Once upon a time, there were bikes like this:
They were great for brisk riding on paved surfaces, and for hanging out by the tennis court in your short shorts:
But they weren’t so great for riding on rugged trails, and so next came bikes like this:
They were a little more versatile and a bit easier to ride, plus they didn’t come with the Euro associations that tend to make Americans uncomfortable, and so they sold like hotcakes. (Though when was the last time you bought a hotcake?)
Because they were so popular, designers started to “improve” them:
(If you’re wondering why all these bikes are Treks, I don’t mean to single them out, they’re just a good representative American bicycle brand and all their old catalogs are also conveniently available on this website.)
And eventually both the bicycles as well as the manner in which they were meant to be ridden bore little to no resemblance to cycling at all:
So along came a “new” kind of bike:
Even though it wasn’t “new” at all:
Nevertheless, people loved these new-but-not-new bikes, because they were fast and efficient like the first kind of bike, but also simple and good for riding on rugged trails like the second kind of bike was before they decided rugged trails weren’t good enough and that riders should aspire to this for some reason:
The whole point of a bike is you ride it on the ground. As Ernesto Hemingway said, or wrote, or whatever he did, “It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.” Contours of the land indeed! Is not the feeling of your tires upon the earth right up there with digging your bare feet into the cool grass or diving into a mountain stream? Aren’t watermelon-fuckers like the bro above not so much daredevil cyclists as would-be pilots who are either to cowardly or too lazy to learn how to fly?
Okay, admittedly I’ve never dived into a mountain stream, and it’s probably a bad idea unless you’ve determined it’s sufficiently deep–that’s deep, not shallow:
Yes, the AI is trying to kill you.
Anyway, given the sublime pleasure of caressing the contours of the land with your overpriced supple tires, what is this obsession among certain people with getting the bike off the ground and orienting it in any direction other than that for which it was designed to be ridden? It’s like buying a pop-up toaster, mounting it on the wall, and shooting the toast into your face.
Care to take a shot at that one, AI?
[The AI’s take on “Wall-Mounted Toaster Shooting Toast Into Someone’s Face”]
Just when you think AI’s getting close it comes up with something so abjectly horrifying it will terrorize your dreams for months to come.
All of this is to say that the bike industry had a good thing going with these not-new bikes, and for awhile it seemed like everyone’s priorities had kind of aligned, and so naturally they’ve got to fuck it all up again by putting more bouncy crap on them:
And by golly are they desperate to ruin these bikes–so desperate they’re not only creating a problem that doesn’t exist:
[If riding beyond the pavement is a “problem” for you, maybe STAY ON THE FUCKING PAVEMENT.]
But they’re trying to pry your old fork right out from under you:
If I were the cynical type I’d almost believe this was a giant conspiracy on the part of Cane Creek to hoard all the decent forks before the Gravel Apocalyspe and leave everyone else stuck with a thousand dollar downgrade:
Remember: today’s cutting-edge must-have suspension fork technology is tomorrow’s…this thing:
Isn’t it astounding that despite all these “improvements” bicycle sales are apparently plummeting?
Though they don’t appear to be “plummeting” so much as going back to normal:
And while I have no idea of what the bicycle market was like a century ago, I do know that even longer ago than that Matisse couldn’t buy a Van Gogh portrait because his brother had already blown a bunch of money on a bike:
Here’s what happened:
Today of course that Van Gogh would be priceless, but clearly Matisse’s brother was a proto-Fred who couldn’t resist the allure of FKTs and proto-Lachlan Morton-esque glory:
If this were happening in the modern era, Matisse would have asked his brother to lend him a grand to buy some bitcoin back in 2016, only to be told he didn’t have the money because he just spent $1,999.99 on an inverted gravel fork.
Ah yes, who among us doesn’t regret the opportunity cost of past bicycle purchases? I bought Ksyriums when they first came out in 1999 or whenever it was:
I recall them being something like $700, which was huge amount of money for wheels at the time. Alas, they’re now long gone, but if only I’d bought Amazon stock instead I’d be sitting on like a 6,000% return today.
Oh, who am I kidding, as soon as the Amazon stock started going up I’d have sold it and bought some new shifters because they had one (1) additional gear.
Speaking of our bright future…
The rider has not been charged:
Apparently the victim was getting out of a double-parked car when a food delivery rider ran a light:
Getting out of a double-parked car and getting walloped by a delivery guy running a stop sign on an e-bike is the pretty much the most New York City 2025 death imaginable.
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