Words James Ion - Photography courtesy of Ian Boswell.
Ian Boswell has been there, done that, and probably has a lot more t-shirts than you! He has been racing bikes competitively for over 15 years, has been to the World Tour with both Sky and Katusha and in only his second GRVL race he managed to win the biggest of them all - Unbound!
His palmarès speak for themselves, however, this Oregonian is not motivated by awards or recognition but rather by the legacy he leaves for both his sport and his community.
I had the pleasure of having some time with Ian, to talk about his experiences in GRVL, his hopes for the sport, missed opportunities, and pesky weasels!
“Oh goodness, I mean where am I at?” sighs Ian over the video chat from his Vermont farmstead. It has been a minute since he came over from the road scene. Following a series of concussions he decided the risk was too high to continue and in 2019 he retired from the World Tour, returning to the USA to start a new career as an Athlete Liason with the cycling company Wahoo
“I kind of came to terms with it, like, hey, you know what I’m done, done racing” reflects Ian “In 2019 I picked up other interests, we live here in northern Vermont on an old dairy farm so there is a laundry list of things to do and to learn!”
Racing was not something being considered let alone thought about, the focus was on getting better and starting a new chapter. Even if pesky weasels ruin your flock of chickens “Yeah we don’t have any cows, there is not enough time to milk twice a day, but we do have apples and did have chickens till a weasel destroyed them, but we are plenty busy.” Ian lives with his wife Gretchen, two small daughters and a dog and in addition to his farm he works for Wahoo, everything was pointing to a life away from elite-level sport, until COVID.
Of all the bad things that came from COVID one of the positives was that things got slower and people were able to refocus and get time to themselves, “In 2020 nothing was happening, and there were no races. I guess I just kind of fell in love again with riding my bike” says Ian “In Vermont, there are just so many roads, and most of them are dirt, I think 70% of all roads in the state are unpaved!” Thanks to the harsh weather and remote nature of the state Ian was exposed to the joys of GRVL riding. “For the first time in my adult life, I was riding my bike just for pure pleasure, I didn’t have a coach, no events, no races, I was just riding my bike as a social tool, meeting with friends, exploring. It was a way to stay healthy and make connections.” Once the fitness started coming back so did the competitiveness “I started racing myself, getting KOM’s and then setting out to beat them, and then 2021 came around and events starting coming back on the calendar”.
Community spirit
By now Ian was established at Wahoo, working as an athlete liaison which meant he would be attending events, and being at the expo and it also meant he still had contacts in the business “I was still close to Specialized and SRAM at the time and it was always the intention to participate in some GRVL events. especially as I was going to be there anyway, I was in no way chasing it as a career.” That is until Unbound 2021. It was only his second GRVL race and he ended up winning it, which was a surprise even to Ian. “At the time I had no coach, the only 200-mile ride I had done was the summer before but never a race, and I’d never really dabbled in GRVL racing, I had heard horror stories about all that could go wrong, I was there to learn, but winning that race changed the trajectory for what GRVL became for me. Looking back, the rest of that summer was probably the most successful year of cycling I had ever had. I won Unbound, I won Rooted Vermont and Vermont Overland. I won BWR North Carolina and went to Kenya where I won a stage of the Migration Race! I look back now and I’m like wow!”
The success was so good that talk inevitably turned to when would he go full-time Pro. The backers were there, and it was a very real possibility “I was like you know what I am going to quit my job at Wahoo” Ian tells me “It sounded so comforting to me to be a professional athlete and just train and race. It’s simple.” Then reality gave him a call and he realized that although it seemed simple, the priorities of day-to-day life, a career after cycling and his growing family were what he should be focusing on, not some last stab at glory. “It seemed like the right thing to do, then I got this inkling inside me of like well where am I going to end up in three years, am I going to come back to Wahoo and be like ‘hey, you know that job that I had a couple of years ago? Can you make it available again?’”
Despite the temptation, Ian was able to resist and to Wahoo’s gain remained in post. “They (Wahoo) have been incredibly flexible, they understand I want to race but also said if you want to work here you still have to turn up!” laughs Ian. It is not just job security that kept him from going full-time pro again, since that Unbound win his family has grown to two children, the puppy is now a dog and he has fully integrated himself into the Vermont lifestyle with community projects such as Progression Park. He is a volunteer firefighter and helps out with the emergency relief. “Yeah I spread myself pretty thin” understates Ian “My cycling kind of struggles because of that, but I guess it’s a reminder to me that GRVL racing was never the goal for me. It’s hard because cycling is a big part of my identity, but I never got to see the fun side of cycling racing the world tour, and now GRVL gives me another way to express myself as a cyclist.”
Community clearly plays a big role in Ian’s life, from fighting fires to fixing flats, it is the driving force behind a lot of his decisions. In 2022 Ian withdrew his application to the Life Time Grand Prix to make room for a more, in his words, deserving candidate who would benefit more from the exposure, this eye on the future is shaping his own GRVL adventure “An alternative calendar to the Alternative Calendar” quips Ian “I want to see the less known events., I still love riding my bike and I want to get out there and share my experiences. I spent 20 years of my life racing, there is a lot of knowledge there that to me is second nature, I want to share that with new riders in the sport.” He is already planning for 2025 and has an idea in the works where he will lead a group of newcomers at Unbound, with meet-ups and calls before the event to get people ready for what for many will be their first GRVL event, despite the 200-mile distance!
