We hate that everything is so expensive in cycling

[/quote]

At my club, one 25 mile TT record was set by a 16 year old on a secondhand aluminium Boardman bike he picked up for £100, put some tribars on...he did 55 minutes 23 seconds, because he'd trained and trained. .

[/quote]

Love it.

Hicksi wrote:

The cycling industry, that's retailers, manufacturers and media are wrecking the sport because they are fixated on making money out of the demographic that has more money than sense. Some years ago the windsurfing 'business' did the same thing to their sport, they killed it by being obsessed with flogging the latest 'go faster' gizmos and gimmicks. Most customers falling for the ads never reached the heights because they were more obsessed about the gear than training.

Cycling needs YOUNG people but they and their parents recoil at what is sold as 'essential'. Very, very rarely does anyone really, properly, scientifically test equipment; manufacturers know it would be massively embarrassing, like blind wine-tasting makes fools of 'connoisseurs'. Is a 12 speed cassette 'quicker' than a 10 speed? Of course not. Does Di2 make you go faster? Obviously not. Most riders blubber is where the weight problems are.

There's nothing more revealing than people pitching up at Time Trials with ridiculously expensive bikes and crossing the finish line with red faces...and PPR, Post Purchase Remorse. Whether a bike is 7kg or 9kg makes little difference, what matters is intelligent training, training and more training.

Cycling Weakly had a review recently between two sets of Zipp wheels, one pair at £1200, the other pair over £3000. Totally ridiculous and very unscientific 'tests', in fairness they admitted it, they had to. A proper scientific test between a pair of Shimano wheels at £99 and the Zipp wheels at £3000 would have been VERY amusing, it would have revealed diddly squat difference for the typical buyer who never races or does TTs, just does occasional sportives with cake stops.

At my club, one 25 mile TT record was set by a 16 year old on a secondhand aluminium Boardman bike he picked up for £100, put some tribars on...he did 55 minutes 23 seconds, because he'd trained and trained. But the cycling industry is now making cycling a non-sport for young people. It's a tragedy.

I agree with you. 

I started racing in the 90's and coming from a cycling family we built our own bikes up with a top end steel frame, ultegra groupset (or equivalent campag), hand built wheels and decent finishing kit for around £1500.

When I returned to racing in 2006 I decided to go carbon and the cheapest frameset at the time was - an S Works Tarmac at about £1200.

That same 2022 frameset is now £4450.00 = 270% increase

As an aside a Colnago C40 in those days was about £1500 and was the benchmark for top end carbon fibre, 2022 price = £3799.00 = 150% increase

Even steel frames because of their "hipster" factor have gone up from £500 to around £2000 in some cases = 233% increase.

Many late comers to cycling i.e. post 2012 won't have noticed it as much.

Bottom line is this - a top end race bike shouldn't be 10k in 2022.

That's before you even get into £100+ bib shorts and 2k + wheelsets. 

These days I knock around on a winter De Rosa Milanino with mudguard eyes and athena group, self build, nice finishing kit the frame was about £700 which I got in 2015. It's a nice ride.

Do you think De Rosa still manfucture it?

Of course not...........£700 framesets don't make the bike bandits any money. 

My first truly spiffy bike was a Raleigh Road Ace in 1986: Reynolds 531 frame and Shimano 600 groupset (equivalent of Ultegra today). It was £600 retail (not what I paid, I got a good deal from an LBS as it was a return). According to online calculators, £600 in 1985 is equivalent to £1937 today, a sum which will still get you an Ultegra-equipped carbon bike provided you're not obsessed with having a fancy Italian name on the downtube. I just don't buy the idea that everything has become super expensive, the very highest highend bikes have indeed shot into the stratosphere but for non-pro riders who don't believe Dura Ace offers any advantage over Ultegra apart from 300 grams in  weight great equipment is still out there at prices not dissimilar, allowing for inflation, to what they were when I started nearly forty years ago

Rendel Harris wrote:

My first truly spiffy bike was a Raleigh Road Ace in 1986: Reynolds 531 frame and Shimano 600 groupset (equivalent of Ultegra today).

Nice!

I had a Record Sprint (501) in 1984. At £180 it was one of the cheaper 'good' Raleigh race bikes.

More recently in 2008 my Giant SCR 2 alloy with 9-speed Tiagra was £525 RRP, while the TCR 0 (carbon Ultegra) cost £1250. I remember a price bump in 2009/2010, partly due to exchange rate changes (and surely the 2008 crash), the TCR models went up by about 20%. The exchange rate volatility after the Brexit referendum resulted in another rise in component prices.

