The Traka is no longer just a race in Girona. Klassmark, the company that turned a modest gravel ride into the biggest weekend on the European off-road calendar, has unveiled The Traka World Series 2027: seven events across Europe and the Americas, live coverage of every round, men’s and women’s overall standings and 76,000€ in prize money, split equally between women and men. The new series will close in October with a finale in Spain called The Last Dance. It also marks the end of the Gravel Earth Series, the global championship Klassmark has run since 2023.

Seven rounds, two continents and a last dance

The events comprising the 2027 The Traka World Series are split into two formats. Two of its seven events follow the full The Traka Girona recipe, with the 300, 200 and 100-kilometer distances the race is known for. The other five carry the By The Traka label, launched in 2026 to take the name beyond Girona under one shared philosophy, and are free to keep their own distances. In the organisers’ words, The Traka is the brand, By The Traka “brings together the events linked to the project”, and The Traka World Series “provides the framework for elite competition”.

The 2027 calendar opens with Santa Vall in Catalonia from 5 to 7 February, followed by Gravel Desert in the Monegros on 13 March. In the first half of April comes the headline addition: the second Traka-format event, which will take place outside Europe but it is still unnamed and without an announced location. The release talks of a calendar “connecting Europe and the Americas”, which points across the Atlantic, but Klassmark has not said where. Girona follows from 30 April to 2 May, with the Traka 300 counting for the series. In Iowa, United States, CORE4 joins the family on 21 August, and The River returns to Bouillon in Belgium on 11 September. The season ends in October with The Last Dance, a finale in Spain meant to gather the season’s best riders and settle the overall standings.

The money is modest but clearly set out. Each of the seven rounds pays 8,000€, 56,000€ in total, and a further 20,000€ goes to the final standings, all of it split equally between the women’s and men’s categories. That is a fraction of the 590,000$ Life Time put up for its own 2026 series, but it is more transparency than the Gravel Earth Series offered last year. When the 2026 Gravel Earth calendar was announced, the prize purse was not disclosed at all. The bigger bet is visibility. Live coverage of every round is something gravel’s European scene has rarely had, and it is the part of the plan most likely to bring teams and sponsors along.

The end of the Gravel Earth Series

The other half of the story is a farewell. Klassmark has confirmed to RAW that the Gravel Earth Series will not continue. “It has helped us position gravel,” the organizers told us, describing the series as a key player in the growth of the discipline.

The series was launched in 2023 as Klassmark’s own global gravel championship, built around The Traka and a set of partner races on several continents. It expanded quickly, to more than 20 events in 13 countries by 2025, before being cut back to twelve for 2026.

What changes is the model behind it. Klassmark explained that Gravel Earth worked as a license system: independent organizers joined the series and in return benefited from the image and the best practices of Klassmark and The Traka. But that arrangement was never free of friction, and Klassmark has drawn its own conclusion. It prefers to have full control of the races on its calendar, and The Traka World Series is built that way, with seven races under the same roof.

The new calendar shows the cost of that choice. Seven of the twelve 2026 Gravel Earth stops are absent from the World Series: The Hills in Italy, Ranxo Gravel in Lleida, Lost and Found in California, Migration Gravel Race in Kenya, Oregon Trail Gravel, Megre in Lithuania and Cuckoo Iceland.

For riders, the new model is simpler to follow and comes with guaranteed prize money and live pictures. For the independent organisers who gave Gravel Earth its global reach, the message is clear: the shared shop window has closed, and The Traka now races only on ground it controls.