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Nathan Pontvianne looks to have gotten his hands on the same unreleased fork stanctions (steel?) that the Specialized team have been running for a while. You can see them better in the latest Vital RAW.

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...

sorry, it's not ebike talk, but here are pit bits photos from leogang https://www.vitalmtb.com/forums/hub/pit-bits-2026-leogang-world-cup-dow…

The etiquette piece might be my single biggest grievance from the ebike crowd. I'm a big guy and climbing is not my strength, so I have PLENTY of experience with being passed on the uptrails by both regular and ebike riders. The ebike riders are exponentially worse at saying excuse me, on your left, or simply making some noise to let you know they're behind you. I've even seen groups of ebike riders talking and laughing about how fast they're cruising past other riders at the top of the climb. These aren't new riders. At the end of the day...

btw, first day back at work and had an old geezer already that was interested in the levo 4 rack, but for his gen3 levo. those things will sell…

Tech Rumors and innovation

Fair point

Charlie no

Guys, I know you don't want to hear this... but the racks on that new Levo 4 X monstrosity are really cool. Those ugly Levo X racks move all of the cargo on the bike from unsprung mass to sprung mass. As forum dwellers, we should all be able to appreciate why that's going to ride better, even if the XX cranks, the paint job, and the S-works price point are all serious headscratchers. If you don't believe me, check out this writeup from Travis Engel at the Radavist on a similar front rack design that he bodged together on...

I would answer this question but we're not allowed to talk about ch__n__ay _ength in the tech forum anymore.

The German market isn't reflective of North America; and possibly other core MTB markets like Australia and New Zealand, however small they might be. The amount and quality of riding in North America, for example, fosters a completely different riding culture. Of course eMTB has a place here in North America, but we still have a large percentage or riders that want the analog experience. Squamish is a good example of a super core area for riders and, while eMTBs are seemingly everywhere there, my anecdotal perspective is that the split is still in favour of analog. My prediction is...

The headset cable routing edition of suspension layout.

Yo dawg! We put your shock inside your frame so it’s covered and we put a hole in your shock cover so your shock isn’t covered when it’s covered 🤘

Maybe it's a subsidized assembly fee or something. I don't know how Spesh works, but when someone buys a Norco online they pass on the normal margin to the shop that gets the bike and assembles it for the customer which makes it not a problem for the dealers that they sell online through their own website.

$89 to go to the bike shop and pick up your own bike?

Great question. To your point, I think the cannibalism is worse than that, because instead of wanting multiple pedal bikes for different sorts of pedal days with granular differences between each model, one ebike is pretty much fine for everything. In the past, as a MTB pedaler, I would have loved to have at least three mountain bikes: a long travel enduro bike, a shorter travel trail bike, and maybe a hardtail or XC bike. Maybe more. If I wanted to give up on pedaling and get an ebike instead, I don't need two ebikes. For ebikers who want to...

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...

Trek would be smart to pull an Orbea. Combine your DH/Enduro into one and base it on your long travel e-bike. 3 in 1.