And I realise that, when all of this is presented together, it can sound a little idealistic. Perhaps even naive.

There is something undeniably social about talking about community, culture, values, ethos or the responsibility of companies to become involved in issues affecting the people sitting under their commercial umbrella, and I can perfectly understand how, viewed superficially, the whole thing could be interpreted as a rather progressive, slightly alternative and perhaps even vaguely hippie vision of what the bicycle industry should become.

The funny thing is that this isn’t really why I have been talking about any of it.

I am talking about business.

More specifically, I am talking about how bicycle companies can become commercially stronger, more efficient, less dependent on external factors they cannot control and, ultimately, considerably better prepared for whatever the next five or ten years throw at them.

Obviously I would love to see a stronger cycling culture, healthier communities and an industry playing a much more active role in protecting and developing cycling. I have spent most of my life around bikes, so pretending that I don’t care about any of that would be ridiculous. But there is a much more pragmatic argument underneath all of this, and I increasingly think we need to start making it considerably more explicit.

The environment in which bicycle companies operate has changed enormously while, in many cases, the basic framework within which they operate hasn’t changed anywhere near as much. We are still developing products, building ranges, selling them through distribution networks, supporting them with marketing, launching the next generation and then starting the process again, broadly following a model that has defined this industry for decades.

When things become difficult, the natural reaction tends to be to optimise that same machine. We make another product, create more content, run another campaign, increase promotions, change specifications, reduce costs or find another way of pushing more units through the existing channels. None of those things is inherently wrong and all of them can be necessary, but I think the mistake is assuming that becoming better at operating the same machine is necessarily going to solve the much bigger problem.

Because the world around that machine is changing rather quickly.

Technology moves faster, product advantages disappear faster, new competitors can enter established markets with industrial capabilities that would have been almost unimaginable not very long ago, dealers are under enormous pressure, acquiring customers is increasingly expensive and the relationship between brands and consumers is frequently mediated by platforms and organisations that the brands themselves don’t control. At the same time, regulation, infrastructure, access and public perception can fundamentally affect whether people can use the products this industry is trying to sell in the first place.

Against that background, I think we need to start looking much more seriously at what a bicycle company can actually build that isn’t so easy for somebody else to replicate.

A product can be copied, a specification can be matched, a price can be undercut and technology that looks extraordinary today can become relatively normal surprisingly quickly. Building trust, cultural legitimacy, meaningful relationships and a genuine community around a company is something very different, because those things cannot simply be ordered from a supplier, introduced in the next model year or created by increasing the marketing budget for six months.

And this is where all that supposedly soft stuff starts becoming considerably less soft.

A company that genuinely owns its relationship with its customers is less dependent on somebody else controlling that relationship. A company surrounded by a strong community does not need to buy every interaction it has with the market. A company with real cultural relevance is less exposed to becoming interchangeable with the next technically competent product arriving at a lower price. A company that has spent years developing meaningful relationships with dealers, riders, organisations and the wider cycling ecosystem has created something that a new competitor cannot simply replicate by arriving with a better specification sheet and a large marketing budget.

The same applies to advocacy and political engagement, which I still find extraordinary that we so often treat as something sitting somewhere outside the commercial business. If regulation determines what products can be sold, infrastructure determines where they can be used, access determines whether people can ride them and political decisions influence whether cycling grows or contracts, then being involved in those conversations isn’t corporate philanthropy. It is protecting the environment in which your business operates.

All of this ultimately creates something that I think many bicycle companies desperately need at the moment: a buffer.

It creates better information, stronger relationships, greater legitimacy and more options when something doesn’t go according to plan, which sooner or later it won’t. It doesn’t remove uncertainty and it certainly doesn’t allow anybody to predict the future, but it reduces the company’s exposure to that uncertainty and gives it more ways of reacting when the circumstances around it change.

That, to me, is what becoming future-proof actually means.

It doesn’t mean correctly predicting what the bicycle market will look like in 2031 or 2036, because frankly we don’t have a fucking clue. Maybe Chinese companies completely redefine the competitive landscape in Europe, maybe distribution changes beyond recognition, maybe regulation fundamentally changes parts of the e-bike market, maybe access becomes one of mountain biking’s biggest problems, maybe some technological development arrives that makes some of today’s product battles look completely ridiculous, or perhaps consumer behaviour changes in ways that nobody sitting in an industry strategy meeting today has anticipated.

Trying to predict all of that with any degree of certainty is pointless. Building a company capable of dealing with it isn’t.

And this is where I think we run into another, much deeper problem, because we need to stop thinking in quarters, or at least stop pretending that surviving the next quarter, preparing next year’s range and perhaps having some visibility over the product line coming the year after that can somehow be described as having a long-term strategy.

Put 20 CEOs from the bicycle industry in a room and ask them, openly and directly, where they want their companies to be in five or ten years, what they are actually trying to build and what they expect those companies to look like by then, and I genuinely wonder how many would be able to give you a clear and concrete answer. I am sure there are exceptions, obviously, and I have no intention of pretending that every company in this industry operates in exactly the same way, but my suspicion is that the number would be surprisingly small.

And this is where Patagonia came back into my head, again.

I know, I am becoming the Patagonia idiot, but when I read Yvon Chouinard’s book this summer there were moments when, frankly, I felt slightly embarrassed, because what surprised me wasn’t Patagonia’s environmental positioning, which everybody knows about, but the extraordinary clarity with which the company appears to understand why it exists, what it believes in, what it ultimately wants to achieve and, perhaps most importantly, how deeply that understanding seems to permeate the organisation.

The impression I came away with was that you could approach people at completely different levels of responsibility within Patagonia and they would still be able to explain, in their own words, what the company stands for, what its ethos is, what sits at the core of its DNA and what the ultimate objective is. These are precisely the kinds of concepts that can very easily sound theoretical, slightly metaphysical or like the usual corporate bullshit somebody writes during a workshop before it disappears into a PowerPoint presentation, but in this case they appear to provide the foundations on which people throughout the organisation understand what they are collectively trying to build.

And that made me think about how far away much of the bicycle industry still is from anything remotely similar.

Because before we even start talking about five- or ten-year strategies, there has to be a foundation on which those strategies can actually be built. People need to understand where the company is going, why it wants to go there, what it wants to become and what principles are going to guide the thousands of decisions that will have to be made along the way. If that common understanding doesn’t exist, then expecting an organisation to execute a coherent long-term strategy becomes rather difficult, because everybody inevitably ends up concentrating on the part of the business they can actually see and control.

