Gritliner Spotlight Series Issue 01 - Théo Tommasini

Where he rides out of

Théo grew up in the south of France, where the Mistral wind kept him company. Théo now rides out of Barcelona and works full-time, which means short weekday rides of around ninety minutes and longer loops when the weekend allows. His introduction to riding off-road came in 2021, on a four-month bike tour from northern Spain through Portugal. The seed was planted then. The gravel bike came later.

His Catalonia

His home route is the Pedraforca Loop: a mix of tarmac and dirt tracks that wraps the massif from every angle, with the distinctive forked summit in view the whole way round. It isn’t particularly long, he says, but the views make it feel much bigger than it is. The kind of ride you’d want to show someone who still thinks Catalonia is all coastline.

For coffee he points east, to Girona. Hors Catégorie has the right ratio of good espresso to muddy socks, nobody raises an eyebrow when you walk in with a helmet still on. Girona, he notes, has built an entire ecosystem around cycling, and the café sits at the centre of it.

Outside the named routes and the named cafés, the broader observation is one of fit: weekday rides of ninety minutes, weekend rides of several hours, in a region where you can chain both without ever feeling like you’ve stayed in the same place. Catalonia is generous that way. The terrain rotates faster than the calendar.

A ride that changed something

A 220-kilometre loop in Mallorca, eight hours in the saddle, exceptional scenery. The first half went well. The pacing was right, the fuelling was right (for once, he writes).

He talks about the last forty kilometres in particular: pushing in silence. No collapse, no breakdown, just the long, narrowing thing that happens when the legs are gone and the only available decision is to keep pedalling.

What he carries from that day is the same thing most long-distance riders carry from their hardest ride: not the route, not the elevation, but the proof of being able to keep going after the body’s polite refusals have started. He says he would do the ride again without hesitation. Of course he would.

Even a ninety-minute weekday ride can feel like an expedition if the surface is right.

What gravel gives him

After a decade of road, Théo started taking dirt tracks. Road had started to feel predictable: same routes, same surface, same rhythm. The first few off-road rides did what road wasn’t doing anymore. “Even a ninety-minute weekday ride can feel like an expedition,” he writes, “if the surface is right.”

The other thing the off-road does is more practical. Most of his favourite tracks have no phone signal, which, after a full day in front of a screen, is the point. The ride doesn’t need to be hard or long, he writes. It just needs to be outside.

What’s next

Théo is just one month into gravel. What he has built so far is a habit: short rides on weekdays, long rides on the weekends, a Pedraforca Loop he can return to, and a clear pull off the road bike when the surface invites it. The longer goals - events, distances, a specific terrain - are still coming into focus.