Happy Friday!
It’s Easter weekend, which means we’re officially moving into spring. That means summer will be here before you know it, and it will also be over before you know it. And autumn always passes too quickly, which really means it’s basically winter already.
Well fuck me.
In any case, further to yesterday’s post, I found myself flipping through some of those 2003 Trek catalogs and reminiscing about the state of the bike industry at the turn of the century. For example, here was the top-of-the-line Gary Fisher mountain bike that year:
[All the catalog links are in yesterday’s post, I’m not going through all that again.]
Just as the earliest land animals still had fins…
…so too did the dual suspension bikes of yesteryear still have rim brakes. Also, in those days you may recall Gary Fisher was pushing this whole crazy 29-inch wheel concept:
It took awhile for the 29-inch mountain bike wheel to catch on; in 2008 I attended the Singlespeed World Championships in Napa and I seem to recall Scot Nicol still deriding them as “wagon wheels,” though to be fair you should not put too much stock in the memory of anyone who was at the 2008 Singlespeed World Championships, and it’s entirely possible I only thought I was talking to Scot Nicol and was in fact schmoozing with a tree. Speaking of which, I had no idea (or forgot) the New York Times covered it:
In the parlance of the time, this would have been a sure sign that singlespeed mountain biking had “jumped the shark.” (Accusing things of “jumping the shark” was the most ubiquitous form of lazy cultural criticism at the time, and I myself was accused of it on a daily basis starting with my second blog post.)
Meanwhile, on the road side, unsurprisingly the top of the Trek range was the USPS team bike replica:
Perusing the catalog gives you a good sense of just how flush Trek was in those days. They had a “WSD” (that was Trek-speak for Women’s-Specific Design, a term that would probably get you cancelled today) version of pretty much every bike, and they even a tandem. (I’ve never paid much attention to tandems, but it seems like the big brands used to offer one, and there’s probably a whole essay to be written on how the slow disappearance of the tandem represents the increasingly dangerous state of the American roadway, the erosion of the institution of marriage and traditional values, our decaying moral fiber, and so forth.)
And here was Trek’s top-of-the-line cross-country mountain bike, complete with dual-suspension, crabon frame, and rim brakes:
Of course if you didn’t want a Gary Fisher, or a Trek, you could always buy a Klein:
In 2003 no one frame material had yet become dominant at the high end, so a big company like Trek had to fight a war on all fronts–and that meant offering top-of-the-line bikes in steel, crabon, titanium, and aluminum:
By this time Klein was just another tentacle of the giant squid that was Trek, but of course Gary Klein had long been a fat-tubed aluminum bike pioneer:
Gary Fisher, Gary Klein…in those days if you were a bike person named Gary it seemed like you had a better-than-average chance of striking a lucrative deal with Trek. If only I’d had the foresight to call this blog “Bike Gary NYC” maybe I’d have been able to cash out early.
Anyway, Trek-era Kleins still had the fancy paint jobs that had become the brand’s hallmark (that and the fat tubes), but it’s the pre-Trek models that appeal to the collector weenies:
After my “American Societal Collapse And The Tandem Bicycle” essay I will write a 10,000-word treatise on this:
Even then I’ll only be scratching the surface.
But Trek wasn’t the only big brand out there, and speaking of fat-tubed aluminum Cannondale was also in a state of advanced bloat. Remember, this was the company that had only a few years earlier gone public and launched a motocross division:
Fortunately no bicycle company would be stupid enough to over-invest in motorized bicycles today:
Don’t worry, this time it will be different.
The big offroad marketing term at the time was “freeride:”
Which gave companies like Cannondale an excuse to sell shit like this:
Though if freeriding was too balls-out for you, then you could always tuck one ball back into your baggy shorts and go with the slightly tamer “all-mountain” lifestyle:
I guess freeriding begat all-mountain, and then all-mountain begat “downcountry,” and of course you’ve got to throw an “enduro” in there somewhere, and oh my god isn’t mountain bike marketing horrible?
By the way, unsurprisingly for a company that had been dabbling in motocross, by 2003 Cannondale was already like “Fuck rim brakes:”
They were also maybe the first company to offer a disc-brake cyclocross bike:
I can assure you that in 2003 absolutely nobody who actually did cyclocross wanted a cyclocross with disc brakes, and it would take many more years for the industry to finally get the concept to stick. And don’t you now we’re ever so much better off for it.
And while Trek was of course the bike sponsor for Armstrong’s USPS team, Cannondale was the sponsor for Saeco:
Saeco was most famous (at least in America) for being the team of Mario Cipollini, but by 2003 he’d changed teams and was riding a Specialized…or a camel, depending on his mood:
This was Specialized’s top-of-the-line road bike in 2003, though I seem to recall Cipollini insisting Specialized make him a bike with a level top tube:
The aluminum era was very short-lived in professional road cycling; steel reigned for like a century, and it’s fairly safe to say crabon will reign for at least another century. But for a brief period in the late ’90s and early aughts aluminum was it:
Not only was aluminum the top bike material, but Bianchi was also the hippest brand in cycling–or at least Binachi USA was, thanks to the designs of Sky Yaeger, who was responsible for the Pista, and the Milano, and Bianchi’s famous line of singlespeed mountain bikes:
Ah, those were the days.