And that usually means the next quarter, this year’s sales target, next year’s range, the next launch or the next budget.

I have seen another manifestation of this during my years working in the industry which, looking at it now from a little further away, seems increasingly paradoxical. Bicycle companies can be extraordinarily secretive internally about their future products, to the point where people working inside the same organisation can have very little visibility of what is being developed two years down the road. Obviously there are perfectly legitimate reasons for keeping future products confidential and I am certainly not suggesting that every employee needs access to every engineering project or future product plan, but confidentiality around specific products is one thing and having an organisation that doesn’t really understand where the company itself is heading is something completely different.

In many cases, the people with the clearest view of two years from now may simply be the product managers who happen to be working on the range that will launch in two years’ time. But knowing which bike you are going to launch in two years and knowing what company you are trying to build over the next ten years are not remotely the same thing.

And I think this tells us quite a lot about where the bicycle industry currently stands, because you cannot build a meaningful five- or ten-year strategy if the destination is unclear even to the people who are supposed to help you get there. You cannot expect hundreds of people across an organisation to make thousands of decisions that somehow move in the same direction if there isn’t a commonly understood direction in the first place.

Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us, then, that we keep falling back into quarters and model years. Those are tangible, measurable and immediate, while the longer-term destination often isn’t sufficiently defined. The sales target is there, the inventory is there, the margin is there, the next product deadline is there, and therefore those are the things around which the organisation naturally begins to organise itself.

The problem is what happens when those things stop being management tools and effectively become the strategy.

Of course companies need to sell bikes, protect margin, manage inventory, control costs and keep the lights on. I am not suggesting for a second that everyone should forget about the P&L and start sitting around a campfire discussing their purpose. Quite the opposite, because this whole argument is ultimately about creating better businesses.

But if almost every decision is driven by what improves the next quarter or solves the immediate problem, the things that take years to build inevitably become harder to justify. Culture, community, trust, meaningful customer relationships, political influence, a strong dealer ecosystem and genuine brand equity don’t appear overnight, and their contribution is not always conveniently measurable within the same spreadsheet or financial period in which the investment is made.

That doesn’t make them commercially irrelevant. It makes them long-term commercial assets.

And none of those assets can suddenly be bought in 2031 because somebody in a management meeting has finally realised that the company needs them. If you want them in five or ten years, you need to start building them now, which in turn means knowing why you are building them, what role they play and what kind of company you ultimately want them to help create.

This is why I think the increasingly uncertain environment surrounding the bicycle industry should actually push companies towards longer-term thinking rather than shorter-term thinking. The natural reaction to uncertainty is to concentrate on what can be controlled immediately, but doing that indefinitely risks producing companies that become extremely efficient at dealing with the present while progressively weakening their ability to deal with the future.

And that takes us straight back to culture, community, ownership, advocacy, values and all the other things that can initially make this whole conversation sound rather idealistic.

Yes, strengthening them would probably result in a healthier cycling culture, stronger communities, better relationships between companies and riders, more political relevance for cycling and perhaps even an industry that feels considerably more connected to the people it supposedly exists to serve. I would consider all of those things extremely positive outcomes.

But they are not an argument against commercial performance.

They are increasingly part of how commercial performance will be protected.

I am not arguing that bicycle companies should become charities, political organisations or wonderfully idealistic social projects, and I am certainly not suggesting they should sacrifice profitability in pursuit of some romantic vision of what cycling used to be. I am arguing that they need to start using every asset available to them to become stronger, more resilient and less dependent businesses, and some of the most powerful assets available to them happen to be precisely the ones this industry has spent years treating as secondary.

Maybe the bicycle industry doesn’t need to become more idealistic at all. Maybe it simply needs to become considerably less fragile, and that starts by looking beyond the next quarter, deciding what kind of companies we actually want to have ten years from now and then beginning the rather less glamorous job of building them.

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Up to 1,700 watts of peak power.

My first reaction was immediate: this is utterly ridiculous.

Then, about a week later, I found another article telling essentially the same story. Bafang had apparently “beaten” DJI Avinox. More power. Bigger numbers. A new king of the hill.

I took a screenshot and sent it to a friend in the industry with a very simple assessment: utterly ridiculous.

He had also been reading the comments below the article. So had I. And he pointed out that there were at least some encouraging signs.

A number of people were asking the obvious question:

More power? What for?

Exactly.

That should have been the interesting part of the story.

Not that Bafang had supposedly beaten Avinox. Not that another manufacturer had produced another enormous peak-power number. But that many people seemed completely unconvinced by the very idea that this represented progress.

Then Pinkbike arrived with its own contribution:

“The peak power battle continues.”

Sorry, but who the hell said there was a battle?

A battle nobody asked for

Who declared this competition? Who decided the e-bike industry needed it? Who decided that the winner would be whoever produced the largest number?

It certainly was not the people asking “more power for what?” underneath these articles.

Bafang is free to develop whatever motor it believes the market needs. And Pinkbike is obviously free to report its launch. That is not the issue.

The issue is presenting this as another exciting episode in a “peak power battle”, as if an arms race between motor manufacturers were something natural, positive and worth cheering from the sidelines.

It is not.

And Pinkbike is not merely describing this supposed battle. By framing it that way, Pinkbike is helping to create it, legitimise it and accelerate it.

Words matter. Framing matters. Repetition matters.

Call every increase in power a victory. Tell readers that Bafang has beaten Avinox. Present the next motor as the industry’s new heavyweight champion. Then wait for Bosch, Shimano, Yamaha, ZF, Brose, TQ and everybody else to be judged against the same ridiculous metric.

Congratulations. You have just manufactured an arms race.

And then everybody can pretend they are simply responding to “what the market wants”.

Really?

Because people in the comments are already asking what the bloody point is.

More is not the same as better

Peak power is catnip for lazy product storytelling.

One number is bigger than another. It gives you a winner, a loser and a headline. No context required. No difficult questions. No need to explain how the motor actually behaves on a bicycle.

But a 1,700-watt peak does not automatically create a better e-bike.

Does it make the bike ride better? Does it improve efficiency? Does it make the assistance feel more natural? Is the system lighter, quieter, more reliable or easier to service? Does the extra power solve a genuine problem for riders? Or is it simply the easiest number to put in a press release and the easiest headline for the cycling media to recycle?

These are not minor questions.

