John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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10 comments
Buy a bike [well, a "used to be a bike!"] from us to trade in!
You'll be helping an African child get to school as well http://www.jolerider.org/shop/the-bike-shed
10% is rubbish. Vitality health insurance (at Platinum point level) gives you £500 off a £1000 Evans bike (inc sale bikes) and a cinema ticket each week too and a starbucks coffee every week too, and a £20 iTunes voucher each month (starts at £5, but £20 on Platinum level). The insurance itself is under £20 a month for young bods. Bit of a hassle though, maybe more than it's worth if you're on a higher salary than me.
If you are planing to buy a bike from Evans anyway, then yes, it's worth doing. As others have said, your local bike shop would probably be up for a similar negotiation anyway - especially if you're a member of British Cycling or CTC which costs around £30 (same goes for Halfords)
But the price they buy bikes is a fraction of the retail price they charge so they are still making one huge mark up and getting your old bike as well. You can get 10-15% off with membership of BC anyway without having to give them your old bike or indeed find/nick an old jalopy.
The discount is no more than you will be able to easily negotiate with any local bike shop, and there's several ethical, environmentally responsible bike recycling project in every UK city. Neither benefit the venture capitalists working hard to force independents out of business, though.
It's a 10% off promotion that the marketing department has artificially made more interesting and memorable by adding the requirement that the customer provides a bicycle with their payment. I wonder if road.cc would have reported it so prominently without that requirement.
Possibly true. But if Evans is repurposing those trade-ins for a worthy cause, why does it matter?
Details on what they do with them towards the bottom of this page:
http://www.evanscycles.com/pages/tradein
Any idea what Evans are planning to do with the old bikes? Hopefully they won't just be scrapped, but passed on to one of the many bike recycling charities out there.
they are donated to various regional charities across the country - bikes are used for a variety of things from training people in bike maintenance to providing transport for those who cannot afford it. http://www.evanscycles.com/pages/tradein