Here Are the Elite Start Lists for Unbound Gravel 2024

Call it the Super Bowl or the Tour de France of gravel, or just call it Unbound. The Kansas gravel race is by now a legend in its own right, and in two weeks thousands of riders will gather in Emporia to test their mettle on the gravel roads that quilt the Flint Hills.

The Unbound Gravel of today is a far cry from its origin story in 2006. Then, 34 hearty riders gathered on a humid June morning to see if they could complete a 200-mile route on the local gravel roads before sunset. Only 18 of them finished, and they celebrated by eating pizza in a hotel parking lot.

This year, just over 5,000 people are registered to tackle one of Unbound’s five race distances spanning from 25 to 350 miles. During the event, an expo blankets the streets of downtown Emporia, and many cycling brands choose Unbound to launch new products and activate around their sponsored athletes.

Read all of our Unbound Gravel coverage here

While the 200-mile race remains the marquee event of the weekend, there is one aspect of Unbound — aside from its massive numbers — that the pizza-eating pioneers of could not have forseen: the professionalization of gravel racing.

A few years ago, Unbound debuted an ‘elite’ race category, and this year that category has swelled to 200 riders. 70 of them are participants in the competitive Life Time Grand Prix series, which Unbound’s parent company Life Time launched in 2022. Nearly 90 riders in the elite field this year are from outside the United States, some coming from as far afield as Kenya, Australia, South Africa, and Norway.

As of May 17, there are 137 elite men and 63 elite women registered for the race.

Lauren De Crescenzo, Ian Boswell, Sofia Gomez Villafañe, Ivar Slik, Carolin Schiff, and Keegan Swenson, the winners of the last three editions of Unbound, will all be returning to Kansas to try and reclaim the title, but with 200 miles of potential headwinds, heat, mud, and mechanicals to deal with, victory is far from guaranteed.

While the eyes of the world may not yet follow Unbound as closely as the Super Bowl or the Tour de France, it’s definitely the place to look on June 1.

Here are the 2024 elite start lists:

2025 Unbound Gravel Elite Men

2025 Unbound Gravel Elite Women