Hey, Where Did Everybody Go? - Interbike 2016
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Where there once was a booth showcasing new bikes now stands a booth showcasing...er...booths. A telling picture.
It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. The weather is fine. There are trails waiting to be ridden and demo bikes on hand. The only thing missing? Riders. By mid-afternoon, you could safely test hand grenades at Outdoor Demo and never harm a soul. I exaggerate. But just a little.
And riders aren’t the only thing missing from Outdoor Demo. There’s also a noticeable lack of Giant, Trek Specialized, Yeti, Intense and Santa Cruz bikes. More and more bike companies are steering clear of Outdoor Demo. The ones that did show up with the goods were, not surprisingly, killing it. Cannondale, Devinci, GT, Marin and Pivot all did brisk business during the first half of the day. But by two p.m., the wait to get on the latest and greatest bikes was a short one, which is great for riders. Not so great, perhaps, for the future of Interbike.
It seemed like everyone was riding a Pivot or Devinci today. The lack of big-name brands meant a field day for the companies that showed up with the goods.
There are a lot of possible explanations for the lonely-tumbleweeds, ghost-town vibe, but the most obvious one is this: Interbike is undergoing a bit of an existential crisis. There was a time when Interbike was The Big Show. The place where new products were unveiled and minds blown. Nowadays, that show is called Sea Otter. Chances are you saw most of “2017’s” new products back in April of 2016, which is a bit of a mind bender…kind of like that moment in Terminator when you realize that a guy who hasn’t been born yet has sent his father back in time to save his mother’s life.
There comes a point at On Dirt Demo when you've run out of booths to lurk at, so you just join the man soup and ride the dolphin. A number of journalists could be found in the kiddie pool asking one another if they'd seen anything new and cool at the show yet.
And if, for some reason, the big bike and component manufacturers haven’t spilled the beans on “next year’s” products right at the beginning of the current riding season, you can bet that they’ll hold their own mini-Interbike sometime during the summer. That's why the big players, the Treks, Specializeds and Giants gave up their booth space at Interbike years ago. But now they’ve all decided to ditch Outdoor Demo too? That’s ominous.
Or maybe I’m just being dramatic. Maybe the shift is less ominous and more…. practical. Interbike as we know it is an artifact of an age when news traveled slow and Google wasn’t even “a thing”. Today, if a bike or widget is new and newsworthy, you probably read about it online at least two months before Interbike limped into Vegas.
You know what's really cool? MRP's Ramp Control upgrade cartridge. It lets you fine tune the amount of end-of-stroke ramping on a Lyrik, Pike, Yari or Boxxer, on the trail without opening up your fork and adding tokens to it. It's also...wait, oh crud, we already wrote about this at Eurobike, didn't we? Dammit. That happens a lot.
“Seen anything new and exciting?” It’s the first thing tech editors say to one another at the show because, frankly, we’re all so hard-up for legitimate stories, that we’ve stopped competing with one another and are now just trying to help a fellow traveler write something. Anything. The answer, however, is almost always the same. No. Hell no. That doesn’t mean, however, that innovation has come to a standstill. There’s plenty of new stuff to be excited about…the trouble is we covered it the last bits of it already at Eurobike and are now asking ourselves, “Is it plagiarism if I rewrite what I typed three weeks ago at Friedrichshafen?”
Pinion's gearbox.
It’s now 10:17 in the evening and I just lost a wrestling match with RC over who would get to write about Pinion’s latest gearbox. Cunningham may be old enough to have fathered me, but he’s a wiry bastard with mad Krav Maga skills. Dammit. The gearbox was one of the few things that really popped out at me. Here’s a picture of the guts of the thing. RC fish-hooked me, put me in a sleeper hold and now gets to tell you about the version with the less-expensive magnesium casting and the evenly-stepped gear changes. We'll see what tomorrow brings....
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Me fail English?
Thats unpossible.
Interbike. That's the only chance it has
Sorry, broke the line, I'll have a $10k bike whose parts work with no other bike in my garage, please and thank you.
Or mot. Mostly not.
