If you want to know how increasing bike prices have affected cyclists, consider this. It is not so long ago that a group of cyclists with nothing better to do would discuss their ‘dream garage’ – the bikes they’d like to own. This was usually several bikes. A university friend wanted 14, to include two identical time trial bikes which he planned to use alternately so that they’d wear out more slowly. He was going to have them in different colours so he could tell the difference, and when we suggested he get one and paint it a different colour on each side, he got very cross and stormed out of the pub.
Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week
No one now can afford to dream quite that big. The same discussion in a pub or cafe these days is about a single dream bike. Even in our wildest fantasies, that’s all we feel able to shoot for.
So what bike is it? Well, that clearly depends. I know one or two riders for whom it’s a current WorldTour bike – Pinarello Dogma, Specialized SL8, Trek SLR9. Generally they still work on the principle that the more expensive it is the better.
I actually own a lot of people’s dream bike. It’s a WorldTour team bike. It was an absolutely wild price – after a few weeks I couldn’t even remember exactly what it was, so deep is the trauma. There is no excuse for owning it, other than that I wanted it, and I wanted to know I was riding around on something that was simply as good as it got.
Is it my dream bike? Only in the obvious sense that it puts a smile on my face when I ride it. But I think there are other considerations to the real dream bike, the one you’d buy a poster of if people made posters of bikes.
I think it needs to be more than ‘just’ expensive and modern. It’s a bike you need to want at an emotional level, and that probably means there’s something personal about it. There’s a good chance your dream bike is whatever was being ridden by your hero when you were 14. Or, if you weren’t a cyclist when you were 14, your hero three years after you took up cycling. It’s probably the first bike you wanted and just couldn’t imagine how you’d ever get.
I have several dream bikes, one of which is a Bike Technologies Stealth track bike from the mid 2000s, ideally in yellow. You don’t know what that is? Well, exactly. You don’t know what it is, and I don’t know where to get one. Now that’s a dream bike. (It was the bike that the Australian track team used to hose all of us out of the velodrome at the Manchester Commonwealth Games in 2002. Find one on the internet – they’re beautiful.)
In fact someone did offer to sell me one a couple of years ago, at a price that was very reasonable. It was even complete with the special Bike Technologies aero bars. And I didn’t buy it, because I have nothing I can realistically do with it. I barely ever ride track, and when I do, I wouldn’t be planning to attract attention by doing it on something as ludicrous as that.
This is, for me, another aspect of the dream bike. It needs to be something I will ride.
Other dream bikes have, at various times, included an original 1870s penny-farthing and a 1950s Cinelli with Campag Record and full chrome ends. I don’t imagine I’ll ever own either of them. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe owning one would spoil the whole thing. Maybe it’s best that they stay in the same fantasy league as my friend with his 14 bikes – which of course he does not have.
And give equipment price inflation another decade, and we’ll be down to a dream set of tyres anyway.
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