Good year; bad year: check out cycling's winners and losers of 2021

If 2020 was the year when our world changed with the pandemic, 2021 has been a year in which we've begun to get used to living with the coronavirus ... these past 12 months have been less disruptive, but the rise of the Omicron variant may provide a sting in the tail. In the meantime, the world of cycling has pedalled on, with some good - and bad - trends during the year from a tech, racing and news point of view. Here's our round-up of some that caught our eye.

It has been a good year for … gravel bikes

Gravel bikes have gone from being The Next Big Thing in cycling to The Current Big Thing in cycling over the past couple of years, and 2021 has seen major bike launches from the likes of Giant, Canyon, Orbea, and Ribble. 

We’ve also seen stablemates SRAM, Zipp and RockShox unveil a whole range of new XPLR gravel bike components comprising wheels, derailleurs, cassettes, a suspension fork and a dropper seatpost. 

Unfortunately, none of this will stop gloomy bores telling you that your gravel bike is basically the same as the hardtail mountain bike they owned in the 1990s. Yaaaaawn!

It has been a bad year for … getting hold of the bike you want

Shortages? Oh yeah, we’ve had shortages. Interruptions to the supply chain caused by Covid-19 added to increased demand caused by, um, Covid-19 have led to a scarcity of bikes and components which began in 2020, continued into 2021, and is likely to continue throughout 2022.

Britain’s bike shortage, part 1: what’s going on, when will supplies return, and how can you improve your chances of bagging the bike you want?

Check out our tips for getting your hands on the bike you want.

It has been a good year for … flogging old stuff on eBay 

If you have a garage full of old bikes and components you don’t need anymore, now’s a good time to get rid thanks to the reasons outlined above – bike shops can’t keep up with demand so you might as well step in and have a bit of a clearout at the same time.

Components are in such short supply that Specialized Concept Store was selling a 2022 Specialized Allez Elite equipped with a SRAM Rival 11-speed groupset from 2014. 

It has been a bad year for … rim brakes

Rim brakes aren’t going to disappear any time soon but disc brakes have become ever more dominant in 2021. 

Pic: Alex Broadway-SWpix.com

Very few pro riders have been using rim brakes, and 18 of the 21 stages of the Tour de France were won by riders on disc brake bikes. Ineos Grenadiers finally switched to disc brakes in September, the final WorldTour team to do so.

It’s not unusual for new road bikes to be launched as disc only. There’s no rim brake version of the updated Cervelo R5, for example.

Is this all because the bike industry wants to force you onto disc brakes? Hmm… no. You can file that argument under 'dealt with'.

Does the bike industry really want to force you on to disc brakes? 

It has been a good year for … indoor training

Who’da thunk five years ago that turbo training would become one of the busiest sectors in cycling? 

In 2021, Elite unveiled its Rizer indoor gradient simulator (above) to help replicate the outdoor experience...

...Muoverti introduced the TiltBike – “the first indoor bike that feels like real cycling”, apparently – and, at the cheaper end of the market, there are ever more rocker plates out there.

Indoor training app Zwift continued to develop in 2021 (above), Hustle City, the ‘world’s first open world smart trainer game’, launched (below) and Wahoo unveiled its new SYSTM indoor training platform. 

It’s all going on indoors at the moment, and there's no sign of the growth slowing. 

It has been a bad year for … the Canyon Aeroad

Canyon launched the new Aeroad in October 2020 and it rode beautifully. However, long term users were soon complaining of excessive wear at the point where the seatpost met the seat tube, and then in early March 2021 the aero cockpit snapped under Mathieu van der Poel while racing Le Samyn and Canyon issued a ‘stop ride’ notice. Ouch!

Some of Canyon’s pro riders were using a new handlebar by the time the Tour de France came around but this whole episode was something the brand could really have done without.

It has been a good year for … the Canyon Aeroad

On the flip side, despite all of the above, the Canyon Aeroad has been ridden to some big wins this year including two stage wins in the Tour de France where Mathieu van der Poel took the overall lead early on.

It has been a bad year for … the Dragons’ Den dragons

Okay, the Dragons’ Den dragons aren’t short of a bob or two – they're hardly on the breadline – but they could have had even more in the bank if they hadn't responded with a collective "I'm out" when presented with the Hornit bicycle horn in 2015. The brand – which is also behind the Clug Pro bike rack – announced last month that it has reached over £3 million in global sales.

It has been a good year for … e-bike sales

This time last year our sister site ebiketips reported that e-bike (electric bike) sales had more than doubled during the Covid-19 pandemic and that a pound in every five spent on bicycles between January and October 2020 was spent on e-bikes.