The Giant Contend with rim brakes & 9-speed Sora costs less than £1000, the Sora disc Contend AR 3 is £1149, Allez Sport (Sora rim) is £1149. The Boardman SLR 8.9 (carbon rim brake) with 105 is £1150 while the alloy framed 8.6 (Tiagra disc) is £850, so perfectly good bikes are still available around £1k. But apart from Boardman there is a significant price jump if you want a carbon frame - Defy Advanced 3 (Tiagra disc) is £2099, Synapse (Tiagra disc, not 'smart') is £2400. The cheapest Tarmac SL6 (105 disc) is £3100, the SL7 frameset alone is £4250 for the 2021 model. Electronic shifting, the must-have du jour, adds another chunk.

Modern steel framed bikes are often built with 853 or similar materials and involve careful tube selection and significant shaping, not stock 4030 chromoly, so they are not going to be cheap.

As for pricey bibs and carbon wheels, we've been repeatedly told that fancy kit is so much better and it'll make us x% faster but people don't want to admit that their £2k Zipps don't make them ride uphill like a pro. Young guns are as vulnerable to the hype as MAMILs.

Simon E wrote:

But apart from Boardman there is a significant price jump if you want a carbon frame - Defy Advanced 3 (Tiagra disc) is £2099, Synapse (Tiagra disc, not 'smart') is £2400. The cheapest Tarmac SL6 (105 disc) is £3100.

Yep, there certainly are eye-wateringly overpriced numbers out there! But as I said, if you're not fussed about "name brands" there are still good bikes for relatively low prices e.g. Ribble R872 Ultegra full carbon £2299, or the Van Rysel CF Ultegra for the same price.

P.S. The Record Sprint was a lovely bit of kit, I would probably have bought one if it hadn't been for a fortuitously-timed small legacy falling due that allowed me to go up a notch! Still miss my Road Ace, I kept it as part of the collection until 2002 and would still be cherishing it now if some bugger hadn't pinched it. Shimano 600 downtube SIS levers were just about the loveliest bit of engineering I've ever owned, I think.

Nothing to do with Brexit, everything to do with the retail business tapping into the wealthy/trendies mindset with ever more ridiculous 'stuff'. Cycling Weakly had a review recently between two sets of Zipp wheels, one pair at £1200, the other pair over £3000. Totally ridiculous and very unscientific, which they admitted. The REALLY interesting test, which would blow the bling industry out of the water would be between a pair of Shimano wheels at £99 and the Zipp wheels at £3000. That would have revealed diddly squat performance difference for the typical lardy middleaged buyer who never races or does TTs, just does occasional sportives with cake stops. Punters have chosen to make cycling expensive. At my club, one 25 mile TT record was set by a 16 year old on a secondhand aluminium Boardman bike he picked up for £100, put some tribars on, did 55 minutes 23 seconds. The cycling industry is making cycling a non-sport for young people, they (or their parents) look at the ads...and take up running, football or nothing. 

Brexit has added some costs, general inflation adding to transportation costs, COVID getting at the supply side, lockdowns in China, shortages in drivers.

Blockage of the Suez really didn't help...

Then there's the world wide bike boom, money to be made, less excess stock, none of the bargains that took the edge off the expence of our hobby.

not really as youd be seeing component costs elsewhere alot cheaper, and they arent, obviously on bike bits with most made in China now its the cost of basically there arent enough factories making enough stuff for various reasons, and then shipping it around the world, but prices were rising before Covid or the container crisis.

Most of the really expensive kit brands are EU based and the stuff is made in the EU, but you can see they charge just as much to their local customers as they do for UK, we just pay roughly £20 extra on the postage/import now.

which if its a short sleeve jersey already costing £130, its one of those well if you can afford that, you can afford the £150 for it.

but how any company survives as a business for long charging that much I really dont know.

And you save time as you dont have to be off the road waiting to get it fixed

To be honest the first thing I would do if I had a £10k bike would be to exchange it for two £5k ones, or even three £3k ones, that money would get you a very nice set of road, gravel and MTB...but in defence of people buying £10,000 bikes, if it's your hobby, why not? A £10,000 bike will, properly cared for, last you a minimum of 15 years with fairly minimal outlay; a season ticket at a premiership football club (in the cheapest seats) will cost you about that over a decade, and that will get you about 50 hours of games a year, whereas you'd probably be out on the bike more like 300 hours a year at least. Membership of even a mid range golf club runs to about £2000 a year these days, and so on…

Of course if you buy a £10,000 bike then the cheapest seats or a mid range golf club aren't really comparable, you're getting the equivalent of a McLaren F1 in terms of being top of the range and pretty much a replica of what the best in the world ride, it's equivalent to having a box at Arsenal or membership at St Andrews.

