Occupy Treasure Island

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Sep 212012
 

Interbike is winding down, meaning I’m left with a bunch of photos and vague memories and stuff. Got to catch up with some great people, meet some genuinely fascinating new people and see some cool new products and some horrendously bad new products.

Oh, and there as a pretty fantastic bike race in there, too.

Huge thanks to everyone at NoTubes for the ride out to Cross Vegas and to pro photographer and super nice guy Dan Holz for capturing some incredible photos for Cyclocross.com.

That photo way up top is of course from the Surly booth, or I mean the place where Surly keeps their bikes inside the convention center. The actual Surly booth this year was just outside Treasure Island.

For the record, I have loitered with the MPLS Mafia while drinking coffee, an activity roughly akin to jogging merrily down subway tracks, through a speeding train, and out the other side. Despite the best attempts of Treasure Island to make me miserable this year (I’ll see your “$19.95 per device, per day for WiFi” and raise you one “fuck you, I’m tethering my laptop to my phone”), they deserve a lot of credit for not using high-pressure hoses to disburse this crowd, though I doubt they’d’ve had any effect anyway.

This was actually the most interesting Interbike I’ve ever attended. Between meetings with manufacturers, NoTubes and all kinds of Cyclocross.com work, I knew it’d be action-packed. Definitely didn’t disappoint. I’ll try to make sense of it all here over the next week or so.

Deserted

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Sep 172012
 

By the time this posts, I’ll be back in the desert. I used to think being in Vegas for Interbike every year was like a bad roller coaster ride. Now I realize it’s like being the guy who mops up the cars. Both are gut-wrenching, but the guy who cleans up the ride has to deal with some genuinely disgusting sights, sounds and smells.

I can’t complain, really. It’s just that normally my various jobs have nothing at all to do with vomit, and this one week a year tries to make up for 360 vomit-less days. The stuff they use on the casino carpet, the cars that pass you on the street, the lights: pretty much every individual component of Las Vegas seems carefully engineered to make me sick. I like the people in the bike industry (if I didn’t, there’s no way in hell I’d go to these things), but every other part of Vegas makes me spiritually queasy.

I don’t mean to suggest being in Vegas is like vomiting. There’s a kind of relief that comes from vomiting that Vegas never offers–at least not until the plane’s in the air again and you’re watching that blinking, barren landscape fall away below you. Have to be there to talk to people, though, and that part of my week is going to be pretty great. Lots to accomplish this year.

So Canootervalve will basically be off this week, though I’ll be posting things occasionally to whatever place seems the best fit. I’ll probably post some photos to Facebook/CyclocrossCom, some to Facebook/NoTubesFan, and a few right here. Whether or not they include any pithy remarks will depend in big part on how much sleep I can get tonight.

I have to be at the airport for 5:00am, so not looking good. At least I can score a barf bag on the plane.

Something Like High Expectations

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Aug 302012
 

I think I might be looking forward to Interbike. It’s a strange feeling.

Last year, the tradeshow was plenty tolerable because I essentially didn’t have anything to do but wander aimlessly making snarky remarks and spending as long on senseless shit as I wanted. I took pictures and wrote brief little things. Easy.

On paper, this year looks a lot more intimidating. I’ll be in meetings with factory guys, representing a fledgling ecommerce site, and meeting with my manufacturer to go over a bunch of IT research and strategic planning issues.

Overall, I’ll be run pretty ragged, but somewhere in there, I’m sure I’ll still take photos and offer snark. Just a little.

After looking like clowns for not embracing 29ers soon enough, every brand in the world seems ready to charge into 650b, whether they understand the platform or not. Eurobike always provides the warning shot, and then Interbike catches me square between the eyes. Will I see more 650b 150-160mm travel mountain bikes or disc-brake equipped ‘cross bikes? Tough to say, but both will definitely be out in force.

And I love that.

I want to see 650b bikes and disc ‘cross bikes. Maybe it’ll get old sooner rather than later, but probably not.

I’m also looking forward to everything else. The Thomson dropper post (above) looks like the boys from Georgia finally brought a giant can of “what the fuck is wrong with all you people?” to the dropper post market. If it really is the dropper equivalent of a Thomson post–and that early report from Pinkbike sounds promosing–it’ll shake things up in a very good way.

I want to see King’s disc road hubs. There’s no reason to, because I get the idea of an R45 with higher flanges and a six-bolt disc mount, but still.

I would very much like to ride a bike with a Magura fork, and a bike with a Formula fork. Both seem to be bringing some intelligent design and simplicity make to forks, the way Marzocchi punk rocked everybody in the late ’90s by building a crude by effective mini version of a motorcross fork.

RockShox and Fox both seem likely to follow the electronic integration rabbit hole no matter where it leads, and I think options are nice. Having more than two viable fork manufacturers would also be nice. (And yes, I did happen to notice that a Suntour fork won Gold in the Oympics this year.)

I could just be that there are nice products entering the market. I hope so.