Long before gravel racing as we now know it started, or the UCI could spell GRAVEL RACE, teams of four amateur collegiate cyclists have been racing on single speed bikes around a gravel track for 50 miles each April at Indiana University’s Little 500 bike race – the world’s largest gravel race with over 25,000 spectators.

On Saturday 22 April in the heartland of the United States, after a race filled with lead changes, gritty crashes, bike exchanges and heart pounding racing, the Cutters team won the 72nd running of the men’s race by a wheel or 0.133 seconds.

“It was just being patient in the end,” 22 year-old Cutters’ rider Torin Kray-Mawhorr told the Indiana Daily Student after outsprinting fraternities Delta Tau Delta and Sigma Phi Epsilon for the victory. 

The Cutters team raced their first Little 500 in 1984, named after the fictional ‘Cutters’ featured in the 1979 Academy Award-winning cycling movie “Breaking Away.” The film follows a group of local teens who don’t quite fit into the Indiana University fraternity scene, but enter the university’s Little 500 race and name themselves after the blue collar limestone cutting industry of Southern Indiana. 

With riders Torin Kray-Mawhorr, Peyton Gaskill, Jacob Koone and Judah Thompson earning the latest Cutters victory, the team has won 15 Little 500 titles, including five in a row from 2007 through 2011. In addition, they have have stood on the podium in 21 of their 38 appearances.

The Melanzana Cycling team of Abby Gren, Grace Washburn, Luren Etnyre and Nora Abdelkader won the 35th running of the Women’s Little 500, the team’s second in a row title.

Photo Credit: Twitter/Indiana Daily Student

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