CEDAR CITY, Utah (August 12, 2022) — Monuments of Cycling, a premier cycling events producer, will be bringing its unique ‘unroad’ racing format back to Cedar City to deliver the Third Annual Belgian Waffle Ride, to be held September 23 -24, 2022. Three years ago, The BWR UT was the first ever Belgian Waffle Ride held outside of California. Now it’s become a punctuating moment on the gravel calendar. Along with the Belgian Waffle and Wafer Rides, the accompanying Unroad Cycling Expo will feature live music, a beer garden, lots of waffles, and all sorts of fun that will exemplify the wonderful familial largess of the great state of Utah.
Cedar City, in Southwest Utah, has become a popular vacation destination among outdoor enthusiasts, offering many outdoor activities for visitors of all ages. It’s a great place to visit, teeming with natural wonders, exciting history, and gorgeous natural landscapes. Cedar City is a popular tourist destination not only because of the area’s natural beauty but also because it’s a gateway for many pioneers and immigrants in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. Cedar City has proven to be a warm and inviting place to visit and race one’s bike with access to the outdoors, entertainment, and views you can’t find anywhere else. Most importantly, it offers an array of terrain optimal for the BWR style of bike racing, including undulating unroads, gravel, single-track, sand, and rock. And the entire party takes place downtown in Main Street Park.
This special fall event, as in the past, will host a deep field of world class unroad, gravel, cyclocross and mountain bike racers from around the world looking to take on the uniquely beautiful and challenging terrain that only Cedar City can offer. The BWR is celebrating 11 years of pedaling perversity in 2022 and this family affair promises to provide professional and amateur cyclists alike the opportunity to ride the most coveted unroads of this spectacular venue, utilizing a myriad of gravel and single-track sectors to connect the best roads of the area for a truly dynamic multi-surface race — the unique complexion of road and unroad dynamics that are hallmarks of the BWR.
The NEW course this year features novel sectors that are sure to surprise and delight new and old racers alike. The Three Peaks Recreational Area offers us some incredible new options for flowy single track that laces its way through Juniper and Pinion trees. This Drie Toppen detour, instead of joining the road after the ever-exasperating als stroop een zandheuvel opduwen sector, will allow riders a chance to enjoy 8-miles of well-groomed single-track over granite stones, ladder bridges and decomposed granite trails. It’s fast and fun, and an incredible addition to this year’s course, but not the only one.
There’s also a new motocross track feature to allow riders to get their whoops and braps out. Of course, we are offering the most notorious sector, the Tolweg, which comes after Muur van Kanarraberg, to give riders a break from the gravel slogs and mix it up with technical, fun, swooping turns, the likes of which can’t be found anywhere else.
“We bring our unique style of unroad racing to Cedar City because it is so different than all the other venues where we host the BWR. It is like the other venues, but with a jubilant juxtaposition of desert and mountain, and thus Cedar City offers limitless possibilities of trails, gravel roads, unroads and mountain bike terrain,” said Michael Marckx, Brooder/Director. “Combined with excessively cheery Utah hospitality, great food, and incredible brews, we are looking forward to providing an experience that participants will revel in again and again.”
The BWR, created as an extremely challenging race in the spirit of the great European one-day Spring Classics, is an utterly unique series of races in North America. There will be two distances on offer in Cedar City; the longer Waffle Ride, roughly 132-miles / 212-km, and the more than half-as-long Wafer Ride (80-miles / 128-km) for those looking to get a taste of the glory without the full-time commitment the full Waffle requires.
This Utah race, like other BWR’s in California, North Carolina, Michigan, and Kansas, will have a deep field of professional riders and an expansive list of hungry amateur riders drawn to the unparalleled opportunity to race alongside their heroes. The Waffle will be offering prize purse to the top-three riders, both female and male! Racers and event patrons will be treated to Belgian waffles and ales, frites, a variety of other culinary delights, more waffles, and even more beer on race weekend.
