Barely a week goes by without a new gravel bike, gravel specific bit of clothing or event being announced. That’s A Good Thing because we love it a bit of dirty drop bar action, but we can’t help noticing that it’s made some things that were distinctly uncool into a perfectly acceptable part of riding…
Five things that weren’t cool – until gravel happened
Transforming mountain bike lead into gravel gold
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Jon’s been riding bikes for ages and has been involved in the bike industry for most of his working life too, starting out as a Saturday boy at Harry Hall Cycles before moving into the world of media via the odd stint as a mountain bike guide. He’s worked at Singletrack, headed up What Mountain Bike magazine and been tech ed at BikeRadar before arriving at the helm of road.cc’s knobbly tyred sister site off-road.cc.
He mostly rides mountain bikes up and down things as fast as possible (not always that fast to be honest) but isn’t averse to riding drop bar bikes either, whether that’s on gravel or tarmac.
He goes all funny at the mention of rubber compounds and shim stacks.
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MaxiMinimalist 40 minutes ago
We are told day in day out that AI is the future, mankind's only way forward. One step at a time, the environmental damage and human costs of AI start to surface. Mega data centres require plenty of electricity to power servers and gazillion of cubic meters of water for cooling, each year. This means more atmospheric pollution and respiratory diseases and less water for humans, animals and agriculture.
MaxiMinimalist 1 hour ago
It seems we hardly hear of doping cases involving women conti and pro cyclists. Here is the latest data : Of the 20 total professional doping cases recorded in 2025, four involved female cyclists.
Backladder 2 hours ago
I think people are making errors deliberally now!
hawkinspeter 3 hours ago
LLMs help pets to create games: https://www.calebleak.com/posts/dog-game/ I'm coming around to thinking that LLMs are like some kind of fancy gambling machine - creating a prompt is like pulling a lever on a slot machine and hoping you get a dopamine releasing result.
slc 3 hours ago
No-one expected that :) On the other hand (according to said LLM) the carbon footprint of a drive to the shops is 100–500 ChatGPT responses. Also, LLMs are nice and help kittens cross the street.