This guy has been bugging me for a while since I found out about his purposeful misrepresentation of the timing of TransIowa to make it appear “first” in gravel events and give him some sort of primacy of opinion.
Nobody gives a shit about the “average racers” they want to see pros and spectacle. They want to lust after super-expensive cutting edge gear and bikes. Gravel, despite G-Ted’s Herculean myth-making was never exclusively in the mold of the Midwest and in many areas of the country has always been a cross/road hybrid where people came to compete in the mold of road racing. The idea that events should be free and ridden on jank-shit bikes and gear (which G-Ted don’t review) is completely divorced from reality.
In a bit of a satirical ranting I did along with N.Y. Roll, I suggested that we start another event, have a single category: “Human”, and stipulate that the bike/gear used in the event has to cost less than 2G. And there is no entry fee, and if anyone doesn’t have a bike, or means to get to the event, they get a free bike and travel/lodging. Inclusive? That’s how I would do it.
The rant of a man who didn’t when he had the opportunity, but says you should do it now that he’s retired. Non Plus Ultra Boomer brain worms. People love the current national gravel scene, they love the names, they love the cost, they love the travel, the walking in mud. It exists separate of whatever DIY/local stuff is still happening. The metamorphosis of one group of events has little to do with the other.
Peter Sagan going to Unbound has zero effect on the Evergreen Grinder or Fried Clay 200k or Iron Cross or whatever. Pretending gravel wasn’t commodified and seized by marketeers and salesman from day one is nonsense. Salsa just got all those bike design ideas to sell from thin air?
There’s always some give and take between grassroots diy stuff and marketing, but there’s a difference between one store brand bike company making bikes and then not advertising them and the media circus that accompanies big brands and big name pros. I mean, if Salsa was funding all the early events, then I stand corrected, but I had thought that a lot of the stuff happening pre-2015 was relatively bottom-up in organization.
I tend to see this media and organizational growth as inevitable with popularity. Either your thing dies out, or if it catches on it grows to the point that it’s isomophic with all the other big events. 2022 Unbound compared to 2014 Oregon Outback is like 2016 Red Hook Crit compared to the first Monster Track (or, hell, the most recent).
He definitely wouldn’t sully his pure gravel cycling by attempting to profit from it. Especially not by doing something as crass as selling internet ads on countless reviews about products targeted at the market:
Also I feel like there’s a corollary to the “no ethical consumption under capitalism” rule here. There are no pure critics/gatekeepers for a sport or hobby when anyone earns money from it.
