evening. The sign of a proper day out.
Onwards, I’m in Boulder now. Next up, Redlands.
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Thanks for the recap, Joe. I found this really interesting, especially the point about fans being what make bike racing special.
But I’m struggling with the idea that starting and finishing in front of crowds equals racing in front of crowds. That’s still just a tiny fraction of the race. The vast majority happens in isolation, with no real way for spectators to engage in person.
You mention that in-person fan activation has been largely non-existent in gravel so far. This feels like the core issue. If that’s the case, how do events like Mid South (or gravel more broadly) actually build a spectator audience beyond participants themselves?
Genuinely curious how you see that evolving, because it feels like mass participation alone doesn’t solve for spectator growth because mass participation creates participants, not necessarily fans. Without a spectator-first experience, there’s no mechanism that converts those participants into an audience.
I’m with you about the safety of a certain race in Girona - I rode it last year and it really surprised me (not in a good way). That’s coming from somebody who spends a chunk of the time chopping around rock gardens in the Yorkshire Dales!