Kylee Hanel Takes Fourth at Big Sugar and Wins the Grand Prix U23 Title

Big Sugar: 100 miles of Ozark gravel

Big Sugar is the last race of the Life Time Grand Prix season and the series' big gravel finale. The route starts and finishes in downtown Bentonville, Arkansas, and loops north into Missouri for about 100 miles and roughly 7,000 feet of climbing on rough, rocky back roads. This year 53 women lined up for the elite start, and 18 of the top 20 finishers were Grand Prix regulars racing for season points.

The front group stayed big for the first 30 miles. Once the climbing picked up after the first aid station, the race came apart. With a little over 50 miles to go, a new lead group formed with series leader Sofia Gomez Villafañe, U.S. gravel champion Paige Onweller, Karolina Migoń, Stella Hobbs, Hayley Preen, and a handful of others. Kylee was in it, riding with the best gravel racers in the world.

Dialed Cycling Team teammate John Hatfield followed the race all day and posted the update to the team. By his account, Kylee was the only U23 rider left in a lead group of eight with 30 miles to go. That group whittled down to five. Through the final checkpoint at Rockford Grange she hung about 10 seconds behind the leaders, then rejoined them on a short paved section.

Stella Hobbs attacked on a steep, loose climb late in the race and rode away for the win. Behind her, Kylee stayed with the chase all the way to the line. Karolina Migoń jumped early in the uphill sprint, and Kylee came around her right at the end to take fourth, three seconds behind Villafañe and two behind Preen. Her ride time was just over five hours: 5:12:20 by the official Grand Prix timing.

How she won the U23 series

The Life Time Grand Prix runs six races across gravel and mountain bike courses from April to October. The U23 riders race in the same events as the pros, and they are scored only against each other. The U23 champion earns a place in the following year's elite series. On gravel, Kylee races as a privateer on Cervélo bikes with support from Maxxis, which is why Grand Prix results list her under Cervélo-Maxxis rather than the Dialed Cycling Team.

Kylee started the year by winning the U23 gravel race at the Sea Otter Classic in Monterey, California, in April. At Unbound Gravel in Emporia, Kansas, in May, she won the 100-mile race outright, beating every woman in the field, not just the U23s. It was her first Unbound and a brutal one. Riders walked a long stretch of mud up the Towers climb, and she spent another five minutes cleaning her bike at a creek. Later a train stopped her for about two minutes while she was leading. She still won by 2 minutes and 31 seconds and finished 34th overall, men included. Afterward she told Cyclingnews, "I did what I came here to do."

Leadville Trail 100 MTB in August was her first time at that race. She lives at sea level and went to Colorado about two and a half weeks early to get used to the altitude, then finished second among U23 women over more than seven hours of racing. In October she won the U23 race at Little Sugar MTB in Bella Vista, Arkansas, and a week later she closed the series out at Big Sugar.

Dialed Cycling Team teammate Kylee Hanel raced Big Sugar for Cervélo-Maxxis, finished fourth against the pros, and won the 2026 Life Time Grand Prix U23 title.

Racing as a pro on the road

Gravel is only half of Kylee's year, and she is racing at the professional level now. On the road she started 2026 with Aegis x Leaders of Enchantment, a U.S. team led by longtime pro Lauren Stephens. At the Tour of the Gila she won stage 5, the Gila Monster queen stage, finished fourth overall, and took the best young rider classification. She won the best young rider jersey at the Tour de Bloom too. In June she won the U.S. national U23 time trial championship and finished seventh in the U23 road race.

In September she raced in Brittany, France, as a stagiaire with Visma-Lease a Bike, one of the teams in the Women's WorldTour. A stagiaire spot lets a young rider race with a pro team for part of a season, and Kylee started the Tout Commence en Finistère and Pointe du Raz one-day races in their colors.

From there she went to Montréal for the UCI Road World Championships with Team USA. She finished 21st in the U23 women's time trial, the best result of any American, and three days later she placed 29th in the U23 road race, 134 kilometers with about 2,690 meters of climbing.

She races with the pros now, and she is still one of ours. When she lines up at races closer to home, she pins on a number in Dialed Cycling Team kit.

She grew up on family rides around Portland, and at 13 she started going out on short rides with just her dad. She spent this season racing against the best in the sport, on gravel and on the road.

The team was watching

Back home, Dialed Cycling Team teammate Lance Heppler watched the YouTube livestream all morning, and plenty of other teammates did the same. Kylee's mom, Shelley, was at the finish line in Bentonville. When the result posted, the congratulations came in fast, and Dialed Cycling Team teammate Scott Trautman said what a lot of us were thinking: we are so happy for her and for all the hard work that got her here.

Next year Kylee lines up in the elite Life Time Grand Prix against the same riders she chased all over Arkansas on Saturday. We will be watching that one too.