If you’ve landed here, you probably know that Badlands is an unsupported gravel race covering a 790km route with 15,400m of elevation gain along Spain’s southern coast. The website bikepacking.com has been collecting and publishing bike setups for races like this, and you can find the data for Badlands 2024 here [link]. It features over 110 submissions—more than half of of the 199 riders—which is quite impressive. However, the data is presented as free-form text with a photo of each setup, making it challenging to draw quantitative insights from so many entries.
To gain a deeper understanding of the gear choices, I decided to put some numbers to this data. After a couple of failed attempts at using ChatGPT to create a table of the setups, I painstakingly itemized them all by hand. I was particularly curious about how the top riders’ gear compared to the rest. While only 4 of the top-10 riders had submitted their setups to bikepacking.com, I managed to gather data for 3 more, bringing the total to 7 top-10 finishers. You can find the raw data in this Google Sheet [link]. In this post I analyze key parts of these rigs, including frames, group sets, tires, etc… as well as some basic demographics.
The majority of riders opted for gravel bikes, which is unsurprising given that Badlands is a gravel race. Out of the 113 riders, 4 chose full suspension mountain bikes, 1 rode a hardtail, and 2 selected gravel bikes with fork suspension. An impressive 37 different brands were represented, with Canyon—the most popular brand—accounting for 10.7% of the field. It’s encouraging to see such a diverse range of bike companies, including many smaller manufacturers, represented in the race.
We observed 18 different tire brands, but two stood out: Schwalbe and Pirelli. Together, they accounted for 45% of all tires. Specialized, Hutchinson, and Continental made up an additional 29%.
Looking at individual tires, it’s unsurprising that the two most popular were from Pirelli and Schwalbe. The Pirelli Cinturato Gravel M was the clear favorite—in relative terms, it was 55% more popular than the second-place Schwalbe G-One R. Interestingly, the Cinturato Gravel M is fairly average according to Bicycle Rolling Resistance data, and it wasn’t used on any of the top-10 riders’ bikes. For more nerdy details about tires at Badlands 2024, check out my longer post [link].
All riders, except the 4 on mountain bikes, used tires between 40-50mm. The most popular size by far was 45mm, featuring on 42% of bikes. While gravel tires can be as narrow as 32mm, Badlands’ tough terrain—with its loose gravel and sand—explains why riders chose wider tires. Research shows that wider tires can often be faster, especially in bumpy conditions. With their added grip, puncture protection, and comfort, the choice becomes obvious. The trend of using mountain bike tires on gravel bikes is emerging, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see more bikes with 50mm or 2.0" mountain bike tires next year.
Even though most riders were on gravel bikes, roughly 45% of them used mountain bike cassettes, which offer a wider gear range—also known as a mullet setup. The most popular cassette across bikes was the 10-52T, which has an 18% larger gear range than the 10-44T commonly seen on gravel bikes. This shows the gear range that’s needed for all the climbing at Badlands. Nevertheless, the 10-44T was still a popular choice, appearing on 18% of bikes.
Over 80% of bikes featured a 1-by setup (meaning a single chainring). The two most common sizes—38T and 40T—accounted for 45% of all chainrings, while 36T and 42T made up an additional 21%. These sizes are typical for gravel bikes. Notably, the 44T gravel chainring appeared on only 4% of bikes, further indicating that riders preferred easier gears for the challenging terrain.
