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We knocked out another B practice podcast this week, and had a few rumor topics come to light: 1. Dak signed a two year deal with Mondraker that ends this year. He was SUPER tight lipped about what the future holds. 2. Cami is retiring, Richie is EDR World Champ, Tyler Waite will be in Elites next year. I'm curious what Richie decides to race, and who they add to the team alongside Tyler (assuming he stays with them) 3. Max and Till Alran will be in Elites next year. Can anyone confirm how many Elite riders you can have...

Regardless of what any of our opinions are on the Nine One, I want to say thanks for being so involved in this thread and wanting to communicate clearly and directly. Direct and public communication between customers and the head of a suspension company is nearly unheard of, so it's appreciated! Thanks, Darren.

Over under on Neko and Logan getting into a fight in the pits?

So much… it’s just too… ÜBER cringe. It must kind of fun to try and write the cringiest nonsense-copy though: “Thank God some kids stayed in science club, because while you were cutting school, they were learning how to manipulate the laws of physics. Some of those kids grew up to be members of Specialized Science Club and helped make the Vado SL 2 an unprecedented combination of power, speed, and light weight.” Gross. Now I want a Rivendell.

I can't reply to this without derailing the thread into something I don’t intend. I also don’t care to 'defend' all Marc’s ideas, implied, explicit, or otherwise. Giant waste of time, even if I do feel you are painting him in a light that isn't totally accurate. The point I was making is that I’m not going to do mental gymnastics to ensure every author, economist, professor, VC, CEO, or personality passes some arbitrary moral or ethical purity test to be worth including here. At its best, this is a thread of ideas with application to the economics of the...

@BGoldstone catching strays (they are not the same person FYI)

the grand parents of ergon and bar ends - oakley 3

I became more interested in all of this business talk and then realized I have access to some forecasting/analytics data at work so did some digging and found some interesting things. These are all global projections from 2024 so could very well be wrong at this point. It's also global bike market stuff so not just enthusiast bikes or mountain bikes. As has been seen in other posts, the European market is larger than all other markets combined or thereabouts; I knew it was bigger but that seems wild to me. Total bike sales are predicted to drop and not...

I think Pedal Bob and sethimus need to hug it out.

This is what Ares Masip - the person bringing the charges against Edgar - posted about the situation and the announcement:

I’m glad the the UCI have spent the time and effort to investigate this and make their judgement. I’ve notice on IG, FB and PB there are a lot of guys getting upset about this and I feel that this says a lot about them. This has been an investigation that’s taken months since the accusation and they’ve kept his name out of the media until now. So it shows that they were taking it seriously. Hopefully the replies on here will be better than on the others.

If time allows, I’ll try to put together a Giant + Shimano + limited Canyon analysis since they all reported recently. At first glance its more of the same. Things are stagnant. The problem we’ve discussed aren't getting worse, but the industry isn’t suddenly waking up from the hangover all at once, either. It’s a bit frustrating to watch how some media outlets and “Substack/social media analysts” are spinning the headlines. I get it, attention economy and all, but I’m seeing people mash up different profitability KPIs that should never be compared, lean on percent-change numbers to make things look...

Ah! Good question. What we are talking about here is "accounts receivable" or "AR". This is a balance sheet item. Those wondering, Fox reported accounts receivable as of 4-Jul of $185M. If anyone wants to play along at home, this is one of the first things on the "balance sheet" part of the press release (under assets). For those who don't know how AR works, a customer (say, Trek) will generally get terms from the vendor (Fox), which stipulates how quickly they need to pay their invoice. Often there is a discount (like 1%) if its paid super fast (10...