Poll: Most Influential Innovation of Last 10 Years?
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650b should be on the list, not dual sus 29ers.
Air Shocks rather than FOXRP23 or Dropper Posts instead of Gravity Dropper.
Fox RP23 Propedal - highlightling the propedal feature?
When talking about a product that has driven a new market or provides a specific advantage over others then you kind of have to be brand specific.
I agree with WAKI, Manitou deserves more credit here. I also dont think the RP23 should be on the list; overrated.
I'm putting my vote in for Sam Hill which really was in combination with Dave Weagle and Iron Horse bikes. They made the modern DH bike a reality through REAL engineering! Shitty thing had to happen with IH though... At least DW's still pumping out gold!
you get the idea.
at the end of the day... it's the human element that has continued to push technological advancement in our massive love affair with mountain bikes. we're doing all the companies a favor by reporting to them what we think is important materially about mountain biking. but they ALL know... it's the kids who have to live it, dream it, do it... to keep this sport vibrant and advancing.
thanks for the inspiration, kiddos... keep at it!
*you'll have to excuse the ramblings. usually i'd be riding, but a dislocated shoulder, AC joint, and torn labrum is upping my time on the pinkbike forums. bahaha! in week 16 of rehab, and it sucks.
You tell me, how much fun would you have at Whistler with rim brakes?
My vote goes to those beautiful metal disks that give me the confidence to go fast knowing I can stop on a dime. Without them we'd all be doing wheelie drops on low speed skinnies.
My vote too.
Wide handlebars are the obvious choice, it's the biggest thing you notice when you ride an old bike or see an old picture from in front if a old bike. All new bikes are coming with wide bars;DH, AM, XC, hardtail or not, even girls bikes. It's a huge difference maker in control and even safety more than any other thing on that list.
We'd all still be wearing spandex
I kinda had to go flatbar+stem slammed on headtube on my AM bike to compensate for having a longer fork than intended and I dig it a lot, especially for cornering and climbing. Only inconvenient would be on super duper mega steep stuff and i haven't met a terrain so steep I wished my bars were higher yet.
Oh and I was extremely skeptical with wide bars as I highly doubted a 8% increase would translate into anything tangible in the real world. Ended up bending my stock 690mm bars on a dh rig. Went for 785mm (they were the cheapest) knowing id cut them and experimented with grip widths. For me, 730-745 is the sweet spot. I was suprised how the 8% increase gave so much more leverage to resist front wheel deflection, a common thing due to the terrain around here. It goes without saying that bars that are too long can be a bad thing as it can make your bike too twitchy. Bars that are too short are equally as bad though. Don't forget that your body is most powerful within a certain grip width and too narrow/wide bars will result in a loss of efficiency.
As for the less traction part that's really about the terrain you're riding, and sometimes it advantageous to be able to unweight the front wheel easily. want to float that front wheel through that rock garden? much harder with a flat bar, and it gets harder the steeper you go, and that's when I don't want my front wheel sticking to stuff.
COG isn't as affected as much as you would think, because the farther over the back you can get, the easier it is to get lower on the bike, and it tends to even be a natural reaction, not something you have to think about.
This is all, of course, subject to reasonable limits, and mostly applies to DH riding.
It has to be reliable disc brakes.
As for Sam Hill, he never invented slack geometry! But would be quicker on a Sunday with cut screams on than on the carbon demo..... would be an interesting experiment.
Funn bars... Sam dominated on them, now Gwin is dominating on them... they are just perfect..;;
Yes, one could argue that All Mountain bikes kind of existed prior to 2002, but similar arguments can be made for a lot of the items on this list. I would argue that the past decade really defined the All Mountain class of bike.
what would you be doing when we are not riding?
WATCHING BIKE FOOTAGE IS WHAT!
dual sus 29ers = fan boy votes
and there isnt a option for all mountain geometry
#mostlytrue
This "poll" is fluffing the industry like a porn film "fluffer" working on Mr Pool Cue.
Of course, that would be a long and cumbersome poll question, so I took the short route and left the reader to fill in the blanks.
