Rob Britton‘s cycling career hit another stratosphere three weeks ago, landing somewhere over a lunar rainbow in Kansas, appropriately enough.
The Factor Bikes gravel racer not only crossed the finish line well ahead of 2024 Unbound Gravel 200 winner Lachlan Morton (EF Education-EasyPost), Badlands adversary Robin Gemperle, and Transcordilleras winner Laurens ten Dam (LSRF) after 359 miles of racing but he did it with a new fastest time, in 17 hours, 49 minutes, 51 seconds. With a new fastest average speed of 20.13mph, Britton smashed the former Unbound Gravel XL finish time by 12 minutes.
“Honestly, it was fun. During the race I commented a few times, ‘this is sick’. And ‘oh man, we’re going to get such a good sunset’,” a relaxed Britton told Cyclingnews on a video call two weeks after the dust settled from his endurance test, able to put his legs up on his back deck at home back in western Canada.
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“Basically, just riding with guys I’ve raced my whole career, just respect between us all, and I think just a passion of doing exactly that. I think at one point, especially when it was Laurens ten Dam, Lachy [Morton] and myself, just ripping into the sunset and into darkness, that was when it was really special. All of us, I think we’re just so similar in squeezing the towel and getting it all out of ourselves. There was nothing weird or anything, like trying to do a hard pull over top of someone else. It was like we were just going really fast, and it was awesome.”
From a mass start on Friday afternoon at 3pm local time in downtown Emporia, the trio of Morton, Ten Dam and Britton rode at the front of the race as they passed the 100-mile mark. However, as the radiant sunshine retreated to the west and was replaced by a dark sky with shimmering stars, Morton marched on alone with Britton trailing solo. Ten Dam fell back and joined forces with Gemperle of Switzerland, a first-timer in Kansas.
“Even later in the race, I remember coming up to Lachy and finally catching him and said ‘Yo man, I know we’re going to battle it out, this has been awesome’. This has been such a cool day of racing – a full day and night,” he laughed about the length of the ride.
“You don’t get that very often, right? Bike racing, especially now, is so cutthroat and so serious. That’s fine. I’ve done that part of it for years. I’m just not really in search of that now. So what was it like for me [at Unbound XL]? It genuinely was fun. And obviously, at the end, winning is fun.”
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Britton recalled that it was eight years ago that his GC win at the 2017 Larry H. Miller Tour of Utah was “hands down” the biggest win of his 12-year pro road career. He said there was a long list of reasons why that victory was his top career road result, and not just as his first UCI 2.HC stage race title or the biggest result for his Rally Cycling squad at that time.
“The biggest [reason] is it was just relief, because I’d been knocking on the door of a really big result for a long time. At a certain point you’re just like, shit, am I ever gonna get this [win]? Am I just gonna be a guy who defines himself with second places and some podium stop bys? I finally got the big one at the race I targeted.”
Across several seasons with Continental road teams, Britton did have a solid run of second-place and third-place finishes, from Tour of the Gila, Tour de Beauce, Vuelta Independencia and USA Pro Challenge stage races, and too many top 10s to list.
“The next one is probably Badlands, really in career part two. Badlands as a whole was really special, a full-on adventure. When I bikepack, I do quite a bit of research into what I’m going to do. But when I do these ultra things, I am so unbelievably amateur. I just get by on fitness.
“The night before Badlands, I was going through the route and checking to see how far is this, where are some climbs? I just ended up stopping here, there and everywhere, but I love that. That’s part of the adventure.”
It was his 2023 victory at Badlands in Spain that sent a new endurance record, as he covered the 800km (497 miles) race in one day, 14 hours, 20 minutes, distancing Gemperle by just over one hour.
A definition of ‘biggest’ ride on a bike is not all about personal wins for Britton. In 2022 he began his first season as a privateer in off-road racing, having officially retired from his pro road career the year before. He accomplished a Fastest Known Time (FKT) of the British Columbia (BC) Epic 1,000km mountain bike course in 2022, riding the full length of Vancouver Island in two days, nine hours, 24 minutes. That record was seven hours faster than the 2019 mark.
“I’ve never hurt myself so bad ever before, or since, not even close,” he said after this year’s Unbound XL record ride. “I couldn’t feel my fingertips for months. I had to get a cortisone injection in my knee afterwards. Your entire body is just swollen. I was so emaciated because I didn’t eat for three days. It was crazy. And somehow from that, I was like, ‘this was great, I should do more of these’.”
