They Were Fun While It Lasted – Bike Snob NYC

While I may have adopted the moniker “Bike Snob,” the truth is I don’t believe in dividing riders up into arbitrary categories, or in judging people by what sort of bike they ride. Whether you ride to work on a rusty old beater or you chase KOMs on your carbon fiber wonder bike, you are partaking in the joy of cycling, and that’s all that matters.

Except for mountain bikers, who I hope we can all agree are absolutely terrible and so are their bikes.

I’m sure people will dispute the origins of mountain biking, but generally speaking I think it’s safe to say it was a bunch of guys in moustaches and jorts goofing around until around the early-to-mid 1980s, when bike companies started to offer complete, ready-to-ride mountain bikes and the concept became sort of standardized:

The jorts are now Lycra shorts, but the mustache is still there, and a typical mountain biker in those days would have looked equally at ease riding the trails or enjoying a cigarette whilst leaning against the wheel well of a Camaro:

By the 1990s mountain biking had become a part of the popular culture and was another one of those cool lifestyle sports everybody sort of “got” even if they didn’t partake in it, like surfing or skateboarding or snowboarding. Indeed, if you look at the big bike companies’ catalogs from this era you’ll note that they skew heavily towards mountain bikes. Consider the 1996 Trek catalog, which I just happened to be browsing recently for reasons unrelated to mountain biking. Not only does it lead off with the mountain bikes, but it also contains a wide array of offerings, from the then-exotic Y-shaped bikes…

…to traditional rigid steel offerings:

I’m sure someone will note some exceptions, but I’d put forth that it’s been something like 30 years since a mainstream bike company offered a performance-oriented rigid steel mountain bike:

Now of course mountain biking retains almost no traces of its origins–and yet what was once mountain biking remains pervasive in cycling, only we now call it “gravel.” Meanwhile, what we refer to as mountain biking is something else completely (arguably it’s a stretch to call it cycling at all) and the Stumpjumper tester of today is a completely different species:

It’s sort of like there was a band called “Mountain Biking,” and when they broke up one member kept the rights to the name and took it in a completely different direction. Meanwhile, the rest of the band kept the same sound, only they had to call themselves “The Gravel Bros” for legal reasons.

And now mountain biking is about to sever its tenuous connections to cycling completely:

Basically it’s a done deal at this point, and the industry is already giving up on the pedal-powered mountain bike:

As with all other forms of electric bicycles, proponents claim that somehow motorizing everything is going to result in people getting more exercise:

This is like saying electric cars are going to get more Americans to learn how to change their own spark plugs.

And of course being leery this is politically incorrect:

Hey, I don’t find it tough at all. I’m not a gray-haired dad but I am a balding one, and whether it’s kids or old people I don’t know why it’s so crazy to suggest there’s nothing wrong with riding according to your ability. Sorry, dads, sometimes you have to choose between leaving the kid behind or doing an easier ride. How come we can still grasp the concept of teaching a kid to hit a baseball the old fashioned way, yet when it comes to mountain bikes we have to “unlock their ability” with a $3,800 Levo SL?

Meanwhile, the industry is banking on everyone buying electric mountain bikes so they can keep up with their friends:

If your friends keep riding away from you maybe you don’t need an electric mountain bike. Maybe you need new friends.