Goldilocks Ascending

If the bike industry worked like the stock market, the first thing we should all do today is double-check that polygonal cassette body Kirk Pacenti suggested a while back. If you want to look where things are going, not where they already are, that’d make some sense, because when it comes to the 650b wheel size Pacenti was developing and promoting years ago, that’s already here.

Sure, Nino’s Schurter’s World Cup race win on a Scott 650b bike with plenty of 650b DT equipment is the clearest writing on the wall, but there’s plenty more where that came from.

We have a kind of stress test in the cycling world, noteworthy here because 650b has survived it in what seems to be historically amazing condition. Here’s how that test goes:

1. Inventors and very early adopters try to scare you away. They can be the nicest people, but they tend to be really passionate about stuff like a new wheel size, and they really want you to understand where they’re coming from. In the right light, you can tell they just really feel strongly about whatever it is they’re rallying behind, but ask any photographer at a trade show how often the lighting’s just right. More often, even the most sensible and composed advocate for some new or resurrected idea comes off a little like this.
2. The first companies on the band wagon try to scare you away. After the first round of men with aluminum foil hats beg you to listen to them, in come the opportunists disguised as “hardcore.” These are the companies selling just enough bikes to actually have a factory make them something new, but not enough bikes to sit back and analyze the situation before jumping right in. Often they do serve to move things along, which can be a good thing, but they couldn’t be more different from the quirky but passionate types who really got it started, and these are usually companies known for cutting corners in the first place. The first 650b bike I rode was a Haro that seemed to have been dropped into the Nevada desert out of a passing plane, buried for several months, and then used to drive in tent spikes. I’m a firm believer that one of the grinch functions of a company’s head of marketing should be to roam trade show demo ride booths, pulling complete maladjusted shit bikes from the lineup before they can frustrate and disappoint more than that first few hundred people, but that’s just me. Still, the first mass-produced versions of a new idea often don’t make a very good impression.

3. Everybody bitches. The front end of the bike industry is filled with really slick-looking bikes and companies that send Sprinter vans to races where GoPro helmets record epic gnar and inhuman acts of power, endurance, and skill, but the back end is filled with stuff like creating a bill of materials and estimating sell-through velocity on “rubber” for that quarter, and for the cave dwellers in charge of that, a whole new category of products–regardless of how “hot”–just means more shit to shovel. We saw this in the past with the reluctance of suspension and tire manufacturers to make 29er stuff. There’s a comfortable inertia to doing things pretty much the same way you always have, and that creates a pushback against new product development.

The 650b wheel has survived all that. While it’s nice to think public opinion will ultimately dictate the future of products, the fact is that this tail tends to wag dog more often than not, and once enough companies have piled onto the bandwagon (and that’s exactly what’s already happened behind the scenes here), you’re going to see the products. In this case, I think that’s a very good thing. As I’ve written and said before, I don’t see 650b wheels replacing 29ers outright, but I do see them potentially replacing 26-inch wheel bikes and possibly even becoming the dominant wheel size.

At least until Jamis “burps out” the first production 36er.