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Further to yesterday’s post about the bewildering variety of bicycles available to the modern consumer, this morning the following story caught my eye:
Now, I want to be absolutely clear here: I have no problem whatsoever with the writer traveling to Vermont on a press trip for a bike. If you’re a writer, and you’re a cyclist, and someone wants you to come to Vermont and ride a bike, you should go to Vermont, and you should ride that bike.
Furthermore, she is completely correct that accessibly-priced bicycles are far more important to most of us than five-figure superbikes with ugly-ass forks or whatever:
And she’s right that all these ultra-high-end bikes are basically all the same anyway. (Not that I’ve really ridden any of them, but they all use the exact same parts and the exact same geometry, so how could they not be?)
Most of all, I definitely have no problem with her recommending the bike. If she rode the bike, and she liked the bike, then she should give anybody interested in purchasing it the green light to do so.
So be assured I am not impugning the writer in any way–quite the opposite, in fact. If anything, I’m un-pugning her.
However, its important to remember this blog is still called “Bike Snob NYC,” not “Happy Inclusive Bicycle Lover NYC,” so of course there was something that annoyed me, and it’s the bike itself:
Even accepting that accessible bikes are a good thing, did the world really need the nine-millionth completely indistinguishable gravel bike that makes you sleepy just looking at it? How many of these things can the human race possibly absorb? We’re already past the point where the cycling media is pushing 28 (!)-bike sub-$2,000 gravel bike round-ups and “testing” them by the hundreds. HUNDREDS! And yet here’s another one, exactly like all the others, only this time from the world’s largest big-box sporting goods store:
Again, I’ll remind you I fully support the writer. Furthermore, I’m also not morally troubled by commerce, capitalism, corporate growth, private wealth, burning fossil fuels to go places in airplanes, or any of the other things people rail against with their smartphones, using the social networks run by the very people they so despise. I went to Bentonville, I rode the Walmart trails, I visited the Walmart art museum, I enjoyed myself very much, and I have no qualms about it.
However, I do find the resulting bikes mind-numbingly boring, which is why I can’t really relate to this:
But while the profit margins may be small, when it comes to the number of bikes sold, that $1400 bike is going to outsell the $11,000 flagship three to one. It’s the kind of bike that gives someone their first taste of gravel riding or bikepacking. The one that helps an adult fall back in love with riding for the first time since childhood. The bike a parent buys for a teenager just getting into the sport. And the bike you see every Saturday morning, leaning against the wall of your favourite coffee shop, well-loved and unfazed if it tips over.
I mean yes, it’s true, a new rider may very well get one of these GRVL AF (I assume that’s gravel-ese for “Gravel As Fuck,” what an awful name) and begin a life-long love affair with cycling. And I hope they do! (Begin a life-long love affair with cycling, that is. I’m mostly indifferent to which bike they choose.) But it’s not like Decathlon are performing some sort of mitzvah or acting altruistically here. Rather, for some reason they simply feel the need to bring their boring-ass gravel bike over here to The United States of America (Canada and Greenland pending) to compete with all the other companies already selling identical boring-ass gravel bikes.
Why? I dunno. Growth? So you won’t walk into your local bikes shop (if you still have one) and buy a gravel bike from a smaller bike company (if there still are any)?
I don’t mean to get all paranoid and dsytopian here (that’s a lie, I totally do) but it feels like we’re maybe a year and a half from the entire bicycle industry, media included, turning into one great big drop-shipping operation run completely by AI.
Happy Friday!
