Another lick or three of superglue on my cheap old Chinese MTB shoe soles, a 153rd or so look over my 2016 battered aluminium gravel bike with its balding tyres, all in a vain attempt to find that harrowing creak that’s haunted headwind rides for a few months now. Nah, I’ve changed most creak potential things already – maybe that’s where it all started? Either way, what the hell? I’ll have to turn a blind ear and bear it, again.
Pulling in my flaring bib shorts and a GB6 Chinese online jersey and off I go, to hammer the roads and trails, much as I have done all over the world at many different levels for decades.
Surely such things are heretic for someone who’se worked in the bike industry and media for most of his life? Shouldn’t I be riding some fancy bike and wearing kit that costs more a black-market golden dodo?
To be honest I’ve never really been gear or image conscious. As for the Joneses – they’re long gone on the never-ending trail of chasing such things, and I’ve never entertained keeping up with them.
Selling dreams through shiny objects and unrelatable folks has been the stuff of horse traders and snake oil salesmen for time immemorial. We live in a material world, where bling, the latest & greatest, and ever re-incarnated, and improved versions of just about everything are thrust before us with disposable promise. Maybe with a hint of style shaming too, especially so since the arrival of social media and influencers.
People buy into this stuff by the bank load, and those who purvey this know that, hence this will never change. Within the bike industry (and everyday life) we are constantly bombarded with newer and faster bikes and bits, all splashed before us, often by implausibly perfect people.
Strangely enough, I never see such shiny people shivering through the misty Welsh winter fog in the mud. They only ever seem to appear in ads, videos, and in expensive coffee shops.
This whole phenomenon, misnomer maybe, went into warp speed in cycling when ”premium brands” (and social media) arrived on the scene, with mighty fine kit too – and country gent like prices to match. Personified with grimy bearded middle-aged men in peaked caps, all with harrowed lines & sweat dripping from their noses, usually seen on dull monochrome days. In cycling, this was a new form of promotion.
Somehow it worked, and seemingly, the bike industry, and many a fancy outlier woke up to the idea that with a little goat hair, some dandy spiel, and lifestyle spin, you could indeed sell cycling stuff for three times the price that regular kit cost back then. It opened up a whole new cycling (up)market too, one that was prepared to pay for it, and they never glanced back.
Add to that the trend of ever changing impossibly incompatible fancy parts, stop making spares for older models, phase out the idea of those secret parts boxes & oily bodges of traditional bikes shops, throw in a fancy coffee machine and a big mirror and your quids in.
Okay, I can’t blame them – it’s business, though not all everyone can afford, or wishes to buy into the materialistic magical promises of the latest bling chase.
As I tap this story out, I’m reminded of an old friend, same vintage as myself, a former Tour de France pro and top adventurer who sadly passed away a year ago. Just before that, we had a long chat, and he told me about his mountain bike; he found it in a roadside skip 20 years ago, rewired it, and had travelled half the world with it, pretty much wearing the same old patched cycling kit he’d had for decades too. Plus, he could still show his back wheel to serious younger racers on it, and many an experience and tale he had too, which I guess they’d call story telling these days.
Sure, I do get expensive kit to review at times, and I do also use it – nice stuff too, often. But do I need it? Will it make me faster, fancier, more fulfilled, cooler, a real cyclist – nah, I very much doubt that.
Am I unique in this, with being involved in the bike media industry? Maybe, slightly medium-rare, but certainly not unique.
Meantime, I’ll keep trying to outride that creak and drain the superglue dry – as those old model shoes just fit me so well. I’m loving riding more than ever, and still do pass people riding that dream kit on occasion, creaks and all (me, and the bike).
Each to their own, it’s whatever works for you; for me that’s not chasing that never ending blingy dream dangled before us every flip of a thumb.
