The Bovine Classic brings competitive bicyclists from around the world to North SLO County 

The grounds in front of Atascadero City Hall thrummed with the tinkle of hundreds of bike bells, the whir of chains passing over gears, and the singular peal of a ringing golden cowbell.

That chaotic melody marked the start of the second annual Bovine Classic Gravel Ride on a chilly but sunny Oct. 28 morning. Almost 450 riders made their way past City Hall before picking up speed on the Lewis Avenue bridge.

Los Osos resident Leah Lemoine clutched the handles of her baby blue and pink Cyclocross bike that held a yellow and green water bottle and a second blue and purple one. Lemoine's bike appeared ready to carry her across North County's tarmac roads and dusty vineyard-lined routes.

"I like longer multi-day rides," she said beaming. "I'm a long and slow rider."

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• COURTESY PHOTO BY TOPO COLLECTIVE

But that day, Lemoine had signed up for the Baby Bovine, the shortest course of the race at roughly 37 miles. A bicyclist since 2009, the East Coast native enjoys gravel bike riding and has previously completed the 150-mile Great Allegheny Passage Trail between Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.

East Coast bicyclists like Lemoine weren't the only ones drawn to the cow-themed race. Bryan Yates, the race's executive producer and creative director, said that the first version of this gravel cycling competition in 2022 attracted people from 14 different countries, including a friend who flew in from Bogota, Colombia.

Yates proposed the idea to the Atascadero Chamber of Commerce after cycling around New Zealand five years ago. Despite biking on another continent, his mind was still on Central Coast gravel.

"Hands down, in the world, it's one of the best places to ride a bike for a number of reasons," he said. "One of them is little traffic. The other is that we have all these great dirt roads. That's the biggest growing market in cycling right now: gravel cycling. It's basically what was sort of saving the cycling industry."

Why is the Yates' brainchild cow-centric?

"It could have been grape-centric, but the reality is I don't drink. While I appreciate the wine industry being a guy from the city, I love the cows here," he said, laughing over a Zoom video screen prior to the race. "The other thing is that a friend of mine has a race up in Petaluma called the Bantam Classic. ... It was going to be a joke response to his ride, and the thing got out of control."

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• COURTESY PHOTO BY TOPO COLLECTIVE

The Bovine Classic's debut race in 2022 brought in 350 cyclists, which grew to 450 last year. The 2024 version in October will limit the number of racers to 550.

Every year, the mammoth races begin and end in Sunken Gardens in Atascadero. The main course—Big Bovine—covers almost 100 miles of scenic rural routes through Creston and Paso Robles. The other courses include the Feisty Bovine spanning 73.4 miles, the Happy Bovine covering 64 miles, and the Baby Bovine.

Yates explained that unlike most races, the Big Bovine competition doesn't rank winners on who completed the course first. Rather, the course is split into three timed segments. The winner is the cyclist with the overall best time across the three rigorous sections.

Montana native and Santa Rosa resident Levi Leipheimer biked into first place in the men's category for the Big Bovine in 2023 while Stanford-based Eleanor Wiseman aced the women's one. The winners get bragging rights, hugs, a hand-screened poster, and a hefty branding iron that says "MOO."

But the Bovine Classic valorizes the cyclist who comes last too. They receive all the prizes and a free entry into next year's competition. They're celebrated because they worked the hardest to get across the finish line, Yates explained. Unlike the other winners, that rider receives a bright red branding iron instead as a cheeky reference to a popular nickname.

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• COURTESY PHOTO BY TOPO COLLECTIVE

"There's a term for the last-place rider in the Tour de France, which is called the lanterne rouge, which is the red lantern," he said. "It was always for the caboose of a train."

Register to ride in the Bovine Classic's Oct. 24 to 26 races at thebovineclassic.com. Funded through sponsorships, the Bovine Classic tails what Yates calls "gravel cycling season" that lasts between six and 10 months. The catch-all term for anything that's not pavement, "gravel" refers to mud, dirt, sand, or silt—terrain that other regions don't have much of throughout the year. But Atascadero is spoiled for choice, and Yates considers it lush enough to brag about.

"We ride dirt almost year-round," Yates said. "The Bovine Classic is not necessarily designed specifically with locals in mind. The idea is to is to bring bodies here to really experience what we've got, so that we can put our community into the gravel cycling community and let those two mingle and learn from each other and exist together."