And a $6000 bike probably comes with ENVE wheels or something similar so...yeah hyperbole does not make your case for you.
29" wheels was a purpose driven innovation, 650b was just like, "hey there's this other wheel size, lets try this, we can lie and talk total bs and say its half way between the other two sizes when in fact its only 20mm bigger than 26", then we can use some nice colourful charts with no scales or units of measurement to show how it performs nearly as well as both other sizes, lets cover up the additional flex and weight by using the word 'enduro' all over it."..... And then things just got ridiculous with making a wider tyre a 'new standard', increased axle widths because wtf why not, 'hey ive got this dinner plate, lets use it on the rear cassette', lets increase bar diameter by 3.2mm and progressively make everything 1% longer, wider and slacker every year; then lets just make everything electrical because batteries have always been so amazing....
Basically 29rs and dropper posts have been the only actual innovation I can think of in the last decade or more, there's been a few refinements, but most of its garbage that can all be thrown in the bin labelled 'enduro' IMO.
By reading the comments online, it seems like I am not alone. Of all the hobbies I ever participated in, I can't recall any of them where people had such a bad opinion of the industry. A side of me is hoping it is just life being rough these days and the fun I used to have riding bikes will come back soon enough... but on the other hand, the siren's call of non-gear centric sports is becoming deafening.
I'd go with the beards, Intex's monopoly on shitty inflatable water things, or even the lack of tattoos.
For Interbike to be successful it needs to be a roaming show much like NAHBS or various other shows that allow different locations to host. Wouldn't it be great to be testing bikes in Bend, Oregon? How about Moab, Utah? What about Mammoth or Tahoe or the slue of trails in the Northeast? (I know there's and east show but if it roamed it wouldn't need dual shows)
Las Vegas provides a lot of pluses for hosting which is why so many of the worlds largest conventions call it home. But, this industry specifically needs a refresher for its largest convention. If you've never been to the Outdoor Retailer Show in SLC, it's incredible. Great location with plenty of things to do just outside the city. I'd love to see Interbike in SLC (no I'm not from there).
After day one at the demo I said the same as he did in the article, where is everyone? On a positive note, with many of the big brands not represented it leads more eyes to the smaller brands. I asked several about that and all shared smiles.
Still, it's a shame that the entire bike industry can't figure out a way for all to come together. You'd never see Ford pull out of SEMA yet they do several dealer shows throughout the year as well. Samsung would never pull out of CES. Blizzard would not dare leave E3. Being a part of the community is extremely important to brand loyalty and how you are perceived by the consumer. Be a part, be present.
Off to day 2. Lets hope it fills in. Cheers, Jordan
Shimano internationally are down 18% for the year gone by. That number alone shows the decrease in bikes being built/consumed.
The big boys with the big company wallets have pulled in the purse strings, because it aint so plentiful. So the decrease in outdoor demos becomes one of those cuts. The proof could be in the pudding of riding a bike at a demo, but the information and feedback at our fingertips these days tells us so much more. And some people will buy on what they have read alone.
What the f*ck is the point of an outdoor demo in Vegas? How does riding an unknown bike, in an unfamiliar trail network benefit a bike shop? Brands they sell will likely have a demo around if they want to ride it.
Sea otter. Roc d'azure, that thing in Italy, Eurobike, Taipei, extremely comprehensive coverage of all these events by a plethora of media websites or even with Instagram.
2.6 tires
26 plus is almost available
Huck Norris?
Fewer but better bikes cheaper!
Great stuff made by nice people in a dwindling market. Can we talk about trail building or what to pack for lunch.
Vernon and RC stand in the sand as the industry shifts. Right on!
Kinda don't make it seem like someplace you'd want to go for a riding vacation unless you were getting paid for it...?
This is like a "car show." Why pay to see a product you have to then buy? Capitalism at its finest.
Mind you, works for Costco...
I'm going to ride my bike
deals can be made without going and we all know our brands --
sure sure, you can write it off as a business expense but, you're still spending a lot of money getting there.
If they still had the show in Philly (dating myself big time) I'd go every year
Off to wash my bike