All Grovel Before The Gravel

It's Friday, which means this weekend you'll probably be cycling.  And if you're like most cyclists, you'll probably use some sort of bicycle to do it.  But what kind?  There are so many!  In fact, according to a popular glossy cycling periodical's buyer's guide, there are currently over 4,500 different recognized styles of bicycle.*  One of these bicycle types is the "graveling bicycle," and Velonews has an interesting interview with Gerard "Vroom-Vroom" Vroomen about where he thinks this whole thing is going:

Being old, I still associate Vroomen with bikes like this:

If you're less as old as I am, the Soloist had a reversible seatpost and allowed you to go from regular Fred to TT Fred and/or Tridork with a few twists of a hex key.  I can assure you it was no less dorky in those days than it is now, but people were all over it just the same.

Now, however, Vroomen is all about the gravel bikes, and he has this to say on what the future holds:

What we call gravel bikes now — but hopefully we’ll come up with a better name for them — I’m 100 percent convinced that will become a bigger category than road bikes and than mountain bikes 10 years from now. That really is a bike that addresses today’s needs for people. It gets people off the paved roads, it’s still fast, and it works really well on a mixture of different surfaces. For sure that will be a big trend.

I completely agree with this for like half the year.  The other half of the year it's so slushy and rainy that all I want to do is ride a road bike on the road.  I think this is probably true in a lot of places, and even as someone who's declared road riding dead myself I think its survival is pretty much assured for this reason alone.

Of course you can always just put road tires on your gravel bike.  But you won't.  That's not how bikes work.  All of cycling tends towards specialization, and it's part of the disease we all have that we have to be riding the "right" bike all the time.  That's why even a no-BS company like Surly offers roughly 1,500 different models now.

Another reason I think the road bike will never go away is that the kinds of people who are attracted to stretchy-clothes riding cannot resist fairings and other stuff that seems aero.  And while Vroomen himself may have invented the world's first aero gravel bike, there will always be people like this:



You'd think he'd have deleted that video by now.

As for displacing the mountain bike, it seems to me that for amateur riders the gravel bike is sort of replacing the cross-country mountain bike, and a mountain bike will only be considered a mountain bike now if it has hydraulic and dropper everything, a 1mm stem, at least fourteen levers on the handlebars, and is totally incapable of actually being pedaled to the trailhead.

Vroomen also predicts the death of the front derailleur:

There’ll be no front derailleurs anymore. That’s for sure. I think when you ask people, “Hey, if there’s 1-by-14, would you ride that or would you still ride 2-by-14?” People would say, “Well, of course I’ll ride 1-14.” And now we’ve established that, and it’s just a matter of when you switch. Is it 1-by-11? 1-by-12? 1-by-13? You wait a couple years, an extra cog shows up in the rear, that’s how we’ve been going since the first rear derailleur. So those are trends that I think are pretty clear.

This is really one to ponder.  On one hand, the more cogs you add in back the more overlapping gears you have with a double.  (At least I think that's the case, I can't be bothered to check.)  On the other hand, the more cogs you add in the back the more annoying it is to shift all the way across the cassette when you crest a hill with a single.  Certainly for gravel bikes the single ring is preferable for a whole bunch of reasons, but a road bike is another story.  Then again I guess we're moving towards a road bike-free future.  Still, it seems like electronic shifting would have to get really fast for the front derailleur to disappear completely.

Anyway, it's all compelling stuff to ponder, assuming you're a terminal Fred, which if you're reading a bike blog on a Friday afternoon you probably are.  But don't ponder it too much, lest you break your brain and decide, "Fuck it, I'm leasing a Hyundai"--or in my case decide, "Fuck it, I'm riding an aero bike made of wood," which in these gravel-obsessed days is just as transgressive.

Of course the big question isn't whether we'll all be riding gravel bikes in the future; the question is "Will that gravel bike be 3D-printed?"


Leave it to Silicon Valley to disrupt ruin the bicycle.





*This is a lie I made up.