Gravel–or as we now know it, GRVL:
The “taxonomy to categorize the phenotype of bicycles whose appearance is altered by demand or terrain” is one of the greatest intellectual challenges of our time, but one thing’s for certain, and it’s that you need a $600 cassette in order to ride it:
Yeah, that’s right, the SRAM RED ASSPLR cassette is $600:
SRAM RED ASSPLR is nothing less than the ultimate gravel drivetrain, and it will put all your energy into the ride:
Of course if you’re not a professional gravel influencer it will also remove all your money from your bank account, but you can’t put a price on “Full Mount Resilience:”
That sounds incredibly dirty, and not in the “gravel dust accumulating on your embrocated legs” way.
I should reiterate that I have no problem with bicycle and component companies designing envelope-pushing equipment for racing and charging lots of money for it. Nobody’s making you buy SRAM RED ASSPLR ASS. I guess there’s a danger that as the ASS-PLSV technology trickles down and becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous you won’t be able to get a bike that doesn’t require batteries and firmware updates, but given the fact I’m having no issues keeping a bike from 1982 on the road I choose to remain optimistic that you’ll be able to operate metal bikes with cables and rim brakes for years to come.
Still, $600 is crazy, and no doubt far exceeds the total cost of my own custom-curated DRTBG GRVL DRVTRN:
The brains of the operation is (are?) the Silver shifters:
With no firmware updates they’ll shift across as few or as many cogs as you want, and while they don’t come with “blips” you can mount them in a variety of locations on the bicycle.
Currently I am using them with an 8-speed cassette:
Why 8-speed? Because the same company that will sell you a $600 cassette also offers an 8-speed cassette which you can generally get on the street for like $15:
Granted, it doesn’t go as low as the ASSPLR, but thanks to Advanced Friction Shifting Technology™ if you need those winch gears you can use them to operate the new cutting-edge triple cranks, which moves the lowest gears from the rear of the bike to the front at a much lower total cost to the consumer (and that includes the seat tube-mounted chain-moving device):
It’s easy to freak out over the state of the cycling industry, but when you consider that with an 11-speed Hyperglide hub and a pair of friction shifters you choose from among an incredibly wide variety of cassettes, chains, cranks, and derailleurs fairly indiscriminately, and if selling $600 cassettes to gravelistas is allowing SRAM to continue selling $15 cassettes to dirtbags then I’m okay with it.
In other news, 10 years ago Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. left a bear and a bike in Central Park:
He mentions the news stories about people getting killed at the time, so I guess he was riffing on the hilarity of Jill Tarlov’s death, which happened that same year:
So basically a bunch of rich drunk assholes from Westchester who’d just stuffed themselves at Peter Luger dumped a dead bear and a bike in Central Park to riff on the death of a woman who got killed by a cyclist.
Classy.
Of course the real question is, “What about that bike?” I guess this must have been a big local story at the time, but I have no recollection of it, and it seems like the news stories at the time make no mention of a bike:
So what kind of bike was it? Was it a nice bike? Did someone find a bike on a bear carcass and ride off on it? And where is that bike today?
Alas, we may never know.