This year, Halfords said it had experienced a 140 per cent rise in sales of e-bikes and e-scooters compared to last year. E-bikes have really hit the big time.

It has been a bad year for ... Tour de France GC contenders other than Tadej Pogacar

Pic A.S.O., Charly Lopez

What can they do? When the fastest climber is also winning time trials, everyone else has a big problem. Tadej Pogacar won the Tour de France for a second time this year despite being only 22 years old at the time. The 2020 race might have gone down to the wire but Pogacar held the race lead for a fortnight in 2021 and the victory never looked in doubt. He won the Mountains and Young Rider classifications for good measure. 

Strange things happen in racing but it's hard to see a future in which Pogacar doesn't win a hatful more Tours.

It has been a good year for … sustainability

Actually, let’s qualify that. It has been a good year for people in the bike industry talking about sustainability. Whether the industry becomes more sustainable as a result remains to be seen.

How green are your bike tyres? What the big brands are doing, and what YOU can do to help 

Alpkit said in February that it made over 2,000 repairs to products last year, found a new home for three tonnes of gear, and that 98% of orders were sent using plastic-free packaging while Trek released its first Sustainability Report outlining 10 steps to lighten its footprint back in July. Those steps include reducing air freight and corporate travel and using more recycled, recyclable or refurbished materials.

It has been a bad year for … cable-operated shifting

Don't get us wrong, the vast majority of bikes have cable-operated shifting and that's going to be the case for a long, long time, but when it comes to major launches, electronic shifting has had a big year.

Shimano’s new top-tier Dura-Ace 9200 and second-level Ultegra 8100 groupsets are both Di2 (electronic shifting) only.

Read our Shimano Dura-Ace 9200 groupset review here 

SRAM’s new Rival eTap AXS groupset is electronic too.

Check out our review of the SRAM Rival eTap AXS groupset 

That said, Shimano's next big groupset launch will probably be third tier 105 and whether this will go electronic or stay mechanical remains to be seen.

It has been a good year for… Strava

Strava says that it now has 95 million users worldwide, up from 73 million a year ago. That’s a 30% increase.

It also says that 17% of the UK population are now "active users". That's about one in six. Sounds nuts, but that's the claim.

It has been a bad year for… bike theft

We’ve covered scummy toerags in terrible clothes using angle grinders to cut through bike locks a few times this year, including one gang who were caught on video outside Surrey Quays shopping centre in Rotherhithe, south-east London.

Thieves use angle grinder to steal Trek bike locked outside busy shopping centre 

On the other hand, we also reported on the Hiplok D1000 D-lock which is said to be the ‘world’s first truly portable bike lock to resist angle-grinder attacks’. 

It has been a good year for… women’s health

The Cyclists' Alliance (TCA) this year partnered with Supersapiens, who produces on-the-go blood glucose tracking for easier energy management, for a new initiative called ‘The Cyclists' Alliance Duty of Care Framework’ to ensure that female professional athletes are empowered and nurtured, both physically and mentally

Wearable tech brand Whoop also established the inaugural Women’s Performance Collective (WPC) that commits to pursuing research and product development initiatives that specifically benefit women. There’s still a long way to go but at least the research is heading in the right direction …

It’s been a bad year for … German Olympic coaches

Rumours in November were that cycling could replace horse-riding in the Modern Pentathlon at the Paris Olympic Games in 2024 after a high-profile incident at Tokyo this summer in which gold medal contender Annika Schleu was left in tears when the horse randomly assigned to her decided it wasn’t having any of it – earning itself punches from German team coach, Kim Raisner, who was sent home from Japan.

Raisner, however, wasn’t the first coach at the Games to be dispatched back to Germany – that dubious honour fell to Patrick Meisner, who during the men’s individual time trial was heard via a TV microphone urging rider Nikias Arndt to “catch the camel drivers” – a reference to the two riders, Azzedine Lagab of Algeria and Eritrea’s Amanuel Ghebreigzabhier, who had passed through the feed zone moments before. “Mr Moster violated the Olympic values,” said the president of Germany’s national Olympic committee as the coach headed back to Europe.

It’s been a good year for … campaigners for Highway Code changes

The end of next month sees a number of changes made to the Highway Code that have long been called for by active travel and road safety campaigners – although as we reported earlier this week, there are concerns that many motorists will be unaware of them and the government is being urged to run an awareness campaign on the revised rules in the New Year.

> Highway Code changes: ‘What about cyclists, or do the rules not apply to them?’

The forthcoming changes include the introduction of a Hierarchy of Road Users aimed at protecting the most vulnerable, a recommended passing distance of 1.5 metres when overtaking cyclists, and clarification that it is perfectly legal for cyclists to ride two abreast – and indeed in some situations may be preferable on safety grounds.

