How does the women’s gravel field stack up heading into the new season?
Photo: Dan Hughes via Life Time
To bid farewell to the 2025 season and ring in the new year, we are taking stock of the gravel scene in a format that we hope is relatively easy to follow while also leaving plenty of room for debate. Last week, we looked at the top 25 gravel racers on the men’s side. Now it’s time for the women.
Thomas Euler is a gravel fanatic. Besides writing about gravel on Escape Collective, he has his own “gravel-coded” The Gravel Stack Substack. He also hosts the Gracing podcast, where he (p)reviews gravel races, often with the top pros who competed.The methodology
The way I assembled the rankings did not change from the men’s rankings. For a detailed breakdown of the methodology, jump over to the men’s side if you haven’t read it yet. For anyone else, just a quick refresher: this list is not making a statement about the riders’ historical position. We aren’t looking for the GOAT. Rather, these power rankings aim to reflect who is best right now, heading into the 2026 season. To that end, I mostly considered 2025 results only and, if it came down to it, weighted results from later in the season more heavily than earlier ones. There are nuances in the method to the madness.
The men’s Gravel Power Rankings
Who sits atop the gravel hierarchy as the 2026 season looms?
Top 25 Women
Let’s jump into the rankings!
25. Wendy Oosterwoud
Photo: sonam.cc – PAS Racing
I think it’s fair to classify Wendy Oosterwoud as the least well-known lady on the PAS Racing roster. But don’t let that fool you; she is a very strong gravel racer. Her 2025 schedule centered on UCI Gravel World Series races, where she finished 11 out of her 12 races in the top 10, including three podiums and one win. While her best results came in fields that did not have the highest level of competition, winning is never easy. In UCI GWS races, in particular, you would be foolish to underestimate the elite riders just because you’ve never heard their names. Many strong women from the continental and pro road and European MTB scenes drop in those races just for funsies. And Oosterwoud managed to be there or thereabouts most of the time.
And let’s not ignore her sixth place at the muddy premiere of The Hills, where she placed ahead of riders like Karolina Migoń and Carolin Schiff. It’s a result that underscores that she can reach a pretty high level. That said, she didn’t get results on gravel’s biggest stages (she DNFed The Traka and DNSed Ranxo), which stops her from ranking higher.
24. Luise Valentin
Photo: Gravel Earth Series – The Traka – Oriol Gonzalvo
If you are a hardcore gravel head, you will forever remember the dramatic moment when Valentin flatted out of the hitter-packed front group at The Traka 360 this year. She was the sole unexpected name among some of the game’s very best, including Migoń, Sarah Sturm, and Gee Schreurs. She tried to fix her tire for minutes on end, with the camera capturing it all. Alas, to no avail. We’ll never know what could have been (luckily, Valentin has great perspective, as I learned when chatting with her about the incident).
But we can’t really factor a performance like this in. It’s a footnote that carries little weight compared to actual results. Because Valentin only raced half the season, and focused on her adventure riding in the second half, she has very few race days to go by. In essence, she’s here thanks to her dominant victory at the Sahara Gravel Stage race, where she won three of the four stages and GC.
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