The women’s race of the 2026 UCI Gravel World Championships starts on Saturday, October 10, at 10:10 a.m. in Nannup, Western Australia. In the United States that is Friday at 10:10 p.m. Eastern. Marianne Vos, the 2024 champion, is the favorite. Riders who start beside her call this the first championship a gravel specialist can win.
When does the women’s gravel world championship start?
The start is at 10:10 a.m. Australian Western Standard Time, which is 3:10 a.m. on Saturday in the United Kingdom and 4:10 a.m. in the Netherlands and Belgium. FloBikes shows the race live in the United States and Canada from 10 p.m. Eastern on Friday. In Australia it is on SBS On Demand from 9:45 a.m. in Nannup. Sporza streams it in Belgium, and in the Netherlands it is listed on Eurosport 1 and HBO Max. Our watch page has the links per country.
The race is 125.6 kilometers long with 3,179 meters of climbing, and at least 80 percent of it is gravel. Last year’s race in the Netherlands had 1,190 meters. The start list has 62 riders from 20 countries.
Why Marianne Vos is the favorite in Nannup
Lorena Wiebes beat Vos in a sprint for the title last year and is not in Australia. She rides the Tour of Chongming Island and the track world championships in Shanghai. That leaves Vos as the only former champion at the start. She won in 2024 and has finished on the podium in both of her starts.
Dutch national coach Laurens ten Dam told Cyclingnews how he heard of her plan: “she announced to me that she will go on altitude [training] so she’s all-in for the Gravel World Championship.” Wiebes, he said, answered: “OK, if she can take the jersey for me, that would be awesome.”
Vos has six teammates in orange, and last year the Dutch took 12 of the first 20 places. One of the six, Geerike Schreurs, won the Gravel Earth Series and The Gralloch this year. At Sea Otter Europe this season Vos beat her in the sprint for third place.
Can a gravel specialist win the rainbow jersey this year?
The four titles so far went to Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, Katarzyna Niewiadoma, Vos and Wiebes, none of them a gravel specialist. Maddy Nutt, one of the specialists on the British team, thinks that can change in Nannup: “Of any year, this would be the year where someone who’s primarily a gravel racer would win, I think, even if it’s someone like Rosa Klöser or Gee [Geerike Schreurs].” Klöser, of Germany, won the Sea Otter Europe race in which Vos was third. She also won The Traka 360 this year, won Unbound Gravel 200 in 2024 and rode the Tour de France Femmes this summer.
Sofia Gomez Villafañe of Argentina has won Unbound Gravel 200, The Traka 200 and the Life Time Grand Prix three times. At the world championships she was 12th in 2022 and 34th in 2023, and she has not started since. “For me, it’s more a personal battle [at Worlds],” she told Cyclingnews. “I just have never been able to put it together at a world championship level race.”
Start positions follow UCI points, counted in full for gravel riders and at half for riders from other disciplines. The American races Gomez Villafañe wins carry few of those points. “I think I’ll be pretty far back because I’ve only done one [UCI gravel world series event],” she said.
Tiffany Cromwell’s last race, on roads she won on in May
Australia has nine women at the start, and for one of them it is the last race of a career. Tiffany Cromwell, the national champion, won the SEVEN race on these roads on May 16. “Of course, the dream would be to finish with the rainbows or even just a podium, but also I don’t want to put that pressure on myself,” she said in the Australian team’s preview. “The course, it’s super demanding, it’s super hard.”
Nicole Frain, the Oceania champion, has won four UCI Gravel World Series races this year and had the flu in her build-up. She is second in the series ranking and should start near the front.
Showers are forecast for Nannup on Saturday
Most of the course is logging road with a surface of pea gravel. “Pea gravel’s super slippy, it’s like ball bearings instead of gravel,” said Nutt, who rides 40-millimeter tires on a bike without suspension. The surface is at its most slippery in dry heat and gets faster after a little rain. The Bureau of Meteorology forecasts a cloudy Saturday of 10 to 18 degrees Celsius, with a 60 percent chance of showers and a westerly wind of 15 to 25 kilometers per hour.
The climbs: Brockman, Ellis Creek and the last loop
The women ride what the organizer calls the medium course, the men’s route without its extra loop. After 15 nearly flat kilometers come about 30 kilometers with 1,000 meters of climbing, where Brockman, 2.4 kilometers at 8.2 percent, is the hardest climb. Ellis Creek, 2 kilometers at 9.1 percent, comes in the middle of the race.
The last 24.5 kilometers are a loop south of Nannup. It opens with a climb of 2.4 kilometers that steepens in its last kilometer, 20 kilometers from the finish, and race director Stephen Gallagher expects the race to be won or lost there. The top of the last climb, Lindsay Road, is 3.5 kilometers from a finish on a wide paved road.