Bosch, Shimano, TQ, DJI, Bafang and every other motor manufacturer are helping define what the e-bike will become. They can compete on integration, efficiency, reliability, ride quality, weight, software, serviceability and the overall experience they make possible.

Or they can enter a dick-measuring contest over peak watts.

Right now, too many parts of the cycling media seem delighted to sell tickets to the second option.

The question Pinkbike does not ask

To be fair, Pinkbike does eventually question the whole thing.

Mike Kazimer says he is “far from convinced that there’s any need for a peak power arms race” and would rather see the industry focus on efficiency and range.

Fair enough.

But even that criticism remains trapped inside a product-review framework.

Is 1,700 watts actually useful? Will it destroy battery range? Will the bike simply loop out on steep singletrack?

Those are legitimate questions.

They are just not the most important ones.

The question Pinkbike never asks is what normalising 1,700 watts and 800% assistance does to the future of eMTB itself.

How will land managers, regulators, insurers and the wider public perceive these machines? At what point does an eMTB stop being perceived as a bicycle, regardless of the 250-watt rated-power figure written in its technical documentation? And what happens when that distinction is rewritten for everyone?

This is not theoretical.

ZIV has already warned that extremely high maximum power and assistance ratios are blurring the boundary between EPACs and motor vehicles. It has proposed a maximum assistance power of 750 watts at the wheel and a general support ratio of 1:4 to protect the bicycle status of the category.

Bafang is now advertising 1,700 watts and 800% assistance.

So the real question is not whether a rider can use 1,700 watts.

The real question is whether eMTB can afford to normalise them.

Have we completely lost sight of the consequences?

This is the part that makes the whole thing more than merely stupid.

The bicycle industry has spent years explaining that an e-bike is still a bicycle. That it assists the rider. That it belongs on bicycle infrastructure and, where permitted, on bicycle trails. That it should not be confused with an electric motorcycle.

And now the same industry expects people outside our little bubble to see headlines celebrating 1,700 watts of peak power and understand the nuance.

Good luck with that.

The people making rules about access, regulation, insurance and liability will not necessarily care about the carefully worded distinction buried six paragraphs into a launch article. The public will not necessarily understand the difference between nominal power, peak power and unrestricted output. They will see increasingly extreme numbers attached to products that we continue insisting are bicycles.

And when the reaction comes, it will not affect only Bafang or whichever brands decide to mount this motor.

It can, and will, affect every e-bike rider.

It can, and will, affect trail access. It can, and will, feed demands for tougher regulation. It can, and will, damage public acceptance. It can, and will, make life harder for responsible manufacturers and brands that never wanted to participate in this nonsense in the first place.

That is why treating this as entertainment is so irresponsible.

Perhaps Bafang’s motor will be configured perfectly legally for every market in which it is sold. That misses the point entirely. This is about what the industry chooses to glorify and the direction it normalises.

You cannot endlessly scream “more power” inside the cycling bubble and then act surprised when everybody outside it starts questioning whether these things are bicycles at all.

Pinkbike and the rest cannot wash their hands of this

Manufacturers bear responsibility for the products they create. Bike brands bear responsibility for the systems they choose to specify. But Pinkbike and the rest of the cycling media also bear responsibility for the stories they choose to tell and the way they choose to tell them.

Publishing the news is not the problem.

Publishing the press release with a few words changed, extracting the most outrageous number and presenting it as the latest round of an exciting battle is the problem.

Where is the context?

Where is the critical analysis?

Where is the question that people in the comments are already asking?

What is all this power actually for?

If publications want to be treated as media, rather than as content factories or outsourced marketing departments, this is part of the job. Their responsibility is not exhausted by repeating whatever a manufacturer announces and adding a question mark at the end.

They shape what the industry talks about. They decide what receives attention. They choose whether a development is scrutinised, challenged or packaged as spectacle.

So no, “the peak power battle continues” is not an innocent line of promotional copy.

It validates the premise that there is a battle. It tells manufacturers that bigger numbers will be rewarded with coverage. It turns a potentially disastrous direction for the entire category into the next episode of a bloody soap opera.

And if this arms race eventually helps provoke restrictions for the entire e-bike category, those publications will not be able to pretend they merely watched it happen.

They helped push it forward.

Somebody needs to say enough

The e-bike industry does not need another peak-power champion.

It needs manufacturers with the confidence to refuse this absurd framework. It needs bike brands capable of explaining why a better bicycle is not necessarily a more powerful one. It needs dealers who can help riders look beyond one spectacular number. And it desperately needs specialist media prepared to behave like media.

The encouraging part is that some people already appear to understand this.

“More power? What for?” is not resistance to technology. It is not old men shouting at innovation. It may be the most intelligent question anyone is asking about the direction of the e-bike right now.

Because the real issue is not whether Bafang has beaten Avinox.

The real issue is who decided there needed to be a winner in the first place, who benefits from selling us this supposed battle and who will accept responsibility for the consequences.

So I will ask again:

Who the hell said there was a battle?

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Will 32” wheels be the next innovation to grow our industry? Will all the Avinox bikes bring back sales numbers and save us? Or are we running into another trap?

Let’s call it what it is: bullshit. They might be short-term fixes and technologically great, but the causes are deeper.

It’s the same loop we’ve ridden a hundred times: when things get rough, we hide behind technology.

A new axle standard, a new motor, a slightly lighter frame.
Comforting, familiar… and completely useless.
We keep talking about geometry, watt-hours, stiffness-to-weight ratios – as if salvation were hiding inside a downtube.
We keep pointing fingers outward, never at our own handlebars.

The bike industry loves innovation — or at least the illusion of it. We obsess over numbers and newness, convinced that technology will save us, fix us, grow us. But it won’t. Not this time. Because our biggest problem isn’t mechanical, it’s mental. And cultural.

Let’s face it: we rode ourselves into this corner, and tech can’t get us out.

2. When Ego Takes the Lead

Strip away the marketing noise and you’ll find a painful truth:
The bicycle industry’s biggest enemy is the bicycle industry itself.
Too much ego.
Too little vision.
And a chronic allergy to collaboration.
Don’t get us wrong. We mean real collaboration, not the kind that fits nicely into an AI-generated press release or a LinkedIn post that sounds good on paper but lacks substance once you dig deeper.
Nice talking, but no walking.

We waste talent, duplicate efforts, hoard data, and then wonder why forecasting feels like fortune-telling at a Christmas market.

Every brand pretends to have a secret formula (what a joke!), when in reality we’re all mixing the same ingredients. Producing at the same factories. Relying on third-party innovations. Using the same agencies. Selling through the same channels.

