2023 Bike Packing Wrap Up

Is this time of the year where we receive the wrap ups with the highlights of our activities. 2023 has lived a great rise bike packing events all over the world. According to DotWatcher, a UK based company building up a great community around this sport, bike-packing racing is living its own golden age and there has been a rise on the events hosted. No matter what discipline, either road, off-road or gravel, there have been events all over the world.

Using information about riders that posted on both DotWatcher and Bikepacking.com information about their experiences, in this blog I am going to show some insights of what has been 2023 in terms of bike packing races.

The set up & the Data

Prior to visualise the insights, a quick note on the data. Data are extracted from sections associated with Rigs of and Bikes of from Bikepacking.com and Dotwatcher.cc. These are dedicated sections where riders post information about their bikes, the gear they intend to use in the race, where they come from, etc…

I have built a scraper that I have combined with a Large Language Model¹ to extract information about different elements referred to the bikes and components used by the riders. A snapshot fo th information availables

country	age_group	race	bike_brand	bike_models	type_race
Austria	30 - 40 years old	Hellenic Mountain Race 2023	Specialized	Epic	Off Road
United States	50 - 60 years old	Stagecoach 400 2023	Marin	Rift Zone 2	Off Road
United States	50 - 60 years old	Stagecoach 400 2023	Canyon	Lux Trail	Off Road
Canada	50 - 60 years old	Stagecoach 400 2023	Habanero	Custom 4XL Titanium Hardtail	Off Road
Italy	40 - 50 years old	Hellenic Mountain Race 2023	Canyon	Lux Trail CF7 Columbia Blue 2022	Off Road

What type of event got more attention from the riders?

Riders were more engaged with gravel events. Out of the almost 2200 riders that reported information about their gear, a 42% did it for an event the info provided by riders is associated with Gravel events (42%) followed by Off-Road (35%) and Road (23%). Within gravel, Badlands led the events with 122 riders reporting their gear. Considering off-road, the Tour Divide obtained most of th was Atlas Mountain Race with 104

What type of riders

Age groups

Gravel seems to be a popular among riders in their 40s and 30s. Off road events look like the event to go as riders get older. This is specially true when riders are in their sixties.

Countries of the riders

Riders from the UK are the most numerous followed by German and American riders. There is a distinction in the type of races. Whereas European riders tend to favour gravel races, American, Canadian and Kiwi riders seem to sign up for off-road events more frequently (in 80% - 90% of the total sign-ups of the riders in the country). Road racing was more determining for French and Polish riders who signed up for Transpyrenees and the Race Across Poland respectively

Bikes

Footnotes

1. The model used is gpt-3.5-turbo-1106