As any Continental Military common or John Wayne Bobbitt* will let you know, you don’t wish to go off half-cocked, which is is why you shouldn’t purchase that thrilling new gravel bike you’ve had your eye on:
*[I really do deserve a Most Dated References On The Internet Award, or “Datie”]
And sure, that’s Half 2 within the collection, which began method again in March of 2025:
This implies the Bicycling journal subscriber and potential gravel bike proprietor has been ready over a 12 months now for a inexperienced gentle, which raises an essential query:
What have they been driving within the meantime?
Like, are they on some outdated highway bike with rim brakes? No, I doubt anybody who reads Bicycling remains to be utilizing rim brakes. It is because again in 2018, when the UCI legalized disc brakes on highway bikes, Bicycling ran a program modeled on the various firearm buybacks organized by police departments throughout the nation wherein riders might anonymously give up their dangerously out of date rim brake bicycles within the identify of public security. They then adopted it up with Money For Mechanical Drivetrains, thereby fully modernizing America’s highway bicycle fleet.
As for gravel bikes, apparently that’s extra like cryptocurrency. Are we on the backside, or on the prime? What number of extra wild swings can we anticipate? Or is all of it simply happening to zero? Should you purchased a gravel bike a 12 months or two in the past, it’s now nugatory as a result of it doesn’t match 50mm tires. However purchase a gravel bike with 50mm tire clearance at this time and it could possibly be out of date tomorrow as a result of it doesn’t match 32-inch wheels. But you could possibly nonetheless purchase a 32-inch wheel bike tomorrow and discover out six months later they obtained the geometry all flawed. Or perhaps you shouldn’t be gravel bikes in any respect and needs to be purchasing for drop-bar mountain bikes, which both are gravel bikes or aren’t, relying on who you ask.
Whew!
In the meantime, having simply bought an ISGB for like nineteen bucks and a 12-pack of Pamplemousse LaCroix (how the hell has the Nationwide Beverage Corp. not achieved a business for Pamplemousse LaCroix sung to the tune of “Nearer To The Coronary heart” by Rush?), I do know all to properly that the gravel bike market is stagnant. In actual fact, one 12 months in the past I actually warned that the bubble was about to burst, citing the glut of gravel conversions as one among a number of signs, and this one remains to be on the market:
Not solely that, however one professional group will journey Paris-Roubaix this 12 months on an “amateur-focused” bike:
Stunning:
Now it appears Issue is at it once more with a non-standard raceday possibility for the Queen of the Classics, with the information that Fashionable Journey Professional Biking will race on Sunday aboard the Monza reasonably than the lighter and extra aerodynamic OSTRO VAM.
…ly boring.
It’s ironic that the racing bicycle has been fully reinvented over the past 25 years or so, throughout which era we went from principally this…
[Via here]
…to principally this:
And but what distinction has it made? I assume the common speeds have crept up somewhat bit, however there are all kinds of contributing elements to that, and little question a minimum of a few of them are pharmacological. And but the developments in rider security throughout which have amounted to…properly, nothing, aside from helmets changing into necessary in 2003, which has not made the game measurably safer, and if something you’re all the time studying about how professional biking is extra harmful than ever.
So perhaps everybody concerned within the sport and the advertising and marketing across the sport will understand they’ve taken bike tech so far as they will take it and transfer on to stuff like growing airbag skinsuits as a substitute:
Rider security does appear to be one thing that deserves extra focus than easy methods to take away the hook from a rim as a way to make it .000000005% extra aerodynamic, although is “lowering considerations about crashing” actually factor?
The go well with’s safety is concentrated on the rib cage and thorax, stabilisation of the neck and backbone safety, says Van Rysel. Its “detection algorithms” are based mostly on greater than 450 million kilometres of information, analysing rider actions at 1,000 a second, it provides.
The group’s CEO Dominique Serieys, says the go well with will enhance rider efficiency by lowering psychological stress and considerations about crashing.
Isn’t that referred to as “threat compensation?” Gained’t all of them simply journey round hitting one another like they’re carrying inflatable sumo fits?
If the last word objective is “lowering psychological stress and considerations about crashing” then a shot of whiskey initially looks like it might be lots simpler.