Secrecy isn’t strategy, it’s insecurity wearing a tie.
Sometimes it feels like we’re not building bikes, but intercontinental missiles. We refuse to collect and share true sales numbers (not just estimates), hide market data, and even hinder creating an industry-wide procurement platform, it’s so absurd we could all be working for the CIA. And still, despite all those NDAs, everyone keeps talking, trading gossip, and leaking “insider” news. Our industry’s theatre of secrecy is ridiculous.

Meanwhile, other sectors (automotive, tech, tourism) build standards together, share numbers, and present a unified voice to policymakers.
We should be leading the mobility conversation; instead, we’re stuck arguing about motor torque and tire sizes.

3. The Illusion of Competition

We treat other bike brands as enemies instead of allies.
Absurd.
Our real competitors aren’t the bike companies next door, they’re everything that keeps people off bikes: cars, convenience, screen time, and political indifference.

Yet we undercut each other, copy each other, discount till death.
We feed a race to the bottom that no one can win.
Unity doesn’t mean uniformity.
It means understanding that if one brand earns a rider’s trust, the entire ecosystem benefits.
If one dealer learns to sell experiences instead of discounts, we all win credibility.
Right now, we’re fighting over crumbs while someone else eats the cake.

4. Human Problem, Industrial Consequence

Our crisis isn’t technological.
It’s behavioral.
Pride keeps us from asking for help.
Fear keeps us from sharing what we know.
And together they’ve built a culture allergic to reflection.

Every downturn we face (overstock, shrinking margins, panic pricing) is rooted in that same loop: we react fast, think slow. This is why next year we might face another 2 other crises that hardly anyone has on the radar yet. But that’s another topic.

What we want to get across: We’re brilliant at optimizing products, terrible at optimizing collaboration.
Innovation isn’t about lighter frames; it’s about lighter egos.

Real progress starts when leadership replaces secrecy and isolated actions.
True leadership is rarer than bitcoins these days.

5. The Price of Fragmentation

Because we refuse to organize, we pay for it daily:
forecasts that guess more than they know,
structures that punish efficiency,
missed political opportunities,
visibility that depends on superlatives instead of strategy.

We have the passion and the people to lead a new mobility era, yet we behave like a classroom with no teacher, no coordination, no representation, no plan.
From the outside, that’s exactly how it looks: busy, noisy, and directionless.

6. One Industry, Too Many Voices

The bike world doesn’t suffer from a lack of associations, it suffers from too many. Everyone’s busy representing something, but no one’s moving the whole forward. Too many small national groups, too little shared vision. National federations, local initiatives, overlapping agendas and a constant fight for relevance and ego.

It’s a power game that kills purpose. Instead of building strength, we dilute it. The result? A bureaucratic mess that feels just as distant and inefficient as Brussels.

If we want to be strong, we need a clear, transparent association architecture, from international to national level. Recently, the two German associations ZIV and ZF made a bold move, indirectly deciding for the rest of the world that Eurobike will no longer be the global leading show. We won’t discuss that topic here, but it highlights a deeper issue: too many associations, too much politics, too little structure to take aligned action. We can’t expect brands to engage in five different associations and still do meaningful work. Nor does it make sense to sustain a fragmented landscape of overlapping interest groups, is there a better way to confuse policymakers?

But simple mergers won’t fix this. If the industry truly wants to reclaim its power, the big brands must come together and design a new structure from scratch, not patchwork from the past, but something built on shared goals: How do we want to live, work, and feel? Let’s build a house that matches our needs.

That requires backbone and a stronger voice from members willing to demand and shape the change they want.

7. Power Games, the ZIV and the Struggle for Unity

Mistrust within the ZIV has been growing. Members say they’re left in the dark – unhappy with how power is distributed between the board and its members, frustrated that decisions happen behind closed doors, and learning news from the press before hearing it from their own organization. Some of that is natural. As organizations mature, power becomes more intentional – shaped by those who come prepared and know what they want. The era of casual annual meetings in Berlin, where attendance mattered more than preparation, is over. If you want to shape an association, you need to show up with ideas, arguments, and the will to engage. If you don’t, others will. And they’ll fill the vacuum you leave behind.

Conflicts of interest between the industry’s biggest players will always exist. That’s not the problem. The problem begins when organizations fail to evolve, when their structures, governance, and decision-making lag behind. That’s when they risk becoming tools for specific players while claiming to represent everyone. It might work in the short term, but it destroys credibility in the long run. Integrity is key.

Unity doesn’t mean everyone has to agree. It means creating space for disagreement and dealing with it honestly. Pretending harmony only breeds mistrust, just like in politics, where silence fuels extremes. Associations must do better: talk openly, disagree constructively, and stop hiding tension behind polished press releases. Real unity isn’t about pretending: it’s about listening, debating, and finding solutions together.

Power alone won’t fix it. Ignoring problems won’t either. It’s time for organizations to step up, act transparently, and put unity first.

8. What Needs to Change

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel to make the bike world a better place. What we need is a shared purpose with a new mindset, a stronger culture, a modern industry architecture, and a true leadership platform.

A neutral, non-commercial space where those willing to lead the change sit at the same table and tackle the challenges that belong to all of us: data, forecasting, sustainability, dealer education, representation, communication, and marketing.

A place where competitors think beyond products and start building a better industry together.

We need leadership and a president. Not to play politics in Brussels or Berlin, but to unite the global bicycle nation and tackle the real issues that hold us back. Not just a place to meet and talk, but a place to reflect, define clear visions, set goals, and create action.

We already have organizations that represent the industry on paper. And yes, they do what they can, and this is very important. But most of their work lives far from the ground, trapped in bureaucracy, legal frameworks, and slow institutional loops. Or lacks aligned action on a bigger scale.

And then there are the power dynamics and opacity that breed mistrust and divide opinions. It’s not always the what it’s the how that determines whether a platform works.

9. The Freedom Trap – the Role of Every Rider

Mountain biking stands for freedom. No rules, no boundaries, just you and the trail. But that very freedom is starting to kill it.

We ride alone, dig our own secret lines, protect “our” trails and think that’s what freedom means. It’s not. It’s isolation.

We’re unorganized, unrepresented, and unheard. While others build lobbies, we build excuses. We love to talk about open-mindedness, but when new riders show up, we roll our eyes. Wrong bike. Wrong outfit. Wrong attitude. We talk inclusion but act like a closed club.

