TBaldwin90

They probably do pay a handful of employees that much a month...because they get a return on that investment. If they don't feel that he's contributing to sales commensurate with their expense, then they ought to let him go. If you consider that $25k to only be a portion of what they are actually paying him. Add in a few bikes a year and the overhead/administrative costs of paying him etc. They are easily at $50k. If on a high end bike sale, Dorel only makes maybe $1000 in pure profit (most likely much less), they need to have sold 50 bikes just to break even. As it is unlikely that he was the sole contributor to that sale, you can assign maybe $100 of that sale to him. Now he needs to have contributed to 500 high end bike sales just for them to have not lost money. No company hires an employee to "break even" so realistically, they need to be getting 1000 or more sales a year to make it worth their while.

Peter Sagan probably contributed to more Cannondale sales in each of his years on Liquigas than Tinker Juarez has in his entire career. This guy really needs to accept that no one cares that he can win races against people with actual jobs and families racing for fun on weekends...

@gramboh: It is much faster and more reliable to swap wheels with a quick-release and rim brakes than it is with a thru-axle and discs. If the disc is off, or the wrong thickness, it can have a real effect when the race is riding away from you at 27mph. For us punters, your right. Rim brakes don't really offer anything that disc doesn't do as well or better

Yeah, but "G2" geometry kind of sucked. People weren't sold on 29ers back in 2010 not just because the funny looking wagon wheels, but because they were hard to ride. He wanted bigger offset forks resulting in almost no trail, and an unstable bike. I'll give him credit for commercializing 29ers, but I won't give him any credit on making them any good.

@laksboy: They basically took a bike that was perfect for its intended use (there are of course limits to that, which it sounds like you found) and tried to pretend they made a new bike in what will hopefully go down as the laziest "new product release" of the decade. Also, the 100 is a really fast versatile bike and 120mm forks are really light and stiff now (Sid Ultimate) but going to 130 bumped up to another class of fork etc. At that point, they really jumped from a heavy duty XC bike (I'm refusing to say downcountry...though that is exactly what it is) and made a kind of weak trail bike.

The SB100 was better than the SB115. Yeti made a new bike...and it got worse

@rip8569: I think you'd expect better from during the ski season wouldn't you? So why lower your expectations during the summer. Of course it is way harder to get someone down to the base area without snow/sleds, but if you got a concussion skiing, I think we all expect the medics at a major ski resort to be able to recognize it and start the appropriate protocol. Broken bones are kind of expected at a bike park, so it isn't unreasonable to expect they should recognize that. I don't think he's suggesting that it is their fault he got hurt, just that they could be better at enacting standard protocols, at least after they get you to the bike/ski-patrol building.

What problem does a longer reach/shorter stem geometry solve in road biking? Road bikes aren't currently unsteady nor do road riders flip over the bars regularly. Second: A smaller frame is a lighter/stiffer frame (all else equal) and road riders are putting our massive power numbers. a 1500W 5sec peak isn't enough to guarantee a local race sprint win, but it would guarantee losing traction on a mountain bike. A long stem also allows you to make up for a long headtube. A very short headtube (ie. short distance between upper and lower headset bearings) would not be desirable, but a low handlebar is. A -17 degree stem isn't just so you can #slamthatstem.

@blackthorne: By your logic we shouldn't wear helmets when biking. I very rarely hit my head when biking. Even more rarely when road biking and yet I still wear one every time I ride. I put on my seatbelt in the extremely unlikely event that I get in a car crash every time I'm in a car. As a former road racer who used to start 30+ races a year, I can 100% assure you that my social circle shaved based on our 3-4 crashes a year. Did it make our legs look great, well of course it did...but that's just how fringe benefits work. There was even one race a season where we'd shave our elbows because it had a (deserved) reputation as a crash-fest. In any case, to clarify, shaving doesn't "prevent" any injury, it just makes treating the inevitable injury suck a little less.

While I don't really think that being good at road automatically makes you good at XCO, I think that it is pretty fair to say that the talent pool in road is vastly deeper than in MTB. I think it shows just with the salaries of road vs mtb racers. The UCI stipulated MINIMUM salary in the 3rd tier of road racing is higher than than the averages at the top of MTB (based on the Pinkbike poll data). The second tier (pro-continental) level of road racing provides a very legitimate salary and the many world tour level racers can genuinely retire off their cycling careers. There is way more incentive to a cyclist to go road vs mtb. Even CX loses people to road, Boom, Stybar, etc, etc. These are some of the best CX racers in the world who basically quite so that they could race road and feed their families.