Last week we revisited the Golden Age of Hybrids–that brief yet magical time before the term became a catch-all for boring bikes that get ridden three times a year by people in sweatpants, and still referred to performance-oriented combination road-and-mountain bikes:
By the mid-1990s the hybrid dream was effectively dead, and the bikes came to embody the worst of both worlds by combining the skinny rims and tires of a road bike with the uncomfortable-over-long-distances flat bars of a mountain bike:
Arguably however there was still one exciting hybrid available as late as the early 21st century, that being the Lemond Wayzata, seen here in the 2002 catalog:
In one respect this bike represents the apotheosis of the worst-of-everything trend that had started in the 1990s (skinny tires, paired-spoke wheelset, flat bars with wonky quasi-ergonomic bar-ends), but in another it embodies the original spirit of the genre as it is built on the exact same frame as the Poprad cyclocross bike–which, as you can see, was the contemporary choice of the discriminating enthusiast:
It’s no wonder then that the iconic status of the Poprad–coupled with whatever strange fumes may be permeating that garage–compels people to sell them for serious money:
$2,000 may seem like a lot, but keep in mind you’re getting a chain that matches the frame:
As wells an adjustable stem and what appears to be the rear wheel of a Schwinn Varsity:
Anyway, given the hybrid’s trajectory from edgy to anodyne, it’s possible that its modern-day equivalent, the gravel bike, could follow suit by vanishing into a mist of meaningless mediocrity. Certainly the signs that the Gravel Bike Apocalypse is nigh are all around us, chief among them being the countless indistinguishable articles about how wonderfully versatile they are:
A Tweeterer brought this particular story to my attention due to its painstaking gravel-centric recreation of The Time-Traveling Retro-Fred from the Planet Tridork Bret:
Who, if you don’t know, is the most widely reproduced cyclist of all time, adorning everything from magazine covers…
…to loaves of bread:
So what makes a gravel bike better then a road bike? Well, you can ride them more slowly if you feel like it, and you can also put 32mm tires on them:
As someone who’s been riding slowly on a road bike with 32mm tires for years I found this deeply puzzling:
I mean sure, I did have to replace that bike eventually:
Just kidding!
It’s the same goddamn bike.
Regardless, the road bike gets a bad rap as a machine with a thong bikini-like lack of ruggedness and versatility, but that was really only true of them for a relatively short period of time–specifically the late 1990s and early aughts, when fat tubes and tight clearances came into fashion:
Yet this was sufficient to change perception of them so completely that even Jan Heine considers it noteworthy that racers are using road bikes at Paris-Roubaix:
Apparently this year’s race was noteworthy in that the racers used their “normal racing bikes:”
But isn’t that what they always did?
Basically the bike companies just introduced pointless constraints to their racing bikes for awhile, from which they’ve finally decided to liberate you:
And for which Jan Heine appears to be taking the credit:
I know I’m incredibly grateful to the all-road bike revolution for making it possible for me to ride this road bike from 1982 all year round across a variety of terrain:
This whole road bike thing might just catch on after all.