A decade ago, two ideas changed the way the world rides gravel. This year, we celebrate both.
It was 2016 when we unveiled the Exploro at Eurobike, a bike that made the industry raise an eyebrow and the gravel community lean forward. An aero gravel bike. People thought it was crazy. Turns out, they were wrong.
A year later, in the hills of Franciacorta, the first edition of Jeroboam took shape: 300km, 7,000m of climbing, a start at 4pm and an invitation to ride through the night. No podiums. No prizes. Just the road, the people next to you and the question of whether you had what it took to finish.
Two experiments born one year apart. Both ahead of their time. Both still here, ten years later.
The Exploro: the bike that invented a category
When 3T launched the Exploro in 2016, gravel riding was still finding its identity. The prevailing wisdom was that a gravel bike should be upright, comfortable and forgiving; a relaxed machine for relaxed riding. We thought differently.
The argument was simple: if you're riding on gravel roads across a plain with a headwind, aerodynamics matter just as much as they do in a time trial. So why build a slow gravel bike?
The Exploro was the answer. A full carbon frame with aero tube shapes, clearance for 700×40mm tyres or 650b wheels, and a riding position that didn't compromise speed for comfort. It won the Eurobike Gold Award that same year. In 2017, Mat Stephens won Dirty Kanza 200 on one. The bike industry started paying attention.
Over the decade, the Exploro family grew, Racemax, Ultra, Primo, each version building on the original idea without abandoning it. The proposition stayed the same: the fastest way to ride gravel is a bike that doesn't slow down on the road to get there.
Ten years in, the Exploro remains the reference point. The bike that made aero gravel possible, and then inevitable.
One lineage, three names
The original Exploro never stopped evolving. A year after launch it already had a flat-mount brake system, a new fork and a redesigned seatpost clamp. The frame stayed the same, because it didn't need to change. It became so iconic that riders started calling every 3T gravel bike "Exploro", regardless of which model it actually was.
That's why, in 2023, 3T gave the original a new name: Primo. The Italian word for "first": a direct acknowledgement of what the bike had always been. Not a new bike, but a clearer identity for a design that had earned the right to stand on its own name.
In 2024, with 3T's new in-house paint facility operational near Bergamo, it became the Primo WPNT, WPNT standing for "We Paint", a marker of the bikes painted directly at the Italian factory.
Then in 2025, the next step: the Primo² WPNT. The geometry stayed identical: same handling, same ride feel, same DNA. What changed was everything around it: fully integrated cable routing through the headset, SRAM UDH compatibility for future-proof drivetrain options, new painted-in-Italy finishes in four colours. And the price; lower than the original Exploro frameset launched nearly a decade earlier.
The Primo² is the same idea, refined to its cleanest form. A decade of "Kaizen" the Japanese philosophy of continuous, incremental improvement applied to the bike that invented a category.
Exploro → Primo → Primo². One bloodline. One geometry. One answer to the same original question: what is the fastest way to ride gravel?
Jeroboam: the event that defined what gravel could feel like
The first Jeroboam took place in Franciacorta in 2017. It was an experiment; a long, hard ride through the Italian countryside, with distances named after Champagne bottle sizes and a philosophy that valued exploration over competition.
It worked because it was honest. Jeroboam never pretended to be something it wasn't. The routes were hard, sometimes unreasonably so. The finish was not guaranteed. And the atmosphere, that particular feeling of arriving back to camp exhausted and finding everyone still there, waiting, ready to eat and talk and tell stories, was unlike anything else in cycling.
By 2019, Jeroboam had expanded to Spain, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. By 2021, it had reached Japan, Malaysia and Patagonia. The format travelled because the values behind it were universal: choose dirt over asphalt, value autonomy and self-reliance, celebrate landscapes, not podiums.
Ten editions later, Jeroboam is a gravel institution. And it still starts from the same place it always did; the idea that the best rides are the ones that ask something of you.
2026: two anniversaries, one gathering
This year, we mark ten years of the Exploro and ten years of Jeroboam with something that feels right: a gathering for everyone who has been part of this story.
On 18 July 2026 in Bergamo, the Jeroboam Italy 2026 becomes a celebration. Three distances, 75km, 150km and the Mathusalem 600km, wind through the Orobian Alps and the gravel valleys of Bergamo, from a new home at the Santini Store village.
But this edition has something extra. We're inviting all owners of the Exploro and the Primo, every rider who chose one of these bikes over the past decade, to ride together, to gather at the village and to mark ten years of a shared idea.
If you've ridden a Jeroboam before, you know what this feels like. If you've ridden an Exploro or a Primo, you know what these bikes are capable of. Put the two together, in the mountains north of Bergamo, on a July weekend, and you have something worth showing up for.
Join us
Registrations for Jeroboam Italy 2026 are open now. All distances, 75km, 150km and 600km, are available. Spots for the Mathusalem are limited.
The weekend begins on Friday 17 July with package pickup and a send-off celebration for the Mathusalem starters at the Santini Village, Via Zanica 14, Bergamo. On Saturday 18 July, the 150 sets off at 07:30, the 75 at 09:00. Both routes finish back at the village for an afternoon together.
This is ten years of gravel. Come and ride it.
Register at jeroboam.bike
Jeroboam Italy 2026 is organised by Reverb Cycling in collaboration with 3T Cycling, Santini Cycling, Limar, Selle SanMarco, Northwave.