We dream of more trails, more access, more recognition, yet we refuse the one thing that could make it happen: structure. Leadership. A shared voice.

Just look at paragliders, freedom lovers, too. But they’ve got schools, licenses, and clear rules. That’s why they keep their freedom.

Us? We keep mistaking anarchy for independence.
It’s time to grow up as a culture. To organize, educate, and lead. To turn our passion into purpose. Because true freedom isn’t about doing whatever you want, it’s about building a system that lets everyone ride.

And let’s be clear: this isn’t just about mountain bikers. The same applies to every corner of cycling, from drop-bar racers to trekking and city riders. We’d all benefit from more structure, better organization, and a shared voice that turns passion into progress.

10. From Riders to a Movement

Too abstract? Here’s what it could look like.
Right now, we sell bikes and that’s where it ends.
No guidance, no education, no onboarding.
New riders are left alone, old riders never evolve.
Skills stay low, risks remain unmanaged, and our voice as a community stays small.

Imagine if every bike sale came with a setup session and a skills course: braking, trail etiquette, first aid, how to behave in nature.
Imagine certifications for different riding levels and real learning throughout the life cycle of a rider.

In cycling, you can buy a Tour de France–level race bike or a Bosch CX-R–powered eMTB as your very first bike and we even market them that way, feeding on pro-sports desirability.
Imagine passing your driving license and starting out in a Formula 1 car.
Is that how we want to onboard new riders?

We fear that structure would scare people away. But maybe it would do the opposite: help them enjoy it more, stay safer, and ride longer.

11. Lead or Lose

It’s never about how much power you have, it’s how you use it.
Ants move mountains because they align their actions.
We must do the same: think beyond products, build an ecosystem, and serve the community, not just the market.

If we unite, we’ll earn more trails, better infrastructure, more funding, and a culture that grows stronger with every rider.
We can’t wait for governments or federations to fix it.
The industry has to lead, associations, brands, media, and riders together.
The bike industry must not only organize itself, it must take the lead in organizing the wider cycling culture.
Because an industry without a connected community has no foundation.
And a community without structure has no power.

So here’s the point: the next big innovation in cycling isn’t a motor, geometry, or wheel size.
It’s honesty. It’s cooperation. It’s courage.
And in the end, it all comes down to leadership.

Leadership is the upgrade no one’s talking about, but everyone needs.
Real leadership isn’t about control; it’s about direction and clarity.

Right now, uncertainty and fear dominate the market. That’s normal.
Old systems are breaking apart so new ones can take shape, built on better answers, not quick fixes.

The key is not to panic.
When the fog is thick, running faster only means high risks of running in the wrong direction and getting lost.
The best thing we can do is slow down, reflect, and understand how we got here.
Then define what’s truly needed to tackle the real causes of our challenges — not just the symptoms.
When that understanding returns, the fog will lift revealing a stronger, more grounded future for the bike world.

Because let’s be honest: our engineers and tech won’t save us this time.
Only we can.

And this is where the original Brixen Paper #1 ended.

Nine months later...

Nine months later, I think there is definitely more acceptance that many of the things we discussed in this first Brixen Paper need to change.

That’s progress.

But acceptance and action are two very different things.

And when it comes to actually doing things differently, I still see surprisingly little movement.

I’m not entirely sure why.

There are signs of change. There are some green shoots. There are people and companies starting to question established ways of doing things and trying different approaches.

But for much of the industry, stepping outside the comfort zone remains incredibly difficult.

We’ve done things in a certain way for decades. We’ve built careers around those ways of working. We’ve created structures, processes and organizations around them.

Changing them means questioning some of what we have always believed to be right.

Is that difficult? Absolutely.

Is it human? Of course.

But is it acceptable?

No.

Because the world around us isn’t going to wait until we feel comfortable enough to change.

And my concern today is that this gap between recognizing the need for change and actually changing is going to become increasingly painful.

For some companies, potentially very painful.

Nine months ago, we were asking the industry to reflect.

Today, I think the need goes one step further.

Reflection now needs to become action.

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Originally published by 41 Publishing in November 11th 2025.
Read the original Brixen Paper #01 here → Papers #01: The Industry’s Next Innovation Isn’t a Bike – It’s Unity

Enduro is dead. Long live enduro.

I haven’t been able to write about it.

Not because I don’t have an opinion. Quite the opposite. This one touches me too closely.

I’m 53 years old. I have been riding mountain bikes for more than 30 years and, despite having much less time to ride these days than I would like, I still proudly consider myself an enduro rider.

I have an eMTB that I ride enduro with. I have another, even more enduro-oriented, muscular bike that I absolutely love. I pedal up mountains to find technical, fast, sometimes difficult ways of coming back down.

I did exactly that the morning I wrote all this.

For me, this is not a sporting category created by a governing body. It is not a World Cup format. It is certainly not a media property.

It is part of my life.

It is therapy. It keeps me physically and mentally healthy. It gets me outdoors. It connects me with people. It disconnects me from everything else.

It is, without question, one of my happy places.

So forgive me if I struggle with the idea that somebody can announce that enduro is dead.

What exactly died?

The UCI and Warner Bros. Discovery have announced that there will be no Enduro World Cup series from 2027.

Fine.

The Enduro World Cup is dead.

Enduro isn’t.

It never was.

And nobody gets to bring it back to life, either.

Because the fundamental mistake is to confuse the death of a commercial competition with the death of the culture from which that competition emerged.

Enduro existed long before the UCI sanctioned it. It existed long before Warner Bros. Discovery saw commercial potential in it. It existed before the Enduro World Series gave it a global competitive structure, and in many ways it existed before we even felt the need to give what we were doing a name.

Mountain bike enduro has always been social.

It happens outdoors, on mountains and trails, between people who share the same obsession. You ride up together. You ride down. You wait for your mates. You talk shit. You fix things when they break. You scare yourself occasionally. And when the riding is finished, very often there is food, beer and another couple of hours talking about bikes.

That is not an audience.

That is a community.

And that distinction matters enormously when trying to understand what has happened.

Warner Bros. Discovery did not create enduro. The UCI did not create enduro. They took something that already existed, something with an extraordinarily strong social and cultural identity, and tried to turn one manifestation of it into a professional sports and media product.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

Professionalisation brought things to enduro that were valuable. Structure, sporting legitimacy, standards, international recognition and the possibility for some of the best riders in the world to make racing their profession.

But somewhere along the way, professionalisation became something else.