RC
Alot of innovation has come from the FR/DH scene.
Real suspension, dual suspension, discbrakes, oversized HT, OS bars, rea l grippy tires, todays bike geometry, AM bikes... And on and on... Alot were around before, but it was FR /DH popularity that evolved it to were it is today.
2*9 was a huge improvement - nobody has 2*10 yet so you can't really assess it's impact!
I do think sram have contributed a huge amount to the perfection of gears,brakes and suspension though. Without competition from Sram, Shimano would be even worse!
What I do think is awesome is the amount of think and technology that the sport is now infused with. The bikes (all of them) have now become just plain awesome and are more often then not well above the capabilities of most buyers. One could buy a 5 year old (and more) frame and go incredibly well for sometime.
My guess for the next big deal will be in the area of shocks and their having adjustable ride height (independent of spring setting) capability much the way sport bikes (motorcycles) have had available to them for years.
For me Mountain Bike is all about takeing a shovel and pedal to the nearest place with dirt or nearest mountain. Build your own trails with friends and enjoy what to do... Yeah, probably with no bikeparks the sport would be at a very lower level compearing to today's but bikeparks contribute to make the sport more competitive, more global, more influenced by the brands, bikeparks make our passion a business.
I voted for Red Bull Rampage, wich also makes what I said about bikeparks, but in a way that motivates bikers to go out and be in contact with nature instead of going to skateparks or the street. I mean the "mountaing" is almost in surplus in MTB nowadays.
Well maybe I said all this beacause I never gone to a bikepark, probablly I would change my mind, I don't know
They haven't done a single thing to/for my riding, even though I've ridden in a few, and even though I mostly ride for descents, and even though I spend the winters skiing lift-served terrain.
Bike parks don't have much to do with bicycle riding. You could remove the drivetrain and ride a scooter. Don't even need to pedal. Sounds to me like an "innovation" that rewards laziness. Can't see how laziness translates to bike riding skill development.
Point remains: bike parks are for people who don't pedal their bikes, so they may as well be places where people ride chainless contraptions with pegs equally placed, rather than drivetrain-equipped bikes that don't ever get pedaled. If you spent all your riding time at a bike park and built your bike accordingly, you'd have an awfully lousy bike for any purpose except bike parks.
To you bike parks are everything. To me they're irrelevant. Your perspective doesn't mean I'm wrong, nor does it mean bike parks have "progressed the sport" in any way that benefits anyone other than park riders.
And I cut my bars down. You ever get a wide pair of bars stuck in your knee pads when doin an X-up on a large and fast double? I doubt it. I have tried 30" bars and they did nothing but sketch me out and make a very nimble bike feel like I was driving a bus. 27" is as wide as I go and 25" on the Dirt jumper. Its worked quite well for the last 12+ years. In 5yrs people will be chopping their bars back down when the trend dies. Kind of like how every bike had to have barends back in '96.
P.S. not hating on whistler...Whistler is still incredible...id have stayed there last summer if i could have.
But actually I'm a big fan of Carbon, just couldn't afford it yet!
A true innovation should be something that improves the state of the bicycle.
Not something that improves the state of one's ego (GoPro etc).
A lot of choices are recent "innovations" that we don't even know if it will become a true standard or if they're just bad fads. Putting them in the invention of the decade seems a bit early to me.
One thing I've noticed in riding MTBs and reading about them on the internet for 20 years is that in the past 5 yrs or so, the most active internet users are people with a lot of down time at a job where they make a lot of money. They relate to bicycles only in the sense that a bicycle lets them project an image on the internet. Thus, to them, a bicycle is a vector for ego gratification, not a tool for fun. To the ego-soother, a bicycle must be expensive, must have the latest-and-greatest-fad-accessories, and must be photographed and documented in its build and "upgrade" steps for projection on the internet.
To these people, extremely expensive fads are the very soul of MTBing.
It's not really about bike riding to them. It's more about bike ownership and bike display.
