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"Saddleback, the major UK cycling distributor that entered administration on 29 May 2026, had a more complicated last few years than previously known. New public filings and accounts from former employees show the owners taking dividends out of the business even as it took on large bank loans and built up debts to more than 150 creditors, many of whom now face being left out of pocket." https://escapecollective.com/saddleback-administration-millions-in-divi…

To give them their due, Vail don't seem to give a shit about anything to do with the guest experience, not just Crankworx. I could go full old man yelling at the clouds about all of the cost cutting, nickel and diming nonsense (WATER FOUNTAINS COST NOTHING!!!) that irks me these days.

What a bummer. We'll see what happens when Vail Resorts inevitably goes bankrupt and/or has to start offloading properties in the next 2-3 years.

Downtime mentioned how widespread the breeden bar ends are becoming, with people like Bruni, Pierron and many many others using them. Owning a pair, having recovered from 2 broken hands (left then right) in 3 years, I've found they definitely live up to the hype and really helped with arm pump and security of my weak hands on the bars. The bar ends are a much more interesting innovation than I originally expected, because they significantly change the biomechanics of the upper-body while riding. Stopped by the Orbea pits this weekend and they've cut grips down (pretty sure it was...

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...

You want to feel sick to your stomach? USAC asks xc/cx/road juniors to give them access to their Training Peaks accounts so that some ai-obsessed vulture of a coach can identify riders for development programs based on training metrics.. because there are so few opportunities for young athletes to compete in the United States. “Performance Oriented” national governing body philosophy was pushed on us by the Walton family when they took over USAC. We used to operate on a “developmental” model that you know… prioritized local, regional and national racing experience. Now we are sending kids with decent w/kg straight...

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…

Fair point

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.

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...

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...

I think it is because we do not smoke cigarettes on our pedal to the mountaintop cafe while needing enough breath to complain about immigration

Big changes apparently happening at Trek. My friend (- owner of a small chain of bike shops) just told me that, a couple of days ago, Trek informed their dealerships that there's going to be a lot of change in their product line-up in the near future. Apparenly they are discontinuing a bunch of models, including the Session, Slash, Remedy and Top Fuel. The way the announcement was worded makes it seem like there's no direct updates or replacement models planned for any of them. For Trek's mtb line-up, this would only leave the Supercaliber and the Fuel (EX, LX...

I have no issue with software teams using "agile" in whatever the original context was. I have issues with what it became in the corporate world. Over my year long in-house counsel contract, I think I attended 4-5 mandatory "agile" training seminars, and it featured heavily at our multi-day retreat. To this day I'm not really sure what it means, except that the "agile coaches" sound like new-age grifters when given a microphone in front of a crowd of people that are mandated to be there. Worse yet was inevitably after one of these seminar things, I'd be on a...

For sure take my paid subscriber metric with a massive grain of salt. I have seen all sorts of numbers thrown around and genuinely don't know. I know its a single digit percentage of their actual user base, which illustrates just how hard it is to get someone to pay for something in the consumer app ecosystem.

When you do, please create a version for highly illegal racing of cars on the road. I need some segments on the canyon twisties around me to irresponsibly try and beat please. The top award would be "KOR" "king of the road" - although that sounds a bit Scania truck like. Maybe "douche of the road" could work LOL. You'll probably need to host this one in Moldavia or something. :-) Strava could turn this on so easily, but imagine the lawsuits.

If you're ever able to get this project going, I look forward to cheering you on, enthusiastically adopting your new tech, and inviting all my friends to join the platform with me, and then later calling down curses on you and the Brines family for generations to come for the inevitable enshittification of your platform after you've sufficiently saturated the marketplace.