Words by Nicole Mitsigeorgis
It’s early June 2024, and my husband, Anthony, and I are frantically trying to finish organising our honeymoon, which is now only two months away. It’s been a hectic year – we got married in March, and shortly after that, we adopted a puppy. Needless to say, training and racing had taken a bit of a back burner.
I open my laptop to skim through my emails, and something catches my eye – ‘UCI Gravel World Series’. I open the email and read the first sentence… ‘We proudly announce that you have qualified for the 2024 UCI Gravel World Championships.’ What? I had no idea I had qualified. At first, I instantly dismissed the idea of going. It was two weeks after our honeymoon and I had no idea how I was going to prepare for it. We had also spent a lot of our funds on our honeymoon, and an additional trip to Belgium was definitely not in our budget! But after telling my family and friends, they convince me that I can’t miss out on this opportunity.
I decide to reach out to sponsors for extra support, and even start a fundraiser to help get me to Belgium. I didn’t expect to receive so much support and was completely blown away by the number of people who wanted to help me get to World Champs. As a result, I was successfully able to raise the funds needed to get me there. Now, I just had to do the work to ensure I was in race form!
In the months leading to World Champs, Anthony and I spent five weeks in Italy for our belated honeymoon. Whilst some would see this as an unideal situation in the lead-up to a big race, it actually turned out to be the complete opposite for me. We had already planned to take our bikes with us on this trip and explore the alpine regions of France and Italy. Consequently, the first three weeks of our trip essentially became a training camp in the French Alps and Italian Dolomites! In addition to this, I was away from home and didn’t have the usual stress of balancing work and life commitments with training. I was in a situation where I could completely focus on training, eating, and sleeping – perfect!
Upon returning to Australia, I had two weeks at home to focus on final race preparation and fine-tuning things on the bike. These couple of weeks went way too fast for my liking, and before I knew it I was boarding a flight to Belgium to compete at my first Gravel World Championships event.
In the week leading into the race, I was lucky enough to stay with my friend Billy, who was also competing at his first World Champs. Travelling alone to another country to compete in a big event like this is a stressful endeavour, and I’m really glad that I was able to share this experience with a friend who was going through the same emotions. Having each other for support was reassuring and helped reduce some of the stress in the lead-up and on race day. Throughout the week I was full of mixed emotions; the usual excitement and nervousness before a big race, feelings of gratitude for all the people who supported me in getting there, and also some slight feelings of imposter syndrome.
Whilst most of the week was uneventful in the lead-up to race day, I did unfortunately have a small crash whilst reconning the course. There was quite a bit of mud in some areas of the course, and I was frequently getting off my bike to look at potential lines I could take during the race.
Unfortunately, this meant my cleats got filled with a considerable amount of mud, which ended up essentially ‘glueing’ me into my pedals. I eventually discovered this when I stopped at an intersection and realised I couldn’t unclip. I fell, quite hard, on my left lower back. I got up, cleaned out my cleats and continued riding, thinking that it was probably just a bit of bad bruising. Upon returning to Australia, I would find out that I had actually fractured a floating rib!
The course had been reconned, my bike fine-tuned and ready, my legs activated, and many carbs consumed. It was time for race day. I have mixed feelings about how my race unfolded. I’m happy with how I prepared and how my legs felt on the day. Unfortunately, no matter how well-prepared you are or how good your legs feel on the day, you can’t control all the other variables on race day.
Each age group had their own starting box and were released from the start line every 1-2 minutes. My group (35-39 women) started a minute or so behind an older men’s bracket. It didn’t take us long to catch the back of this group and get caught behind them in the narrow sections of the course parkour. For most of the race, I found myself sitting at a very comfortable pace waiting for opportunities to get around slower riders on single-track sections, and dodging crashes in the more technical sections of the course. I’m very thankful that I managed to stay upright the entire day and finish without any mechanicals, however, I am slightly disappointed that I couldn’t go as fast as I was capable of in some sections due to the interference from other age groups on the course. I finished 23rd out of the 40 who managed to finish in my group.
Looking back now on my experience, I’m glad I took the opportunity to race at this World Championships. Travelling alone to a foreign country and competing in a big event such as this is not an easy endeavour, and no matter how well prepared you are or how good you feel on the day, there are so many things that are out of your control. Despite not getting the results I wanted, I’m proud that I was selected to represent my country and I feel like this experience has helped me grow further as an athlete.
Currently, I’m enjoying some much-needed downtime and having fun doing some local racing in my hometown of Adelaide. Moving into the New Year, I have plans to race again at RADL GRVL in January, and also Gravel National Champs in April. In addition to this, I have plans to return to some road racing in 2025.
Race photos by Sportograf (@spotograf), other photos by Anthony Bogiatzis (@bogga93).
