UNBOUND UNLEASHED

Josh Patterson was one of 34 starters for the inaugural edition of Unbound in 2006. Now, with more than 5,000 riders taking part in today's event, he charts the rise of the most important race in gravel

- Josh Patterson

Unbound was an unlikely candidate to become the most important gravel race in the world. It began in Kansas, a state most people drive through or fly over, in a rural town with an even smaller cycling community. Back in 2006, there were only a handful of other events that could accurately be categorised as gravel races.

It's not that the deck was stacked against Unbound, then named Dirty Kanza; it's that founders Jim Cummins and Joel Dyke were playing with an entirely different deck of cards, with no inclination of what the race they created would become - nor how it would reshape cycling. "Joel Dyke and I founded the event for one simple reason," Cummins tells me. "We wanted to ride it.

We knew that if we didn't create it, most likely nobody else would." I was one of the 34 racers who embarked on the first edition of Unbound in 2006. I didn't have a clue what I was getting myself into. Yet, as soon as I crossed the finish line for the first time, which was actually just a pop-up tent in a hotel parking lot, I was hooked. Since the inaugural Unbound 200, I've tried my luck on nine other occasions, most recently in 2023. I've had some triumphs and some failures, and it's been one heck of a ride watching this once-niche event become a globally recognised race.

This is the story behind how it happened.

The first domino

Unbound wasn't created in isolation.

Cummins and Dyke drew inspiration from other endurance events taking place on backroads throughout the Midwest. Within the state of Kansas, there was the Flint Hills Death Ride, which ran from 1993 until 2010.

This was more of an endurance ride than a race, and the courses were shorter, generally around 80 miles in length. However, it was often held in the sweltering August heat.