I think there is a touch of the person you described in EVERYONE who rides bikes and knows what the internet is, and saying its "only to project an image" is kind of harsh and unrealistic. Unless you're talking about Los Angeles, then maybe I'd agree with you. (jk)
Why can't fun equal ego gratification? I agree there are complete d-bags like the person you described, but most of them don't stick with the sport for very long - usually buy in, pose for a while, and then forget about bikes and riding.
Carbon is sweet but it is the flavor du jour, and something else will come along in five or ten years that makes people treat carbon like hi-tensile steel.
My vote was for Whistler because it combines and gives a context to so many of the other candidates up there: the social aspect, the great trails both up and down, the feeling of being "out there" as well as "tuned in", the venue for torture testing product, the accessibility to old and young and male and female, and the constant coverage by news and marketing people who then broadcast how awesome it is to the world. I'd give my left (something) to live there.
Not at all clever how you began that post with a personal insult. Guess I must have been describing you, eh?
Oops.
Yes, I did. Your second paragraph even admits it. To your mind, everyone uses a bike to project their ego and uses the internet to help them do that.
I'm guessing you weren't riding MTBs 10 years ago. Pre-facebook, pre-twitter, pre-GoPro. The internet hasn't always been ego-ville. 20 years ago it was just lots of information, some good, some mediocre, some bad. Then it became commercialized, bland, corn syrup-added brain fattener.
Talk to someone who's been riding 20 years and see if that person agrees with you, or with me.
1. Pretty much, yes. I don't have a problem with that either. There are down times and up times.
2. Nope. I did my first mtb race in 1992, actually, on a blue Cannondale M700 with Force 40 braking and a rigid fork, and came in third in the beginner class. Twenty years ago. Have the t-shirt to prove it.
The only people using the internet in 1992 were defense departments and universities. There was as much ego-stroking on the bike back then as there is now, just in different forms.
I don't know what mountain biking looks like for you but judging from all your comments it has to be a pretty lonely place, as your definition of "bike riding" can't be communicated through email, internet, photos, bonding over bike parks or disc brake performance, etc.
I'd prescribe coming out of your cave, feeling the sunshine, and submitting to the sweet dopamine rush of buying some new forks and a park pass. You might enjoy it.
You need to work on your reading comprehension. You don't know me at all if you think I'm "lonely" or angry.
Also, you need to realize that outgoing, Frat Boy attitudes are not the only way to be a human being. So desiring some solitude when riding my MTB is not sad, defective, wrong, screwed up, or something you should look down your nose at. Plenty of people ride MTBs to ESCAPE the crush of crowds, humanity, "me too" extraverts who have to brag about everything every waking minute of their lives.
Apparently, that stuff energizes you. You need to realize that not everyone feels that way. And you need to account for the fact that MTB as a sport hasn't always been this stupid Frat Boy Flatbill Bro-Heem crap that it is in 2012.
Riding isn't the same as posing with pictures on the internet. What people post on PB or ridemonkey or MTBR, that's not anything remotely related to riding MTBs. It's just shootin' the schitt, wasting time, and feeling like a part of the crowd.
Nice fraternity, Skippy. Hope you enjoy that trust fund.
i had several friends that died because of not wearing it.
they would have been alive, you know what i mean?
Please don't bother with the truth!
You confuse sales boolshyte (marketing advertisement copy) and truth. You should pay more attention to the truth, and less attention to marketing.
The other 9 choices are about fads/trends, not advances to the bicycle, nor advances to what people call "the sport." The activity of riding a mtn bike is not defined by infotainment media such as PB or Dirt Rag or dirt magazine or Clay Porter videos. Only your own acts when riding a MTB define MTBing. People shouldn't confuse hype for bike riding, even if armchair "stoke" and e-riding gets them through the work day. In that context, it's no different from whatever you daydream about while your wife/gf makes you watch that chick flick with her.
Exactly.
You got 3 neg props by the time I'm posting this.
What a bunch of insecure fools reading PB and neg-propping you. They're mad that you pointed out their insecurities, their need to feel their fad choices have been validated by RC's poll.
Journalists seek the truth.
Fluffers fluff the industry they cover.
just my opinion