Unbound Gravel winner becomes professional rider for Canyon-SRAM

The winner of the women's Unbound 200 gravel race, Rosa Klöser, will race on the road for Canyon-SRAM next year, the team announced on Monday morning.

Klöser, who won the world's biggest gravel race as an underdog in June, while also completing her PhD in green shipping, will still ride mainly a gravel calendar in 2025, but is going to try out road racing for the German squad, with a contract until the end of 2026.

"I started cycling only 2.5 years ago so that probably also why no one really knows me,” Klöser said post-win in Kansas, US. "Actually I am still a full-time PhD [student] and do cycling, or professional racing, part time. The Unbound victory is amazing. I still don’t believe it."

Canyon-SRAM, who won the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift this season through Kasia Niewiadoma, have also signed Cecilie Uttrup-Ludwig from FDJ-Suez, adding to the squad's strength in depth. They also have a habit of picking up riders from non-traditional methods, like the Zwift Academy. Canyon has also supported its riders in gravel events; Niewiadoma won the gravel Worlds last year.

In a press release on Monday, she said: "I’ve been looking up to Canyon-SRAM as one of the leading Women’s WorldTour teams since I started cycling around three years ago.

"They always stood out to me with their unique ways of identifying new talent through new approaches like the Zwift Academy, looking beyond road racing results and giving riders the freedom to combine different disciplines. From the first conversation with the team, I could tell that I would feel at home here."

"Winning Unbound 200 in my debut year while still being a full-time PhD student who has only dipped her toes into cycling around three years ago was certainly the biggest moment in my cycling career so far," she continued. "While my main focus for next season will be on gravel as a privateer, I am convinced that the team structure and road calendar where I am racing with incredibly talented team mates and being guided by highly experienced support staff, will allow me to make some big steps and unlock new potential in my still fairly new cycling career. I am excited to see where my limits are."

"With my background in gravel racing, I believe that I can be quite a versatile rider performing and supporting the team across various terrains," Klöser added. 'I would like to try myself out in classic races and be up there in the mountain stages of Grand Tours to support the team’s GC ambition.”

"With more and more high-profile riders entering the gravel sports and participating in gravel events, adapting to new ways of racing and thinking is essential. The lessons I will learn from road racing will come in handy, as the depth in the women’s gravel peloton allows for increasingly strategic racing.

"On the flipside, I think the long and hard days in gravel races will allow me to thrive in the road races where the race is ridden incredibly hard from start to finish, hopefully allowing me to be up there in the final supporting the leader or racing for an individual result, if possible."