His commitment to community is nuanced, it comes from the help he received growing up in the sport, from tips and equipment to support and advice, and from the influence a “selfish” world tour lifestyle can have. “All those years I was racing on the road I had a very narrow view of what cycling was, I was like ‘If you are not racing World Tour why bother?’ Coming to GRVL my eyes have been opened to what the bike can mean to people, It really fascinates me what drives people to take vacation, time away from family just to do this one event, it means so much to them and it’s kind of beautiful.”
Ian can also be seen riding at the back of Steam Boat Gravel (SBT) not because he can’t keep the pace but because he is making sure others enjoy the day they have trained for “Racing at the front is like what Alexey Vermeulen alluded to in your interview (GRVL Magazine 05/09) it’s another race, another weekend but for a lot of people participating it is their one event of the year, it is their Tour de France, their Unbound or World Championships, to be able to help them finish is just awesome.”
At this year's SBT one such incident sticks out, a gentleman was standing at the side of the track, he had flatted out and thought his day was over, all that hard work was for nothing and the tears were coming, he had no tube, no way to fix it, his day was done. Until Ian Boswell, former world tour rider and Unbound winner, showed up with his bag full of spares “I saw him there and thought hey this will be a quick fix, five minutes and he will be back on the road and able to finish the event. To be able to just help them get to the finish line is rewarding for me, but it’s also just inspiring too, you know to see the community that comes together for this event.”
It is not just the community at the back of the race that is important to Ian but also how it looks at the front. When he came over from the road the sport was still finding its way, it was a blank canvas in terms of what was possible, but the change and the speed of change in particular has been phenomenal. “Yeah it has changed a lot” reflects Ian, “When I look back at 2021 there were a lot of familiar names, Pete Stetina, Payson, Ted King, Alex Howes, you know, Lachlan, you could look around and know who the hitters were, now the field is so international a win could come from anywhere. It was very much a race of attrition but now it is full-blown from the start, attacks flying from the gun.”
With the competition heating up there were fears the sport could lose its way “I saw that the events, media, brands and riders all defaulting to pro-road cycling. For a while, though it was beautiful so much freedom but we missed the chance to keep it like that.”
There is much discussion about the spirit of GRVL however, for Ian, it was not some ambiguous idea but rather the direct impact such a direction could have on the next generation. “My time at the front of the race was dwindling I was more concerned for what we were, as elite athletes setting up for the future, how does it look for an 18-year-old kid who wants to in five years be a pro-GRVL racer, I had, I guess a lot of issue with that.”
“The beauty of the GRVL space is that an unknowncould train their butt off and then go and win Unbound”
“I was worried, like is this really going to kill the sport but I came to realize that you know, what’s happening at the front was always going to happen.” muses Ian “But I have had the opportunity to ride as a participant, everyone is so concerned with what’s happening in GRVL but it’s like, well that’s 2% of the participants! Everyone else is out there riding, they’re enjoying it for far different reasons than how fast can they get around the course, my faith has been restored!”
It has been said many times but what makes this sport great is the participation element, it is more like a marathon or a triathlon than a road race. Every sport has an elite level and that will always be where the money is but the USP of GRVL is that anyone can just rock up and ride the same course on the same day as the Pros. “That is the beautiful side of GRVL that anyone can take part in, it really is cool!”
Faith restored Ian can now turn his focus to his own goals and look ahead to the next season “I have been thinking about that a lot in the past few weeks, I think next year will be my last year, I mean people say that a lot, then get inspired and keep going but I have extracted a lot from cycling and if a young rider is coming through I don’t want to take opportunities away from them. Money is tight across the cycling it’s a lot less than people realize, so if someone else can get an opportunity to make a career out of cycling I would love that, so next year will be my last.”
With him calling time on his racing career thoughts turn to what the future might look like for the sport. “I think the next big evolution, and it is already happening, will be teams, there will be more of a team structure, not just team tactics but the support at events, GRVL racing can be expensive real quick and teams will help mitigate that.”
Calling time
“I see more teams popping up over the coming years, I would be happy to be part of that - I have all this experience of knowing how this works on the road. A lot of people are coming from MTB and riding privateer style and don’t know the benefits of or indeed the challenges of the team structure, so that is definitely something I can see myself doing.”
Even at the finish, it is the community that drives him, and how he can help, how he can shape the stories of those taking part “It’s nice to see the whole range of participants are there, all have amazing stories to share, which is really cool to see. It’s very cool!”
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Photo Credit: Ansel Dickey
With so much to talk about, we touched on a few fanciful ideas for GRVL. Below are two ideas from Ian, which could inform a nice discussion so let us know in the comments what you think...
Team Random
“Oh boy I had this idea a couple of years ago. I always thought it would be cool if the day before Unbound or another race there was a random team selection, a sort of lottery where five riders are thrown together as a team. I rode with Mitch Docker at Cape Epic and it was such a great experience it would be cool to match riders of different strengths and they had to finish within a certain time of each other to win the event.”
Unbound and Free
“The other idea I had was to try and convince Unbound to not let the winner race the next year, rather they have to support the back of the race. For two reasons, one they get to experience the whole spectrum of GRVL racing, and their sponsors could still do some cool activations. The athlete would get to see a whole other side of the sport. It would also force brands into signing longer-term partnerships with athletes - it sounded like a good idea in 2021 and 2022.”
Let us know what you think
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