Stalking Morton
Mutual respect for top two riders in Unbound Gravel XL (Image credit: Life Time)
Britton had his previous best finish at Unbound Gravel 200 in his first appearance in 2022, where he was sixth. His sophomore gravel season he bookended the year with victories at the Belgian Waffle Ride British Columbia and Badlands, and followed in 2024 with a win at Shasta Gravel Hugger, then podiums at Sea Otter Classic Fuego XL, The Traka 360 and Oregon Trail Gravel Grinder. The big results became evasive for his 2025 campaign.
“Before the race, I was probably struggling a bit with just being happy racing bikes. I guess it’s a product of years of doing it. Usually, when you put in a lot of work, you get something out of it. I had a pretty good couple of years racing gravel, and the spring had always yielded some sort of results, something positive. For whatever reason this year, It was not coming together. I was just getting blown out,” he said recalling that even at The Traka 360 he encountered challenges with a flat tyre and chasing that left him in 11th place.
“But then XL came, and I was on a good day. I didn’t just get lucky, as I had great legs. That’s kind of more my thing, the ultra stuff now.”
Morton was the favourite to win Unbound Gravel XL. Why not? As the man who rode around the perimeter of Australia, 14,200km (88,823 miles) for a FKT last year among his accomplishments, then just 577km in a giant loop in the eastern prairielands of the central US should not have major unknowns.
The one major reckoning for the Australian turned out to be a former foe and friend, not the weather, not the relentless rolling terrain, not refueling stops. Morton even said he could tell the Canadian was matching his pace, if not surpassing it, because he could detect a headlight behind him for hours in the night.
“I hadn’t ridden through the night for a really long time. I was struggling with what felt like a whole swarm of the most like-PTSD memories of so many dramatic nights. But then I actually got into it, and then I was having such a nice battle with Rob,” Morton said after the finish in Emporia, rolling in a little more than five minutes after Britton.
“It really became this really crazy, sort of a unique experience where we’re just sort of not together. That was one of the better battles that I think I’ve had, it was really cool.”
The Britton-Morton battles began when they both raced on the road more than a decade ago. In 2015 the Australian won the GC at Tour of Utah, while Britton was fifth on GC. Earlier that same year Morton won the GC at Tour of the Gila and Britton was third. The year before Britton won that UCI stage race and Morton was just inside the top 25.
They did race ‘together’ throughout the Kansas night, separated by just a few miles. Britton said he never saw Morton’s light ahead the entire night, but figured he could see the light of his bike behind in what turned out to be an eight-hour chase.
“We were just taking turns pulling. We were shattered. I mean, when I was catching, it took forever, an eight-hour chase. I could tell he wasn’t as good as he was earlier, but we were both taking long pulls. I was like, ‘damn, this is nice’. The person you’re racing against, you have so much respect. It just seemed fitting that it would end in a sprint.
“Then at one point, I just turned around and he wasn’t there in the last 10k. I knew he was buckled, but I didn’t know he was as beat up as he was. He’s so strong. We all can go so deep, but for him to just go from being on the wheel to not, he was fighting. It’s exactly what I would have done.
“I look back and he wasn’t there, and then it started to sink in. I had 7 or 8k by myself, and you’re thinking ‘he’s gonna get a second wind and get back’. Then you come into that long straight [on Commercial Street] and that feeling was just insane. I’ve never even come close to winning Unbound.”
What got Britton through the 18 hours? He said he didn’t stop at the stores along the route, the XL race being completely self-supported, not even getting his go-to Coca-Cola.
“What got me through was probably caffeine more than anything. I calculated it was between 800 and 1000 milligrams of caffeine, which is a lot. I’ve raced my bike for a long time, and doing that for an entire stage race is pretty bad.”
Will he go back to Kansas for another XL? Maybe try for a new record, or slow down and the stops?
“I honestly don’t know. It’s unbound. It is still the biggest event in the gravel world, for sure,” Britton admitted.
“I kind of have this thing too, where if I win something in this career ‘part two’, I don’t really love going back, you can only find disappointment doing it again. Nothing will replace that feeling of wanting it again. It was so special. Lachlan certainly elevated the status of this race to a legitimate race.
“The neat thing about gravel is you can do different things, you can race it or ride it. I look at a globe and decide where I want to go, not a calendar.”
Now Britton is an Unbound champion and has a new best-ever ride tale. After a short stay at home the week after, he’s back with a full block of racing in North America with a back-to-back stage races at the end of June.
Next week he tackles the five-day Oregon Trail Gravel Grinder, June 25-29, which provides top points in the Gravel Earth Series. Then a few hours after the finish in Bend, he takes a flight direct to British Columbia for the start of the seven-day BC Bike Race, June 30-July 6, the prologue of the mountain bike endurance test taking place the next morning in the Cowichan Valley on the south end of Vancouver Island.