The fastest bike that year (2014) was this bike, with 50-34 front chain rings. The bike of a road racer doing gravel. Cutting edge stuff 
Most other top racers were on 29ers.
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Boost is the logical next step. With how often a lot of these āoffroad racersā are switching between MTBs and gravel bikes, the Q factor is really not an issue. This is proven by the fact that many of these athletes are totally willing to ride Boost MTBs with drop bars.
Hopefully, the engineers in the industry can do some testing and find a somewhat future-proof solution that works and stick to it for a while. Then weāll all be here wondering what to do with our āwideā cranksets & FDs. 
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I have a feeling gravel bikes will adopt Boost when MTB have made the transition to something wider, ex. Super Boost. Thatās how the industry operates.
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I was talking about the MTB side of things, running 2.35ās on MTB trails then vs. the 2.2ās that came with the bike. And that was my gravel race bike at the time, would run anywhere from 45ās to 2.35ās for gravel racing depending on course. No drop bars, but it was a solid gravel race rig despite being full suspension and limited to a 38 chainring (the biggest challenge by far). I always got the āI canāt believe you are racing this on a MTBā like it should have been much harder, but the watts vs. speed made it very clear that it wasnāt much of a handicap at the time. Anyways, MTBās on wide tires for gravel racing isnāt new (actually became less common for a while while everyone was launching āgravelā bikes), but it looks like itās coming full circle back to MTB geometry and tire width.
Back to tires, we can debate when āmost peopleā accepted that bigger/lower is faster on certain surfaces, but itās been way more than 2 years from what Iāve seen. Even if you focus on gravel instead of MTB, its been a while. Since gravel started exploding in the US and all the OEMās started making dedicated gravel bikes, supporting wider tires has been the biggest part of the arms race.
Thereās currently no reason for XC bikes to get any wider. A lot of them can fit ~36t chainrings and 2.4" tires with room to spare on 52mm chainlines and still have short chainstays.
Trail bikes might be a different story. 55mm chainlines might be necessary there which would benefit from a wider rear endā¦
Not just trail bikes. SRAM transmission is supposedly optimized for a 55mm chainline and I have my Epic 8 XC bike running 55. I know transmission can also work with 52, but I could see 55 becoming the new standard for MTB over time. Since transmission pushes the cassette out a bit more than old eagle, I believe the 55mm transmission chainline setup provides about the same actual chainline as a 52mm chainline with the old eagle cassette spacing. Pushing the transmission cassette out also gives room for a 13th cog (at some point) without the need to go to superboost.
Specific to Gravel: What were the bigger tires people were using in 2019-2021? The Pathfinder Pro 700cx47 didnāt release widely until 2022, and it didnāt fit on many bikes from earlier years. Prior to that there were hardly any tires in 44-50mm sizes. 650b didnāt really have a foothold.
The bigger tires people were accepting were generally 35/38 to 42/43. Not 47s/2.0-2.2.
Gravel racers were generally not accepting of the idea that 2.1-2.2 XC tires are as fast or faster than gravel tires until very recently, and even now itās not the general consensus. I mean go look at Torsten Frankās thread and posts on this forum, and that was from last year.
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Agree with that and Iām still in that camp as well (despite having run 2.2ās in multiple gravel events). Like most things, people want black and white and the answer is almost always grey. I believe 2.2ās make sense on some courses and 42ās are faster on others. And 47ās on others. Iām also not a big believer in drum resistance translating to real world use. Surface and speed dictate tire choice and wider/lower isnāt always better. But thatās a long way from the mindset of skinnier and high pressure provides the fastest option.
Not looking to debate the nuances of when the cycling community accepted that lower/bigger is often faster, itās totally cool if we can agree to disagree on that point.
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I agree with you and from my own personal experience wider and lower psi tires are way more comfortable and much better on sketchier descents and if theyāre overall slower for me itās not by much.
But I understand from those at the pointy end of races any bit slower may not be acceptable.
Iām currently running Vittoria mezcals 2.1. Not the fastest but theyāre very comfortable which for my day to day training rides is important
I think it depends on what you are riding. I mean, if you you are riding chunky, loose gravel and some singletrack, absolutely. But if you are splitting time on the road and/or riding smooth dirt roads I still think a narrow(er) tire is going to be faster.
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The tension disk was great. You could hear Johnny T coming a mile away.
I ride stuff more technical than Leadville on my gravel bike. Iāll be ok.