It’s been a bad year for … ‘whataboutery’ enthusiasts

No discussion of poor driving online is complete without someone piping up, “What about cyclists … ” but they really went into overdrive when the impending Highway Code changes were flagged up in the mainstream media, and our own inbox began to fill up with correspondence from people who, it seems reasonable to assume, are not exactly our core readership.

In response, we set out one by one some of the common myths held about cyclists’ use of the road, with reference to what the current rules are and how those will change come the end of January. Of course, it’s probably too much to assume that people who have a beef with those of us on bikes will actually take the time to read and digest what we wrote, but we live in hope.

> Highway Code changes: ‘What about cyclists, or do the rules not apply to them?’

It’s been a good year for … traffic police on social media

Traffic police are at the sharp end of road safety – day in, day out, they see the carnage caused by poor driving, with an average of five people a day killed on Britain’s roads and dozens more seriously injured, and some police accounts on Twitter are very active in dispelling myths about what the law is regarding cyclists.

Among the most active of those is the Surrey Police Roads Traffic Policing account, which regularly steps in to educate motorists claiming, for example, that cyclists must ride in single file – and which just this month gave celebrity solicitor Nick ‘Mr Loophole’ Freeman a proper schooling on the subject after he posted a video to Twitter bemoaning a group of cyclists riding two abreast ahead of the vehicle he was travelling in on a winding country road where, even if they had been in single file, there would have been no opportunity to overtake them safely.

Took this video(from passenger seat) on 60mph road. Forced to travel in line of traffic at 20mph due to obstruction caused by cyclists ahead riding 3 abreast. Anonymous and cycling with impunity. Law should be changed to force them to drop into single file when vehicles behind pic.twitter.com/u3Qt9mRTQu

— Nick Freeman (@TheMrLoophole) December 1, 2021

They also had some words of wisdom to share about the spin that the lawyer – who acquired his nickname through his ability to get motorists acquitted of driving-related offences, often on technicalities – gave on road traffic casualty figures showing that there had been a rise in the number of cyclists killed while riding on rural A roads in 2020.

No they shouldn’t Nick.
Drivers should drive their one tonne vehicle more carefully and stop killing 5 people every day.

To use your opinion in a different analogy, should kids in American schools wear bullet proof jackets in case of a mass shooting?

— Roads Policing Unit (RPU) - Surrey Police - UK (@SurreyRoadCops) December 1, 2021

It's been a bad year for … Mr Loophole

Those posts from Surrey Police came as Freeman was making his final push on the petition he had spent half the year promoting both through social channels and through national and regional media, including the Telegraph and the BBC – both of which, of course, have huge reach.

Posted on the Parliament website back in June, the petition called for cyclists to be licensed, among other things, and it squeezed over the 10,000-signature threshold at which the government was obliged to provide a response inside the last 24 hours – although when that response came, the government was clear that it had no plans to act on his suggestions.

> Government confirms it has “no plans” to make cyclists wear identification numbers as it rejects ‘Mr Loophole’ petition

It’s been a good year for … Mark Cavendish

Until this summer, Mark Cavendish’s last stage win at the Tour de France had come way back in 2016 and since then his career had been dogged by illness and injury – to the extent that even though fit, he was not selected for the 2019 or 2020 editions of the race by his respective teams at the time, Dimension Data and Bahrain McLaren.

Even a week before this year’s race, it appeared that Sam Bennett, winner of the points competition in 2020, would be Deceuninck-Quick Step’s sprinter at the Tour de France, but an injury (and falling out with team manager Patrick Lefevere) meant that it was Cavendish – who had seemed destined to forever be stuck on 30 stage wins, four behind Eddy Merckx’s all-time record – who got the place instead, and it was an opportunity he seized with both hands.

Picture ASO/Pauline Ballet

By the end of the race, he had joined the Belgian on 34 wins, missing out on the outright record as Wout van Aert outsprinted him on the Champs-Elysees – performances that helped him secure a one-year extension to his contract that will see him back in the peloton in 2022.

It’s been a bad year for … Mark Cavendish

The end of the year though brought two low points for the Manxman. First, there was his horrific crash at the Ghent Six in late November, which resulted in him sustaining a punctured lung and broken ribs – all under the eyes of his family, who were watching from the stands.

He had barely been released from hospital and returned home to Essex when there was an even more traumatic episode for him, his wife and children as armed intruders broke into his home and in a violent robbery in which he was beaten in front of his family, made off with two super-expensive Richard Mille watches, as well as a Louis Vuitton suitcase. Police have subsequently made one arrest.