The sport increasingly had to justify itself through the economics and metrics of a media property: audience, reach, broadcast, sponsor ROI, rights, visibility.

And enduro is a bloody awkward thing to squeeze into that box.

The irony is that many of the characteristics that make enduro difficult to package are precisely the characteristics that make people love it. Riders disappearing into the mountains. Long days. Multiple stages. Transfers. Different terrain. Unpredictability. Destinations. Thousands of individual stories happening simultaneously rather than one perfectly controlled spectacle happening in front of a camera.

And this is where I think we need to remember what the Enduro World Series once managed to achieve.

I remember those early years very clearly.

The EWS became a reference for me. Not because I wanted to sit at home and consume it as a media product, but because I wanted to be part of it.

I wanted to race one. I wanted to go there and help. I wanted to be there even if I was only watching.

Think about that for a moment.

That is an extraordinary thing for any sporting property to achieve. It created desire not simply to consume, but to participate.

The original Enduro World Series travelled around the world, but instead of simply bringing a show into town, it activated existing riding communities. Places mattered. Trails mattered. Local riders mattered. Amateurs could inhabit the same ecosystem as the world’s best racers. Finale was not simply a backdrop. Neither were Madeira, Tweed Valley, Whistler or the other destinations that became part of the identity of the series.

The competition did not happen in front of the community.

The community was part of the competition.

And somehow, over the years, that feeling disappeared.

At least it did for me.

What had once made me want to race, volunteer, travel or simply be there gradually became something I felt increasingly disconnected from.

That, to me, is the real failure here.

Warner Bros. Discovery inherited a competition capable of generating an extraordinary desire to participate and managed to turn it into something that became increasingly easy to ignore.

They didn’t kill enduro.

But they did a pretty good job of killing what the Enduro World Series had built.

And the worst part is that none of this feels particularly surprising.

You could see it coming from a long way away.

The progressive disconnect between the product and the culture around it was not particularly difficult to detect. The warning signs were there. The enthusiasm was changing. The relationship with the community was changing. The economics were becoming harder. The thing that had once felt so alive was becoming increasingly institutionalised and increasingly distant from the people whose culture had created its value in the first place.

Yet it continued. Nobody stopped it.

Or at least, from where I was standing, nobody seemed capable of stopping it.

And now, after years of watching that process unfold, we are discussing whether enduro itself is dead because the structure built around it has finally collapsed.

No.

The structure died.

The culture didn’t.

This morning I went riding. So did hundreds of thousands of other people around the world. Nobody needed permission from the UCI. Nobody checked whether Warner Bros. Discovery was still interested. Nobody needed a livestream, a race truck or a media rights agreement.

We just went mountain biking.

And tomorrow people will do it again.

The Enduro World Cup can disappear.

Enduro cannot disappear because nobody owns it.

WBD borrowed it. The UCI sanctioned it. Promoters organised it. Brands financed parts of it. Professional riders pushed its limits.

But none of them owned it.

That is why the announcement from Crankworx that it intends to launch a global enduro series in 2027 is interesting, but it should also come with a warning.

If the objective is simply to replace WBD and recreate another international series based on essentially the same logic, I struggle to see why the outcome should ultimately be different.

Crankworx is a business too. Events are its business. There is nothing wrong with that. But if this becomes another attempt to take a culture, package it into a global commercial property and then force the culture to fit the needs of the property, we already know where that road can lead.

The opportunity is much bigger than replacing a World Cup.

It is to understand where the value of enduro actually comes from.

Not: How do we rebuild the Enduro World Cup?

But:

How do we help enduro communities around the world do more of what they already do?

Strong local races. Strong national series. A handful of truly meaningful international events. Professionals and amateurs sharing trails and experiences. Destinations becoming part of the story. Brands participating rather than simply buying visibility. Riding, racing, testing bikes, travelling, eating, drinking, meeting people and belonging to something.

Maybe the success of enduro should never have been measured primarily by how many people watched it.

Maybe it should have been measured by how many people wanted to do it.

That was the magic of the early EWS for me.

It made me want to be there.

And there is a much broader lesson here for the bicycle industry.

Cycling has an extraordinary ability to create cultures from the bottom up. Mountain biking did it. BMX did it. Gravel has done it. People create something because they love doing it. Communities form around it. Rituals, language, places and identities develop. Brands arrive. Money arrives. Institutions arrive.

All of that can help those cultures grow.

But there is a point at which we need to remember where the value came from in the first place.

Professionalising a culture does not mean owning it.

Commercialising it does not mean creating it.

And failing to monetise it does not mean killing it.

So no.

Enduro isn’t dead.

It doesn’t need to be reborn.

It doesn’t need anybody to save it.

Enduro was never theirs.

And it doesn’t belong to anyone now.

It belongs to everyone who rides.

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The story is not about cycling. It is not about the launch of a new bicycle, a technical innovation or a sponsored athlete. The audience is not being asked to care about frame materials, wheel size, weight, range or performance. The story is Cate Blanchett, the fans waiting for her, the brief encounter and the slightly unexpected way in which she disappears back into London. Yet the Brompton feels completely natural in that scene. It does not need to be introduced, justified or explained. It simply belongs there.

That is a far more significant achievement than securing another review in the cycling media, because it shows what can happen when a bicycle stops being understood only as a piece of cycling equipment and becomes a culturally legible object.

The bicycle industry has spent years asking how it can reach people who are not cyclists, but it usually starts from the wrong assumption. It believes that the task is to make cycling more interesting to them, so it simplifies the technical language, makes the photography more inclusive, adds a lifestyle campaign and then proceeds to tell essentially the same product-led story to a slightly broader-looking group of people.

We keep explaining the bicycle when we should be explaining the life the bicycle makes possible.

Brompton is one of the very few cycling brands that has genuinely crossed that boundary. It has not done so because everybody who recognises one understands the engineering behind the fold, knows where the bicycles are made or can distinguish one model from another. It has done so because the object now carries meaning beyond its function. People who know almost nothing about bicycles can still recognise a Brompton, place it within a city and associate it with a certain way of living.

It speaks of urban intelligence, independence and personal freedom. It suggests that the person riding it understands how to move through a city and refuses to allow traffic, timetables or lack of space to dictate the structure of the day. It is practical without being anonymous and eccentric without becoming a novelty. In London especially, it has become part of the visual language of the city, but its meaning now travels far beyond London.

This is what it means for a product to become a cultural object. Its presence tells us something before anybody starts describing what it does.

