Cyclist Killed in Crash With Truck While Riding in Rasputitsa Race

Cyclists participating in the 2022 Rasputitsa gravel bike race Credit: Courtesy of Rasputitsa

A cyclist riding in the Rasputitsa gravel bike race was killed on Saturday morning in a crash with a truck in the Northeast Kingdom.

Richard Wanstall, 54, of Marblehead, Mass., was riding south on Brook Road in Burke shortly after 9 a.m. when he reportedly crossed to the other side of the street and collided with a northbound pickup truck, according to Vermont State Police.

Wanstall was taken to an area hospital where he was later pronounced dead. The driver of the truck, Alex Goss, 27, of East Haven, was uninjured. The crash investigation is ongoing, but police do not believe that speed or impairment contributed to the crash.

“We are deeply saddened by the news that one of our community members died today, after colliding with a vehicle while on course,” Rasputitsa organizers wrote in a statement posted late on Saturday on Instagram and Facebook. “We do not have any information at this time other than what the State Police have publicly released so far, but we will reach out to our community with updates as we learn more.”

Rasputitsa, which began 2014 and attracted 1,821 registrants this year from around the world, is an annual early spring race that’s held mostly on dirt roads, all of which remain open to other traffic during the race. Wanstall was participating in the 100-kilometer category when the collision occurred. Race organizers said that section of the course was rerouted to allow emergency responders to do their jobs.

Saturday’s fatality was the second at a major gravel bike race in Vermont in less than a year. Last August, Suleiman “Sule” Kangangi, a 33-year-old professional racer from Kenya, died of injuries he sustained while participating in the 59-mile Vermont Overland race, which began in West Windsor.

As Seven Days reported in this week’s cover story, the sport of gravel biking has exploded in the last decade. Many of the cyclists who’ve switched from riding on roads to gravel or dirt say they did so due to growing safety concerns about riding alongside motorized traffic. According to data from the Vermont Agency of Transportation, of the 860 cycling-related injuries and fatalities reported to the state between 2010 and 2022, only 14 occurred on unpaved roads.