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Just as wider wheels had to be invented, disc brakes for road had to be invented, etc. I mentioned MTB suspension as an easily understood reference point.
By which point the clear product trend was for road-style gravel bikes. Hell, the prevailing thinking until even just 3 years ago was that tires that were too wide would be slow on gravel. You think consumers were gonna jump from 35mm tires to 48-50mm tires at a time when 40ās were considered wide?
Greatā¦.i was riding gravel on road bikes at the same time in the canyons outside Boulder.
Anecdotal experience is meaningless. I am simply disputing, though professional experience and knowledge, the idea that there is some āplanned obsolenceā going on in ANY product development in the bike industry.
The reality is that the business is filled with a bunch of bike geeks trying to sniff out consumer trends and make cool schitt. The harsher reality is that the industry isnāt smart enough to be able to plan more than a cycle ahead of itself, primarily because you are dependent on so many different suppliers.
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Iknow everyone likes to point to this as a sort of pioneering bike, but it is actually the complete opposite. Tomac road drop bars because he was riding for 7-11 on the road and they wanted him to keep his same position on the MTB as his road bike.
It eventually proved to be a horrible idea as he compromised handling and performance to achieve a position that was horrible for off road riding. It was very reactionary, old school euro thinking in its genesis.
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You would have to differentiate between US and EU and between Gravel Racers (Proās and Privateers) and Gravel Cyclists doing touring, Gravel Fondos and even a bit of bikepacking.
The latter rather quickly found out already 4 years ago if not earlier: āoh, that trendy Gravel bike I bought is quite bumpy and uncomfortable over all these rough forest trails I constantly encounterā and thus searched for solutions and solace in form of wider and wider tires (back then, gravel bikes would be sold with 35 mm tires stock or max 40 mm which was rare). Instead of doing the sensible thing and realizing: ok - for European unpaved roads and trails you quickly go from āa road bike sufficesā to "this is best ridden with an XC mtb).
So - the amateur gravel crowd in Europe (as well as the adventure biking crowd world wide) were on the āthe widest tires I can feasibly cram into my gravel bikeā train since quite some years already.
Where you found the āMust. Run. The. Narrowest. Slickest. Tire!ā approach (even last year and often even today) are the gravel pros. Especially if they have a road back ground. For them indeed it seems to have been really only the last 1-2 years where it slowly finds acceptance what is actually faster. But even then many of them are bound by their sponsoring. E.g. Paul Voss (German Gravel Pro, former Tour de France rider) would test the limits towards the narrowest tire he can possibly ride on any course. But even he would have loved to get a bit bigger tires for the last Unbound (probably more to a certain degree out of FOMO upon seeing all the other big hitters arriving with their 50 and 55 mm tires and thus beginning a slow realization process on which he surmised after the race in his podcast) - butā¦ he couldnāt replicate due to the limitations of his Sponsors (Orbea) Terra Gravel bike.
My 2017? Cutthroat was speced with thunderburts. Salsa so ahead of the curve with that mosel.
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I tried the drop bar setup for gravel. Core4 normally has around 9 miles of mtb singletrack in a 50-60 mile course but this year only did 4 miles due to rain so it wasnāt ideal. But it was still interesting to try it out. The B roads were easy and comfy vs have to be vigilant on a normal gravel bike setup. This was my first ride with race kings and I really liked them, feels like they just float over the gravel and donāt have to worry about how rough it is.
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It was just two years ago that Stetina ran a 33mm rear and a 36mm front at SBT GRVL.
Exactly (well - havenāt checked what Stetina ran exactly at SBT GRAVL 2 years ago but I have no reason to not think youāre right). He must also be the culprit (or one of those) stated by Canyon āthey have asked their Pros what max tire width they wantedā for their new and now current 2nd generation Grail Gravel race bike.
I dissected this quite in length in one of my articles on my blog and couldnāt help but asking why on earth they limited this bike to 42 mm nominal clearance. EVERYBODY must have / should have known (Gravel Pros including Stetina who failed big time with several experiments over the years - remember this DNF test of this un-pronouncable MTB race he tried to do with a Grizl and years old tires juuuuust fitting it out of some basement?) even by the time of closing the specs for testing and then production that 42 isnāt sufficient. At the least if you also want to have a bit buffer for mud clearance.
I came to the conclusion it must have been a product range and positioning thing by Canyon. Wanting to have the Grail a bit below the Grizl in terms of tire clearance. But also this makes no sense. Well - like quite a few decisions by them in terms of bikes and some over-engineering, really.
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