All

While I haven't ridden it myself yet, all the people who I know who have, which is about 7-8 people on a variety of bikes, have no complaints about the clutch. No dropped chains, no excess noise, no feedback from chain slap. I hope to get some time on it soon.

Excuse my French, but could we fucking please stop calling bikes "analog", "acoustic", or -the worst I've heard- "bio"? Bikes are bikes. Ebikes are something else. Now get off my fucking lawn you punks!

As a mostly analogue rider who also has an ebike, I was surprised at how rude, even nasty, a lot of guys on regular bikes are—even when you're as polite as possible trying to pass them on an ebike. Before I had an ebike, my buddies and I would kind of snicker at ebikers after they passed, but never to their face. I figured I'd see some of this once I got one, but I was surprised at how rude some "analogue" riders are for no reason, and how often it happens. It's pretty much an every-other-ride occurrence, which is...

That's also because Codes were god awful and the sram riders were so happy to get on an actual brake. I recently felt some older codes on some bikes I was dealing with and they were shockingly worse than I remembered. Say what you will about Shimano brakes, but they've been consistently good for a while.

I've even heard rumors that Red Bull doesn't actually make helmets either

At the risk.of a massive tangent it's not just the USA and it's not just cycling. Youth sport is in a mess almost everywhere.

One of the things that came up in discussion is how absolutely insane the new generation of riders are. They are SO fast. They are SO good in their training. They are SO dialed in their nutrition and recovery. The guest made a point to bring up an interesting-to-me factoid: They can't let the younger riders anywhere near the big-name riders during team training rides. None of them know how to ride in a peloton. They don't know to not overlap wheels. They don't know how to ride predictably. They don't know how to brake smoothly. They don't know how...

I'm thinking Cat 5 Crit at pro speed and it's terrifying.

I was listening to a road biking podcast recently. One of the guests on the podcast is currently a DS for a bigger team and used to be a world tour rider. One of the things that came up in discussion is how absolutely insane the new generation of riders are. They are SO fast. They are SO good in their training. They are SO dialed in their nutrition and recovery. The guest made a point to bring up an interesting-to-me factoid: They can't let the younger riders anywhere near the big-name riders during team training rides. None of them...

Imagine showing 2013 Charlie this post.

Using a picture of Jolanda Neff on a Trek on their promo shots, I guess that's one way to do it or did I miss a secret sponsor deal from Trek Factory.

Tech Rumors and innovation

Name a more annoying sound than an American complaining about ebikes. Honestly, we've all heard your opinions before. We know you have them. I don't really like or want an ebike either but there are 12,000,000 whingy comments online about how you're too pure or too dedicated or too fit or too angry at unskilled riders and you're mad about it. We don't need any more. Talk about the market or discontinuation of normal bikes, sure, but complaining about being passed on a climb track or peoples ass cracks is tiring af at this point. You've been yelling about it...

Pretty far from 97-3 ratio I'd say. The G-A-S region has always been an regional specialty when it came to performance mtb. They resisted 2x, 1x, progressive geo, real tires, to name a few things, well into the adoption phase in other markets. Being a leader in eMTB market penetration doesn't mean that they're early, more that the MTB culture is different there.

If anyone doesnt understand this bike I dont blame him, neither did I. But after spending few days in a Sud Tyrol town, through which runs a long distance cycle path that connects Northern Italy and Germany my perception changed big time: I only used said cycle path to link different trails for few km at the time but I'd encounter hundreds of elder people riding such bikes. It was eye opening and I realized there exist bike markets I had no idea about...

"emtb can't give me suffering" Spoken like a man that has never run out of battery halfway into a group ride 😁

Posting this here because it seems more bikeonomics related than tech rumours related, but it's sort of in reply or brought about to the discussion going on over there. I'm curious about eMTBs's impact on the MTB "market cap", whether you want to measure that by industry dollars or total number of riders or some other metric ("rider cap?"). I don't think this can be answered decisively as we haven't had enough years of clean data (setting aside any data-gathering difficulties or whether that's really happening industry wide) in the sense that eMTB has really only taken off recently in...

Ive been pondering the e-bike vs regular bike debate a bit recently, and if that conflict is unique to North America only at this point? From what I gather, Europe has heavily embraced e-biking in all forms, to the point where is it somewhat the default choice for most people. Here in the US, the debate of e-bike vs regular bike is still very much a point on contention, but that seems to be something unique to America biking culture, and not so much the rest of the world. Am I wrong on this, or is American protestant work/suffer culture...

We first met Pau at Sea Otter in 2025, where he showed us the early prototype of the Rockintor protective vest. We're stoked to see him push through and make his vision a reality today: https://www.vitalmtb.com/news/press-release/introducing-rockintor-airvo….

30+ years ago bullet bros was trying to solve the same problems.