New Outside Column! And Bonus Bloviating! – Bike Snob NYC

I’ve got a new column in the Outside, and it’s about how to build a bicycle that won’t succumb to obsolescence:

Which is to say it’s thinly-veiled propaganda for riding old road bikes:

Note how what’s left of the rusty chrome still manages to scintillate.

Really, though, how do you beat them? Fancy Dura Ace derailleur notwithstanding, starting from scratch, you could probably throw a bedraggled-yet-still-classy bike like this together for about what a remote dropper post costs if not less:

[It costs $861]

For that matter, you could probably buy two complete Normcore bikes for what that remote-control telescoping ass-pedestal costs:

Best of all, you don’t even need to remember to charge it.

Speaking of road bikes, what’s the deal with Campagnolo?

Or, more specifically, what’s the master plan at Campagnolo?

As a modern American urbanite with no real problems to speak of I’m always up for a lengthy think piece about a bicycle component manufacturer, and while I’m troubled by the author’s apparent sentiment that Campagnolo hasn’t gone electronic enough…

…I do think one problem Campagnolo is probably facing right now is that half the people looking at it are disappointed it isn’t electronic enough, and the other half are disappointed it’s not all silver and cable-actuated. This is because people who like Campy are old, and when roadies hit middle age they encounter a fork in the road; some opt to continue modernizing and upgrading to the very end, while others renounce all that and become insufferable retrogrouches. And you can’t please them both. As a member of the latter group I of course wish Campagnolo would abandon the battery-powered rat race altogether and cater entirely to people with slight beer bellies who ride steel bikes and wear wool jerseys, but apparently they’re going to do the opposite and become a “sports luxury” brand:

I take this to mean that instead of appealing to portly retrogrouches they’ll be targeting high net worth individuals with personal trainers, like Richard Branson:

Branson is of course widely known for his inability to use his thumbs:

Which would explain Campagnolo’s widely-lamented abandonment of the thumb button on its latest shifters:

I had just assumed that this was because Campy saw the writing on the wall and understood that within 10 years all shifting will be done sphincterally via satellite suppository shifters inserted deep in the rectum, but I now understand that it’s because their sociocultural evolution department have recognized that as people earn more money there’s a corresponding loss in manual dexterity.

Regardless, obviously a few portly retrogrouches can’t support a company the size of Campagnolo–this is a group of cyclists so grotesquely frugal they do ridiculous stuff like re-use cables and bar tape and even patch their inner tubes. Furthermore, everybody knows the bottom fell out of the luxury bicycle market during the height of the fixie craze:

Most importantly, as the author points out, as of 2024 none of the top road racing teams are using Campagnolo anymore. Rivendell can sell you drivetrain components despite the fact the professionals aren’t using their stuff–in fact they can sell you drivetrain components because the professionals aren’t using their stuff. But Campagnolo doesn’t really have that luxury, as their long racing heritage is their entire identity–that and needing special tools for everything.

I don’t know what the future holds for Campagnolo, but I’ve been thinking about it (remember: I have no real problems to deal with) but I do think I know where it all went wrong for them:

Yes, it’s that wacky Campagnolo spline pattern. Once indexing and freehubs took over, you had to choose your universe–Campy or Shimano. And if you chose Campy, you were cut off from the ever-expanding world of Shimano-compatible hubs and wheels. (Yes, of course there were conversion cassettes, and cable rerouting workarounds, and the 10-speed stuff was pretty close and borderline interchangeable, but you couldn’t always count on it. And I think 12 speed stuff all works together now but it’s too late.) Remember when SRAM sauntered in with Double Tap? They used Shimano splines and cog spacing so switching over was easy, now they own everything and are flogging $900 remote control seatposts. Meanwhile, Campagnolo’s spline pattern is obviously the work of a deranged psychopath. If Campagnolo had adopted Shimano’s spacing early on they might still be on top today.

Apart from the thumb thing of course.