As any Continental Army regular or John Wayne Bobbitt* will tell you, you don’t want to go off half-cocked, which is is why you shouldn’t buy that exciting new gravel bike you’ve had your eye on:
*[I really do deserve a Most Dated References On The Internet Award, or “Datie”]
And yes, that’s Part 2 in the series, which started way back in March of 2025:
This means the Bicycling magazine subscriber and prospective gravel bike owner has been waiting over a year now for a green light, which raises an important question:
What have they been riding in the meantime?
Like, are they on some old road bike with rim brakes? No, I doubt anyone who reads Bicycling is still using rim brakes. This is because back in 2018, when the UCI legalized disc brakes on road bikes, Bicycling ran a program modeled on the many firearm buybacks organized by police departments across the country in which riders could anonymously surrender their dangerously obsolete rim brake bicycles in the name of public safety. They then followed it up with Cash For Mechanical Drivetrains, thereby completely modernizing America’s road bicycle fleet.
As for gravel bikes, apparently that’s more like cryptocurrency. Are we at the bottom, or at the top? How many more wild swings can we expect? Or is it all just going down to zero? If you bought a gravel bike a year or two ago, it’s now worthless because it doesn’t fit 50mm tires. But buy a gravel bike with 50mm tire clearance today and it could be obsolete tomorrow because it doesn’t fit 32-inch wheels. Yet you could still buy a 32-inch wheel bike tomorrow and find out six months later they got the geometry all wrong. Or maybe you shouldn’t be looking at gravel bikes at all and should be shopping for drop-bar mountain bikes, which either are gravel bikes or aren’t, depending on who you ask.
Whew!
Meanwhile, having just sold an ISGB for like nineteen bucks and a 12-pack of Pamplemousse LaCroix (how the hell has the National Beverage Corp. not done a commercial for Pamplemousse LaCroix sung to the tune of “Closer To The Heart” by Rush?), I know all to well that the gravel bike market is stagnant. In fact, one year ago I myself warned that the bubble was about to burst, citing the glut of gravel conversions as one of several symptoms, and this one is still for sale:
Not only that, but one pro team will ride Paris-Roubaix this year on an “amateur-focused” bike:
Shocking:
Now it seems Factor is at it again with a non-standard raceday option for the Queen of the Classics, with the news that Modern Adventure Pro Cycling will race on Sunday aboard the Monza rather than the lighter and more aerodynamic OSTRO VAM.
…ly boring.
It is ironic that the racing bicycle has been completely reinvented over the last 25 years or so, during which time we went from basically this…
[Via here]
…to basically this:
And yet what difference has it made? I guess the average speeds have crept up a little bit, but there are all sorts of contributing factors to that, and no doubt at least some of them are pharmacological. And yet the advancements in rider safety during that have amounted to…well, nothing, apart from helmets becoming mandatory in 2003, which has not made the sport measurably safer, and if anything you’re always reading about how pro cycling is more dangerous than ever.
So maybe everyone involved in the sport and the marketing around the sport will realize they’ve taken bike tech as far as they can take it and move on to stuff like developing airbag skinsuits instead:
Rider safety does seem like something that deserves more focus than how to remove the hook from a rim in order to make it .000000005% more aerodynamic, though is “reducing concerns about crashing” really a good thing?
The suit’s protection is focused on the rib cage and thorax, stabilisation of the neck and spine protection, says Van Rysel. Its “detection algorithms” are based on more than 450 million kilometres of data, analysing rider movements at 1,000 a second, it adds.
The team’s CEO Dominique Serieys, says the suit will improve rider performance by reducing mental stress and concerns about crashing.
Isn’t that called “risk compensation?” Won’t they all just ride around hitting each other like they’re wearing inflatable sumo suits?
If the ultimate goal is “reducing mental stress and concerns about crashing” then a shot of whiskey at the start seems like it would be a lot easier.