There is an important lesson here, because brands often assume that reaching a broader audience requires them to become broader, safer and more generic. Brompton demonstrates almost the exact opposite. It is intensely specific. The small wheels, the unmistakable silhouette, the exposed mechanics of the fold and the sense that the object has evolved according to its own internal logic could all have been diluted over the years in pursuit of a more conventionally attractive bicycle. Instead, that distinctiveness was protected, refined and repeated until it became recognisable.

The fold itself is no longer merely a feature. It is a ritual, a small piece of theatre through which the purpose and ingenuity of the object are revealed. Most brands would need a paragraph to explain their principal technical advantage. A Brompton can demonstrate its entire reason for existing in a few seconds on a railway platform.

That consistency matters. Cultural relevance is rarely created by a campaign, because culture does not emerge when the marketing department decides to claim it. It accumulates when the product, the company, the people, the place of origin, the retail experience and the community continue to reinforce the same meaning over time. Brompton has been building that accumulation for decades. Its engineering gave the idea credibility, its design made the idea visible and its presence in the daily lives of real people allowed the idea to spread.

Engineering is the price of admission. Product gets you considered, brand gets you chosen and culture gets you remembered.

This is also why the Cate Blanchett footage matters, although not for the reason the bicycle industry often imagines. Celebrity visibility is not the same thing as cultural relevance. Putting a bicycle underneath a famous person can generate exposure, but exposure alone does not create meaning. If the product is culturally empty, all the attention remains attached to the celebrity and disappears with them as soon as the image has passed.

Here, the Brompton contributes to the scene. Cate Blanchett riding away on one makes immediate sense, even if nobody stops to explain why. The bicycle appears intelligent, understated, individual and very London, and those associations sit comfortably alongside the person riding it. The celebrity has not magically transformed an anonymous product into a cultural symbol. The moment works because the product had already accumulated enough meaning to play a role in the story.

You can buy placement. You can buy reach. You cannot buy decades of coherent meaning.

None of this means that every bicycle brand must become a design icon, manufacture in London or wait for a Hollywood actor to appear on one of its products. The useful question is not how to copy Brompton, because copying the visible expression of another brand’s culture is precisely how companies erase their own. The useful question is what role a bicycle can credibly own in the lives of people who do not define themselves as cyclists.

A children’s bicycle can represent independence and self-confidence long before it represents cycling. An e-bike can represent the ability to remain active, connected and capable. A mountain bike can represent escape, belonging and the protection of a person’s physical and mental health. These are not diluted cycling stories. They are larger human stories in which the bicycle has an important role.

The industry has access to all of them, yet it repeatedly retreats into the language with which it feels most comfortable. It talks about watts, torque, weight, stiffness, aerodynamics and component hierarchies, then wonders why the conversation remains trapped among people who already care about those things. None of that information is irrelevant, but it cannot be the only language through which the bicycle is allowed to enter society.

There is a strange contradiction in an industry that says it urgently needs new consumers while designing most of its launches, media plans, ambassador programmes and retail environments for the converted. We ask people outside cycling to step into our world, learn our vocabulary and accept our priorities before we give them a reason to care. The real opportunity is to reverse that direction and take the bicycle into the worlds they already inhabit, connecting it with work, family, independence, ageing, identity, cities, health and freedom.

This does not require abandoning the core. Brompton did not escape the cycling bubble by pretending not to be a bicycle company or by smoothing away everything unusual about its product. It earned broader relevance by owning its difference so completely that the meaning of that difference became useful outside the category. Its specificity was not an obstacle to cultural reach. It was the source of it.

That distinction has serious commercial value, especially in a market in which almost every product advantage can be copied, improved or undercut. A competitor can produce a folding bicycle that is lighter, cheaper or more technologically advanced, but it cannot instantly reproduce the place Brompton occupies in people’s minds. Specifications create comparisons. Culture creates preference before the comparison has even begun.

This is why culture should not be treated as a decorative marketing layer added once product development has finished. It is an asset built through coherence, behaviour and time. It allows a brand to appear in conversations it did not initiate, reach audiences it did not directly target and remain meaningful in contexts where nobody is interested in hearing a sales pitch.

Which brings us back to those few seconds in London. The video is not about the bicycle, the audience is not a cycling audience and no one is explaining why the product matters. A woman simply chooses her own way through the city, and the Brompton fits that story so perfectly that it requires no translation.

When a product can enter a story it did not commission, speak to an audience it did not assemble and carry meaning without needing an explanation, the brand has crossed the line from the market into the culture.

Most bicycle companies are still trying to make more people care about bicycles. Brompton points towards a much larger opportunity: making the bicycle matter to people through the lives they already care about.

You do not reach people outside cycling by talking to them about cycling. You reach them by making the bicycle relevant to who they are, how they want to live and the world in which they already live.

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Over the past few months, I have had several conversations that have gradually changed the way I think about the arrival of Chinese companies in the European bicycle industry.

Not because I believe the competitive threat is smaller than I previously thought. If anything, my respect for Chinese technical, engineering and manufacturing capability has increased enormously. What has changed is my understanding of where the real threat lies, and particularly my growing conviction that we are still analysing what is happening through the wrong lens.

For years, much of the Western bicycle industry fundamentally underestimated China. We became comfortable with the idea that China was where things were manufactured while Europe, Japan and the United States remained the places where products were conceived, engineered, positioned, marketed and ultimately given meaning.

That distinction has collapsed.

Anyone who still thinks Chinese companies compete primarily through cheap labour, low manufacturing costs and imitation has simply not been paying attention. The development of increasingly sophisticated e-bike systems, complete bicycles, electronics, batteries and components has demonstrated technical competence, industrial integration and development speed that should have eliminated any remaining complacency in Europe.

We underestimated their ability to engineer, we underestimated their ability to innovate, we underestimated their ability to industrialise and, most importantly, we underestimated how quickly they could learn.

That was a serious mistake.

But I am increasingly wondering whether, having spent years underestimating China, we have now allowed the pendulum to swing so far in the opposite direction that we are beginning to overestimate the wrong things.

Because being extraordinarily good at developing and manufacturing products does not automatically mean being extraordinarily good at building a sustainable business in Europe, and the distinction between those two capabilities is becoming increasingly important.

Technical competence is not strategic competence

I recently had a long conversation with someone who has spent considerable time operating between the Chinese and European bicycle industries, and during that conversation he made an observation that has stayed with me because it encapsulated something I had been struggling to articulate.

