The way we never were....

Because I'm afraid that I didn't make my feelings perfectly clear in my last post, here is a (first) paragraph from an essay glorifying those wonderful old days and those wonderful old bikes - and my comments, in bold:

There was a time when we took our road bikes everywhere, in all seasons.

There was? I recall riding my road bike on roads, almost always in nice weather. I remember taking it to races in friends’ cars, VWs primarily, but Hondas too - to be perfectly candid.

Our frames and forks came ready with braze-ons for fenders as well as plenty of clearance to accommodate more rubber.

They did? I remember being unable to insert a finger over the front tire and under the fork crown. I don’t recall being able to mount tires larger than 28C or fenders or racks – without gadgets designed to serve as temporary eyelets.

We’d swap out wheels, mount fenders, and ride all week to school, train in wet weather, and ramble unpaved lanes and across fields---then we’d pare down, put on our best sew-up skinnies, and head for the weekend races.

Brits did that in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Most could not afford VWs or Hondas. Yanks who could afford racing bikes did not do that.

We rode our bikes to school, sure enough, and to our bike shop jobs. Those of us with money and patience rode sew-ups, but most in the ‘70s rode newly introduced 700c clinchers and were happy to do so.

Guys who could afford sew-up wheels and tires could also afford BMWs and Volvos, so that how they’d “head for the weekend races.”

We had one bike that could really do it all, smartly designed for versatility and as uncompromising on trails as it was at races.

We did? We had bikes that did all the things we wanted them to do. Our bikes were designed for racing. Because they were bicycles, they would do anything we asked of them, but they were not all-purpose. We would not have bought “all-purpose” bikes.

There is no bike “as uncompromising on trails as it is at the races.”

Well, I take it back. There is such a bike. It is all the things you claim.

It exists in brochures. The bike we offer, brochures state, recalls a golden time when all the claims made above were true and genuine.

That time never existed, but has been co-opted by marketers to sell bucks-up cyclists yet another niche bicycle, often a do-all, last-forever, road-and-trail, hand-crafted uber-bike.

I don't have negative feelings about those bikes. I'd enjoy owning a 'cross bike, I'm sure.

I'd imagine that those bikes could be sold on their own merits. No need invoking the smell of wet wool, the ping of a just re-tensioned spoke relaxing in a rim, the feeling of cable guides trying to penetrate your butt cheeks as you sit on your top tube. We all experienced those things in the age you appropriate for commercial purposes and call golden.

The difference: No purchase was necessary.