Mass starts in gravel races can quickly mean the women pro riders become separated and scattered through a predominantly men’s field of pros and eager amateurs, with the races potentially affected or ruined by the machinations of an entirely different category.
Last year, Unbound Gravel 200 introduced a separate start time for the elite women, but it didn’t keep the fields split for long, particularly with the bottleneck of the mud-field chaos just 11 miles in. To try and make a difference this year, the gaps have been extended between pro men and pro women, as well as pro women and the general field of the 200-mile race.
The question is: will it be enough to make any material change to the dynamic of the women's race and interference from the men?
Riders in the Unbound 200 head out early on Saturday, with the 145 pro men getting underway at 5:50 CDT and the 61 pro women at 6:05. Rather than the eight-minute margin to the more than 1200 riders who make up the rest of the 200 field, that gap will now be 25 minutes after the pro women at 6:30.
Australian gravel champion Justine Barrow agreed with the separation at the start line. Last year's Unbound was the first time she had raced without a mass start.
“It's just less chaotic, and you know where your competitors are,” Barrow told Cyclingnews.
“You can be racing against women rather than thinking that if you're if you're making an effort, that the other women can just be brought back up to you by men. But everyone's in the same position (in a mass start); it can happen to other women in the field as well.”
The big question is how will the separate start time affect the rest of the race.
The inevitable mingling
The bigger gaps this year, which leave a 15-minute gap to the pro men ahead and 25 minute-gap to the rest of the field behind, mean the intermingling shouldn't happen so soon but it may still be a matter of when, not if.
“The folks at Life Time and Unbound are helping us move closer and closer to get a fair race for women. It's a really tricky component of women's gravel racing. And right now we're not, we are just not quite there yet, but we're getting closer," said Sarah Sturm, who came third in Unbound in 2023.
Sturm, who has finished in the top 20 of the UCI Gravel World Championships the last two years, said that even there when the women's elite race was held on a separate day to the elite men's race, some of the field ended up mixing in with the 50+ age categories.
“There's only a handful of races that are truly a women's race, that the promoters have been able to figure out how to make it a separate women's start, a separate women's race."
One step organisers were considering to try and reduce the impact of the mixing of fields was rules prohibiting drafting between categories, but enforcement was a stumbling block for this year’s edition.
2022 Unbound 200 champion Sofia Gomez Villafañe – who has been an advocate for a completely separate race for the women and the introduction of drafting rules sooner rather than later – has raced through all the different starting formats.
"This will be my third Unbound, and again, we are having to show up not really knowing what to expect," she said of the anchor event in the Life Time Grand Prix. "In my first Unbound, I had no idea what that mix start would look like or how the race would go as it was my first one. Last year with the small gap we had to the elite men, and over the amateurs, it was about trying to anticipate when the categories would start to mix.
"This third year, with the added time buffer between all fields, you do not know if there will be intermixing of categories and how things are going to play out."
Carolin Schiff, who finished ahead of Villafañe last year for the pro women's Unbound 200 title, was in agreement with her adversary about a formula for a true women's race, especially now that the field is so strong.
"I think the only solution to avoid the impact of the men on the women's race are races on different days," 2023 Unbound 200 winner Carolin Schiff told Cyclingnews.
"A bigger time gap is nice, but in the end, the fields will be mixed again. At least it's the same for every one of us, but our race will always be influenced by the men."
