Hello world. I suppose I’ll introduce myself seeing this is my first post.

My name is Ryan LaBar. I interned with Dirt Rag last summer and am now a contributor and racer for them. This summer I’m living, racing, and riding bikes in Colorado before I go back to Michigan to race the collegiate mountain bike series and finish up my last year of college.

Now on to the meat-and-potatoes of the post.

In my time out here in Colorado I’ve noticed a few things that have me concerned with the state of mountain bike racing. It has been said that “racing is dead” and, as of recently, I can’t say that it’s far off (though, I will say, my perspective is mainly from a XC racers point of view; downhill racing seems to be doing alright).

I raced at Telluride ski resort last weekend. Before my race started there was a fistfight between two sport class racers who were approaching the finish. Apparently one rider wouldn’t let the other rider pass and the other rider rammed into him. They then started throwing bikes and punches. Seriously? Sport class? These were grown men! Not such a great example to set for people thinking about starting to race bikes.

Another thing: There were only 5 starters and 4 finishers in my field (Expert 19-24). I ended up in third place. While the podium always feels good, there isn’t much satisfaction in finishing 3rd of four. There has been poor attendance at every race I’ve gone to out here, and the competition is quite spread out. The thing I’m attributing to this lack of attendance is the $50 entry fee. I understand that the promoters need to pay the venue, but $50 is still a hefty fee just to race bikes. If they lowered the price to $25 or $30 they might be able to make up for the loss of profit with the extra people the less expensive entry fees would attract. Another solution to the small fields is to merge age groups, which would be a more realistic first step towards a solution.

Thankfully there is a somewhat silver lining in the bike racing cloud. The newest event: Super D. This event could help save racing if the promoters did it right. The event brings out every crowd, from downhillers to cross country weenies, because it’s just plain fun. I think if you enter any of the main events (XC, DH, or 4X) you should gain free or maybe $5 entry into this event. Doing this would encourage more people to compete in the Super D and give people more incentive to race in the main events.

Another, brighter, silver lining is the state of collegiate racing. With entry fees usually no more than $12 just about any broke college kid can afford to race (the only problem is cost of gas to travel to the races) so the field size is usually good. The races almost always have a fun atmosphere, and let’s not forget the after-parties.

That’s my rant for now.

My Telluride results:

XC–3rd 19-24 expert
SD–2nd 19-29
HC–3rd 19-29 expert

Teammate Lianna’s Results:

XC–5th women 19-29 expert
SD–1st women 19+

I challenged our readers to identify a very obscure reference in a Blog posting title: “Where’d the Links Go At?” Joe McManus of Pittsburgh was the only person to figure it out.

The reference was to a commercial jingle that the band Ween did for Pizza Hut. The title of the jingle was “Where’d the Cheese Go At?”. The commercial was supposed to promote Pizza Hut’s The Insider Pizza.

But if you know anything about Ween, you won’t be surprised to know that they were promptly fired by the ad agency after submitting the jingle.

You can read all about it…and hear a few versions of the jingle…here. Read it….it’s a good laugh.

Congrats to Joe. Joe…your stickers will be delivered soon! Thanks!

Marketing.Whether or not you agree with me, it’s true that marketing is a necessary aspect of the world. While the word “marketing” puts a taste in some mouths just like “lawyer” or “plastic suergeon,” the profession isn’t inherently bad–I would even argue that the act of spreading a positive message is inherently good–I suppose the bad reputation just comes from the people who pursue their message spreading in repulsive ways. And often, at least for me, traditional often accompanies repulsive.
And being subjected to traditional means of marketing can be painful. Nobody likes being on the receiving end of a sales pitch that sounds like it came out of used car salesman’s mouth–but certain PR firms deem it necessary to treat their products like any old commodity like hair restoration gel or penis enlargement pills.Take this phone call I got the other day as a great example of how not to pitch a product,

“I’m not just the national sales manager, I’m also a customer.”

I talked to the guy who uttered these words for something like 15 minutes. But I can’t tell you his name, what product he was pitching, or much anything else he said.

Why? Because his pitch wasn’t authentic. It was insulting, and it was slimy. Was he talking to me about a product related to bicycles? I don’t know. And the reason I didn’t pay attention to his pitch was because he could have been selling insurance, windows, computers or headsets.
If he’d have treated me from the rider’s approach, I would have listened to him. But instead his pitch closed my ears to his message. And he wasted 15 minutes of my time, and his.

Back in the day when I was slingin wrenches at Country Roads Bicycles in Plymouth, Indiana, we had to deal with a bunch of BMX brats. These kids would come in and say one of three things.

“what do you have for a dollar?”
“where are your pegs?”
“can I see the Profile cranks?”

Usually a kid would progress through these questions in rapid succession, shortly after his first bike. Get the kid a bike for Christmas and he’s hooked. He’s barely ridden the thing, but he wants accessories and he wants to make the thing better. The first two questions stem from his low budget, for which I had a mild hatred. As a shop rat, I simply didn’t want to show the $9 pegs to someone who’d reveal he only had $3 in his hands. A simple waste of time…

So it took me a while to figure out this third question… why were these Profile cranks the object of every kids’ desire? As a mountain biker, I simply didn’t get it. My square taper cranks worked just fine, and so did his one-piece cranks. They seemed like a pain to remove, and they cost nearly $300–more than the purcahse price of every bike we ever installed them on, and we only installed one set in my four years!

Was it that the Profiles were just shiny and showy? Did they act as a secret handshake to allow access to bigger and badder jumps? When I inquired, all I got was, “dude, it’s 3-piece.”

And all I could think was, “yeah, and my square taper is 3-piece as well, but they’re surely not $300.”

*****
Fast forward 12 years
*****

Mountain bikes have seen innovation. We saw boutique builders offer CNC machined cranksets for $500. And we’ve gone from a square taper bottom bracket to ISIS spline bottom bracket, and now external bottom bracket.

No matter what anyone tells you, including the reviews I’ve written and edited, these cranksets are not what we say they are.

From the year 2001-2006, I wrote reviews on two ISIS cranksets and two external bottom bracket cranksets. Each review was fairly uncritical of the technology. Each review took roughly three months of testing, plus another month of writing and internal peer reviewing to prepare for publishing. And only until after each review was published did the true issues present themselves.

ISIS doesn’t last long. Well, sort of. I’ve had luck with a few bottom brackets, but it seems that it’s luck of the draw and how abusive a rider is on the component. But for the most part, ISIS is plagued with a short lifespan.

External has issues too. The bearing life, for the most part, is not as poor as ISIS, but it’s certainly not as long as square taper. The big issue with external bottom brackets (EBB) isn’t that they don’t last long, it’s that they don’t spin freely. Go ahead… try it… take off the chain and try to spin that crankset. If you don’t get at least four revolutions out with a good hand-spin, your bearings are too tight.

The only manufacturers I know of to address this problem are Shimano and Cannondale.

Shimano’s new FC-M970 offers a bearing compression adjustment, and Cannondale offers the SI BB30 with press-in bearings on a few of their bikes like the Team Rush

But each of these products are ridiculously expensive… $600 for the XTR set-up, and Cannondale’s requires the purchase of a frame to match the crankset.

******
Touché BMX
******

All this makes me really think back to that Profile crankset.

It had press-in bearings.
It had an oversize shell (all BMX bikes are “overzize bb shells” in mountain bike terminology).
It was spline (ala Shimano).

It was durable as all hell–hHeavy (for mountain bike standards), but durable.
And it was half the price of what Shimano and Cannondale are offering now.

Sure makes these things seem like a freakin’ steal.
And it makes those kids not seem so stupid after all.