In other Blackest Friday news, NS Bikes is re-issuing the Specialized Pitch which is fantastic news for anyone that missed the boat on that model the first time around:
The only update they seemed to have really missed was trimming their god damn cables to length for the product shots of the bikes.
Next update, get a real US distributor and help get people into the sport with something other than $12,000 enduro bikes.
Specialized is adding an “Enduro” team to their roster but in order to make room for this in the budget, they had to cut their Rockhopper Team and scale back on their Crossroads Senior Citizen Commuter Squad. Because, you know, Enduro is so hot right now.
The economy worldwide is like ten minutes away from Ayn Randian collapse, so basically no one can afford to race downhill anymore. Some places have it even worse with their lousy local series races collapsing under the crushing bloat that you get from resting on your fat laurels until you slowly grow into your couch and have to be fork lifted out of your trailer to the set of Maury.
Cross country racing has been reduced to dry cyclocross with even less technical challenges on a track.
4X is a zombie finally put in its place with a bullet to the brain.
Dual slalom only happens once a year.
So yeah… let’s go race “enduro” or what it’s been called all along: mountain biking.
That dude in the background is probably an engineer and he’s probably calculating what Anneke Beerten looks like in a bikini.
So the cat’s out of the bag and Gwin is riding for Specialized this next year. The comments sections to the PR are going bonkers. For some reason, people are butt-hurt that he some how betrayed Trek and they really looked up to Gwin before this all happened. Those people are what scientists refer to as “pussies.” For one thing, Trek sponsors Trek World Racing which is a team that rides Trek bikes, not an entity of Trek itself. For another, who gives a shit about Trek’s feelings? They build mountain bikes in a state devoid of mountains. It’s a small miracle that they have been this successful at making good bikes without splitting the mountain bike branch off completely to do better work in California or Colorado.
When you draft up something saying, “We want you to ride for us, we want to pay you about this much, and we’ll have a contract for you in the next month or so” and then that month or so rolls around and you haven’t come up with a contract, then your letter becomes useful only as painfully ineffective toilet paper and little more.
Mister-I’ll-Exploit-Every-Little-Technicality-When-It-Falls-In-My-Favor doesn’t like the bitter taste of his own gross medicine.
Not that I give two shits about this whole stupid thing but this might just be karmic payback for doing stuff like going through the rulebook with a fine toothed comb in order to make another team’s rider pull their national champ arm band off at a race because technically a junior beat his time… among other such shanangins.
Trek World Racing will do just fine. They will still have Neko who is fast as shit when he doesn’t smash his brains on the ground. And they will probably just scoop up Brook MacDonald or some other 23 Degrees athlete who will win a world cup when Gwin, Greg, and Gee all get flats.
And Trek (the actual company) will still sell a fucking million Madones and not really have to care about moving a few hundred Session 9.9s.
TrivialMTB 