Elite Damer / U23 (6 × 20 km)

Elite Damer / U23 (6 × 20 km)

Six laps of about 20 km each, half asphalt and half wide forest roads with fast gravel. Every lap starts fast and downhill into a technical corner and a hard climb, puts a hard hill about 600 metres in, and keeps throwing short kickers after that; the first three kilometres are gravel before any asphalt. The women’s elite group goes off twelve minutes after the elite men, in the same wave as the U19 and younger age-group women, and shares the lap with every senior class on course.

Help comes only in one place: the marked depot zone on the right just past the finish line, which is also the course’s only waste zone. There are no following cars, mechanical assistance is allowed only in the depot, and a sweep vehicle circulates all day to bring riders with a defect back to the finish. The final decides the class podium and the overall DCU Gravel Cup podium. This page is about the 2026 edition.

Six passes of the depot mean six chances to hand up a bottle, and the person holding it needs to know when the next one is due. A Livebib broadcast that the rider shares shows where she is on the lap, the distance covered and a finish estimate that updates with every lap. It opens in a browser, no account and no app, estimates are marked as estimates, and the rider chooses who gets the link.