How I Helped the Gravel National Champ Make a Surprising Bike Choice

Welcome to Dropped, a new weekly road and gravel cycling newsletter from Velo that brings you the latest ideas we’re debating endlessly on group rides, and a look behind the scenes of our coverage. 

 Sign up for Dropped

The world of gravel racing is small. Covering it for cycling media makes it feel even smaller. Around the stops of the North American off-road calendar, we all gather in far-flung places. Riders, media people, brand reps, race organizers—familiar faces at each level, making the increasingly familiar rounds.

Now, things are getting bigger every year. The riders are more well-known, the support staff is more robust, and the media demands are bigger. Things just keep getting more hectic, and we in the media adjust, but it has all shifted towards the serious end of the spectrum of cycling media.

Nevertheless, every once in a while, our little side of the sport still shines its casual origins. In the right scenarios, it can still feel like the small sport it began as, where everyone can become quick friends, brought together by the love of bikes. In Steamboat Springs this June, in the lead-up to SBT GRVL, I got a healthy dose of this kind of spirit after I finished up a bike check with Cobe Freeburn.

Freeburn, if you haven’t heard, is a rising star in gravel. The 24-year-old from Durango is one of the first true homegrown gravel professionals, switching to the discipline full-time in 2023. It has taken some time, but Freeburn is clearly in the upper echelon of professional gravel racing.

Yet, he is also just a guy in his twenties who really loves bikes. For those who don’t know, that is also a pretty good way to describe myself; I am just on the other side of the professional cycling coin. It is not hard to imagine how this went. After I put the camera equipment away, we got to chatting and quickly found ourselves deep in the weeds of gravel racing, bike tech, and the ups and downs of life in your twenties.

Eventually, we found our way to the subject of what bikes I have been testing. Coincidentally, I was just beginning my review of the Trek Domane. While the bike was still two months from launch, Freeburn is a Trek athlete, so he knew the bike was coming; he just hadn’t seen it yet.

I happened to have it with me, and when I pulled it out of my truck, that curiosity turned to excitement. That soon devolved into scheming, which then led to testing. A few minutes later, we had pulled the wheels off, Freeburn had run in to grab a set of gravel wheels with 45mm tires, and his teammate Daxton Mock had emerged from the Trek team’s condo.

Light bulbs were going off, and the idea for Freeburn to try and ride the Domane at the US Gravel Nationals was born.

Obviously, when Freeburn rolled across the line with his arms up at Gravel Nats nearly three months later, there were so many different inputs that made that victory happen. Our little experimental wheel swap in Steamboat was just one tiny part of it.

But when I confirmed with Freeburn that the bike he rode was the Domane, I couldn’t help but smile.

His winning bike choice was not some grand plan from Trek. It wasn’t a part of a marketing ploy. From what Paige Onweller, a Trek rider who also decided to race the Domane en route to victory at nationals, told me, it seems like it was actually a bit of a stretch to make it all happen. Instead, it was just two young bike-obsessives shooting the shit about how to make weird bikes that go fast.

That, my friends, is the truly beautiful side of gravel cycling.

Let us know about making connections in cycling! Who have you met, what did you chat about, and what has come of the people you have met at cycling events? Drop a comment, we read them all.

 Sign up for Dropped