Gravel racing has exploded. What started as weekend warriors riding dirt roads has become a global circus—World Cups, full-time pros, corporate money flooding in. At Argonaut, we've watched this transformation up close while building the bikes that fuel it: light, fast gravel racing bikes built to devour any terrain. But as the sport rockets toward legitimacy, we're learning that growth without direction breeds chaos.

This weekend's UCI Gravel World Series event in the Netherlands, the Gravel One Fifty, proved that point in brutal fashion.

The women's elite race turned into a masterclass in how not to run a gravel race. Picture this: elite women get a two-minute head start over 2,000 age-group men on a flat, narrow course with minimal road closures. What could go wrong?

Everything.

Our Argonaut Factory Racing athlete, Cassia Boglio, lined up against some of the world's best, expecting to race. Instead, she found herself dodging crashes and fighting for wheels as waves of male riders swallowed the women's field. "I lost count of how many crashes I had to avoid and wheels I had to fight for," she said afterward.

She wasn't alone. Rosa Kloser, who somehow managed second place, called it "pure chaos." Geerike Schreurs, racing her first—and likely last—UCI Gravel World Series event, cut deeper: "It's not racing, it's survival."

Twenty-five kilometers in, the amateur men's field had completely absorbed the elite women's race. At that point, results stopped reflecting fitness, tactics, or bike handling. They reflected who could hang on in traffic and who could avoid getting taken out by someone else's mistake.

The safety implications were terrifying. Multiple riders in the top 10 reported near-misses and collisions. At one point, an elite woman lay screaming on the ground as racer after racer in the peloton streamed past. This isn't racing—it's Russian roulette with carbon fiber.

Compare that mess to events like The Rift in Iceland this weekend, where elite women's gravel racing gets the respect it deserves with separate starts from age-group men. "Just real racing," as Geerike put it. Simple concept, apparently revolutionary execution.

The fix isn't complicated. As Nicole Frain pointed out, give elite women a 30-60 minute head start. If road closures can't accommodate that, redesign the course. If organizers want to build a legitimate sport, they need to create conditions where tactics and fitness, not luck and crash avoidance, determine who wins.

This isn't about protecting anyone or making excuses after a hard race. It's about basic sporting integrity. When the women's field gets swallowed by traffic halfway through the race, you're not crowning the strongest rider; you're crowning the most fortunate.

Cassia's 8th-place finish was impressive given the circumstances, but she shouldn't have to race in those conditions. Her post-race reflection captured the frustration perfectly: "I still did have a lot of fun out there and am so grateful for these race opportunities… but how unsafe I felt yesterday, and the inability to race each other properly has now reached a point I think we'd be doing ourselves a disservice if we didn't speak up."

She's right to speak up. Gravel racing sits at a crossroads. It can evolve into a sport that treats all its athletes with respect and creates conditions for genuine competition, or it can remain a well-funded free-for-all where logistics trump sporting merit.

We build gravel bikes for racers who deserve better than survival mode. Athletes like Cassia show up ready to compete; the sport needs to meet them halfway. Because if gravel racing wants to be taken seriously, it has to take itself seriously first.