I guess the bottom line is, if we remember Oscar Wilde's line that a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, the price may be outrageous, but the value is still rather good.

Of course there is another way of looking at it...

I would also argue the people who buy a 10k bike are the ones probably buying an 100k car. 

AlsoSomniloquism wrote:

I would also argue the people who buy a 10k bike are the ones probably buying an 100k car. 

Neither is likely to be kept for 15 years by the original owner, surely.

Too much inflation?

Awavey wrote:

I know people treat cycling nutrition as snake oil, but there must be something more to it than just good marketing, as Ive tried to swap to cheaper alternatives that the cycling collective brain trust recommends as the cost of energy bars etc is becoming noticeable, but I dont get nearly enough bang per gram with the alternatives, Im finding Im either under fuelling on rides now, or having to carry twice as much to begin with.

I don't believe that the branded food products contain anything special or cram in much greater quantities of carbs. I've had no problems with bananas, flapjacks, eccles cakes etc and my perennial cool weather favourite of a Snickers/Aldi Racer bars.

For drinks you could buy bulk maltodextrin and mix it with squash or fruit juice (though I invariably drink just plain water, it's my fitness that fails me first).

As for bikes, clothing etc - as in all areas of life, you can choose to make it expensive if you want. Choose Rapha or Assos shorts over Decathlon or Lusso. A top-of-the-range carbon bike with Di2 instead of a perfectly good alu or cheaper carbon bike and Tiagra. Run GP5000 tubeless on the new wide carbon rims instead of Lithion tubed tyres and an OE wheelset. And so on ad infinitum.

Although bike prices have jumped in the last 2 years but that's a combination of factors that I believe are not limited to the cycling industry. And since review sites and publications review a disproportionate number of very expensive bikes (£5k Pearson models have been cropping up here and in CW, for example) then yes, it can appear to be a very expensive hobby.

But it's not a monopoly, no-one is forcing us to buy expensive stuff, so I don't see any point in moaning about it. As long as my LBS sells and maintains cheap bikes as well as the eye-wateringly expensive ones like the Tarmac SL7 and Aspero then surely doesn't everyone still manage to ride a bike or 3?

Apart from necking pure granulated, can you get more sugar into a smaller space than a jelly baby. And they taste great.

I'm for real food, me. Bake my own flapjacks and brownies (I love to bake), bananas, and cheese and pickle sarnies. If it's going to be a long one, starting the day with a bacon and brie sarnie, or maybe a fried egg one. And a cold can of coke stored in a coozie for a mid ride treat...

And of course Jelly Babies were good enough for Beryl Burton...

ktache wrote:

can you get more sugar into a smaller space than a jelly baby.

Kendal Mint Cake.

Good call.

Though I'd rather the jelly babies.

Also the offering from the best Dr Who.

Simon E wrote:

I don't believe that the branded food products contain anything special or cram in much greater quantities of carbs. I've had no problems with bananas, flapjacks, eccles cakes etc and my perennial cool weather favourite of a Snickers/Aldi Racer bars.

I dont have a problem with other foods as such I just dont think they deliver the same high energy hit in the volume as the energy bars do and I definitely feel the hit on energy levels on longer rides swapping out the energy bars. And ok maybe measuring carbs isnt the best way to do this, but one energy bar that gives 40g carbs, would need according to google 2 bananas, or 8 jelly babies to be closely equivalent. I used to carry a bar around with me, and thats ignoring British Cyclings nutrition advice which is I should be consuming 2 bars per hour, but is swapping that 1 bar out for essentially a whole packet of jelly babies a good swap ?

To the extent that these bars work their magic through the placebo effect the cost is part of the chemistry; you swallow the price. For non-believers there are cheaper alternatives. Everyone's a winner.

Energy bars might be convenient but and quite well-designed for cyclists - but so are Fig Rolls (and own brands are about one-third the price of those reviewed by road.cc). It's hard to find independent reviews that credibly claim energy bars give you something that 'normal' (even if still heavily processed - but cheaper) food can't.

yep Ive tried fig rolls as an alternate, its about 12g a roll per the packaging, so 3 is under, 4 is over as an equivalent, but you are still undercooking at that rate per BCs nutritional advice. and yet I dont often see other riders with whole packets of fig rolls being carried around in jersey pockets.

and then someone will tell you btw you know what happens when you eat lots of fig rolls too often...