Mechanical Shifting: A Postscript

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As the song goes, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. This is true of everything except herpes, which you don’t remember that you’ve got until it flares up again. STDs notwithstanding, this aphorism continues to resonate as cycling journalists lament the disappearance of the mechanical bicycle drivetrain:

Obviously I agree with him, for all the reasons he cites, and more:

What you never have to do is remember to charge a mechanical drivetrain.

Or update its firmware.

Or remember to replace those tiny hidden shifter batteries that you forgot about.

Or worry that you leaned another bike up against your electronic-shift road bike, and not only drained the battery, but actually destroyed the battery by over-draining it. Yeah, I did that with a Di2 setup several years ago.

Also, a couple of years ago, I found an AXS battery on the side of a trail about 2500m above sea level, high and deep into the Swiss Alps. I hope someone lost their spare battery. Because if that had fallen out of their mountain bike derailleur there, it would have been a really long day stuck in the wrong gear before they made it back to civilization, where they’d have been able to shift again.

Though for the record I don’t hope the rider who lost their battery only lost a spare. I hope they lost their one and only battery, learned the error of their ways, and immediately replaced their electronic drivetrain with a mechanical one when they finally made it back to civilization. But then again, like most retrogrouches, I’m bitter and twisted.

And my twisted bitterness doesn’t stop there. As someone who believes in mechanical drivetrains I should feel vindicated that a story like this is appearing in a mainstream cycling publication, and I should applaud the author for writing it. But I do not, and I do not. Sorry, but as the fertility clinic said to the hypospermia sufferer who missed the ovulation window, this is too little, too late.

Granted, I’m not immediately familiar with this particular writer, and for all I know perhaps he’s been staunchly defending mechanical shifting in the cycling press for decades. Even so, this is yet another publication that for years and years has given us headlines like this:

And now I’m supposed to raise my tankard of ale and emit a hearty and robust “Hear, hear!” because they’ve placed a single wilted flower on mechanical shifting’s grave?

I don’t think so!

And what do these publications have to show for all this new-tech rubber-stamping, anyway? The bike companies don’t even buy ads from them anymore! In fact, as I read this particular article, I kept seeing ads for nicotine pouches:

Just like I refuse to post the Obligatory Tomac Photo, I also refuse to post the Obligatory Tour de France Riders Smoking Photo (or the Obligatory Mario Cipollini Smoking Photo for that matter), but as advertising revenue becomes increasingly scarce and the cycling media continues to wither I think cycling is ripe for a takeover by Big Tobacco. First get all the riders hooked on nicotine pouches, then gradually re-introduce cigarettes for their pre-climb lung-opening qualities, and soon smoking will once again be seen as a healthy lifestyle choice.

Look, the mechanical drivetrain is dead, and YOU PEOPLE (that is the cycling media) have nobody to blame but yourselves. Go ahead, keep telling me that things…

Have never…

Been better:

And yes, that video is a glowing review of a steel road bike, but it’s a steel road bike with a carbon fork and disc brakes and electronic shifting:

That certainly doesn’t make it a bad bike–no doubt it’s an excellent bike–but still, I don’t think bikes like that should get to claim membership in the steel bike community:

So yes, high-end mechanical shifting is dead, and it’s not ever coming back. How do I know? Well, back in…I dunno, maybe 2017?…I briefly returned to bike racing. Now, please note when I say “bike racing” I don’t mean I was training or setting goals for myself or trying to win. No, what I mean is that I went back to racing in the park at the crack of dawn because it’s a great way to get a fast group ride in, maybe do a little socializing, and be home by 9am. Basically, it was the equivalent of a normal person joining a gym. I even got a bike for it:

I’m not exactly sure, but I think I got that bike in 2018, and I obtained it at minimal personal expense–yes, partially because I had “connections,” but also because it was a racing bike with rim brakes and mechanical shifting, which even then pretty much nobody wanted. It served its purpose very well, too, though after awhile I stopped racing again and switched it for another Specialized better suited to my lifestyle:

In retrospect that was a better gravel bike than the PRJCT GRVL bike (for me anyway), but that’s beyond the purview of this post.

The point is, you could barely sell that plastic Specialized as a new bike even way back in 2018. Admittedly, that’s more because of the rim brakes than the mechanical shifting, but one begets the other. See, people demand disc brakes now; more specifically, they demand hydraulic disc brakes. If people were okay with mechanical disc brakes then the drivetrain companies could keep making high-end mechanical shifters that worked with either disc brakes or rim brakes. In fact, in some alternate dimension where things actually made sense, the mechanical disc brake would have become the standard for road bikes. Imagine a pro-level Dura-Ace mechanical disc brake caliper, and being able to use the same shifter on a modern carbon disc brake race bike or your beloved 40 year-old steel frame.

But this didn’t happen. Instead, I’m pretty sure the Dura-Ace 9100 drivetrain on that Specialized represents the last fully mechanical, non-fluid-filled top-tier road racing group Shimano ever made. Braking went hydraulic, shifting went electronic, and all cables and hoses went inside the frame, or else vanished completely. As a result, virtually all high-end frames have internal cable routing, and more and more of them aren’t compatible with mechanical shifting at all. When I put together that PRJCT GRVL bike using a completely mechanical drivetrain, by far the most difficult job was routing the cables through the frame. In 2026, any person not suffering from my (perhaps irrational) level of commitment would would have concluded that simply using wireless shifters and cables and more flexible hydraulic brake lines was a far better choice. They’re charging everything else in their life anyway–the phone, the TV remote, the watch, the e-reader, the Apple pencil–so what’s a few more batteries on the bike?

Basically, the holes in the frames have closed up, and no bike company is going to open them up again. It’s like that earring you used to wear in high school. Try putting it back in now and it’s not happening–at least not without lots of pain and bleeding.