His point was that we continue to underestimate Chinese technical and production competence while simultaneously overestimating the strategic capability of many of the companies entering our market.

That distinction matters enormously.

There is an understandable tendency to look at an extraordinary product, combine it with Chinese manufacturing scale, aggressive pricing, enormous development speed and access to capital, and conclude that European domination is therefore inevitable.

I am no longer convinced that this follows automatically.

Europe is not simply another destination for containers of bicycles, motors or components. It is an extraordinarily fragmented collection of countries, languages, regulations, consumer expectations, dealer structures, riding cultures, political environments and cycling traditions. Building a sustainable business here requires considerably more than an excellent product and an attractive price.

It requires choices about which countries matter and why, which consumers you are trying to reach, what problem you are solving for them, where your brand belongs, what your competitive advantage will be once the price difference begins to disappear, which channels are appropriate, how those channels make money, how much control you are prepared to relinquish, how much capital you are prepared to commit and how long you are prepared to wait before expecting a return.

It also requires answers to less glamorous questions about service, warranty, spare parts, dealer relationships, regulation, organisational capability and what happens after the first container has been sold.

Those questions may sound obvious, but recent experience has convinced me that they are far less obvious than we assume.

I have recently been involved indirectly in discussions with Chinese bicycle businesses that expressed considerable enthusiasm about Europe while Europe remained an abstract opportunity. Their products were competitive, their pricing looked attractive and Europe therefore appeared to represent an obvious next stage of growth.

Then the conversation became concrete.

Instead of discussing whether Europe was interesting, the questions became which European markets should actually be prioritised, which consumers should be targeted, what the positioning should be, what channels should be used, what competitive advantage the company genuinely possessed, what organisational capabilities existed internally and, critically, what resources the company was prepared to commit before the market provided certainty.

The confidence changed remarkably quickly.

In one particularly revealing case, a detailed strategic assessment was effectively interpreted as a discussion about promotion. Because the company had no immediate plans to invest in promotion, management saw little reason to engage with questions about positioning, channels, market selection, organisational readiness or long-term objectives.

That distinction tells us something important.

We were trying to understand whether the company was ready for Europe. They were thinking about whether they were ready to sell something in Europe.

Those are not remotely the same question.

When market conditions subsequently became more difficult elsewhere, Europe rapidly moved from being perceived as an exciting growth opportunity to something considerably less attractive: unnecessary uncertainty.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that decision. Concentrating resources when conditions become difficult may be perfectly rational.

But it reveals something I think we need to understand much better.

Wanting Europe is not the same thing as having a European strategy.

Europe might not even be the game

Another comment from that conversation has stayed with me even more.

The person I was speaking with described many Chinese companies as effectively playing their own game, with Europe and the European market merely forming part of that game.

I think this is a crucial distinction because we continue to evaluate Chinese companies using objectives that we assume they share with us.

We ask how much European market share they will capture, how many OEMs will specify their systems, how many dealers they will sign, whether they will establish European subsidiaries and which established brands they might eventually displace.

But those may not always be the most relevant questions because building a profitable, sustainable, thirty-year European bicycle business may not necessarily be the objective.

Europe can serve many purposes. It can provide international credibility, technological validation, additional production volume, access to prestigious OEM customers, evidence of international expansion, improved valuation, a story for investors or preparation for a future IPO. It can also simply represent another outlet for enormous industrial capacity.

If that is the case, then the way a company behaves within Europe may be perfectly rational from its own perspective while being profoundly disruptive from ours.

There is an example unfolding in front of us that I find particularly revealing.

One of the most celebrated technology entrants into our industry in recent years arrived with an extraordinary new e-bike system and an associated bicycle brand that was initially presented essentially as a showcase for the technology, a vehicle designed to demonstrate what the system could do and convince established OEMs of its potential.

At the time, that explanation made perfect sense.

Look at that “showcase” today.

It is no longer one bicycle demonstrating one technology. The bicycle business is expanding its portfolio, entering additional categories and increasingly behaving like a bicycle brand with ambitions of its own, while the technology business simultaneously signs an ever-growing number of established OEM customers and encourages them to build increasingly important parts of their future product portfolios around its ecosystem.

This evolution could have been part of the plan from the beginning. It could equally be the result of the original product performing far beyond expectations and management understandably changing direction when it discovered an opportunity considerably larger than anticipated.

I genuinely don’t know, and that is precisely the point.

If I am an OEM considering building a significant part of my future around somebody else’s technology, I am not simply choosing a motor. I am making decisions about frame architecture, batteries, electronics, service, dealer training, future product development and ultimately my own competitive position. The deeper the technological integration becomes, the more strategically dependent I become on the company providing it.

At that point, I think I am entitled to understand what game my supplier intends to play.

Is the associated bicycle company ultimately a showcase for the technology, an independent bicycle company, a rapidly expanding global bicycle brand or something considerably bigger? How many categories does it eventually intend to enter? Where does the boundary between technology supplier and bicycle competitor sit? And, most importantly, do the OEM customers currently committing themselves to that technology have a sufficiently clear answer to those questions?

Because what was originally described as a showcase is increasingly capable of competing for the same consumers, through the same dealers and potentially across an increasing number of the same categories as the companies being asked to adopt the technology it was created to showcase.

There is nothing inherently illegitimate about that model. Vertical integration exists throughout industry, companies evolve and nobody should expect a successful business to ignore opportunities simply because they were not part of the original presentation.

But let’s at least recognise that a technology supplier whose associated bicycle brand is expanding across the market is not strategically equivalent to a technology supplier whose long-term success depends almost entirely upon the success of its OEM customers.

The incentives are different.

And if there is one thing I think the European bicycle industry needs to become much better at understanding right now, it is incentives.

They don’t need to win

This is also why I think much of our current analysis is focused on the wrong question.

We keep asking whether Chinese companies will win Europe.

I am not sure they need to.

A company does not need to build a sustainable European business to fundamentally change the European bicycle industry.

It can reset consumer expectations around price before discovering that those prices are unsustainable. It can trigger a power race before deciding that Europe is too complicated. It can force established companies to sacrifice margin, change specifications, accelerate product cycles or pursue technologies they would otherwise have approached differently. It can encourage dealers to chase products that generate immediate demand without considering what those products do to the category five years later.

A company can eventually leave Europe having failed according to almost every conventional European measure of success and still leave behind an industry profoundly different from the one it entered.

Disruption does not require domination.

And that is what worries me considerably more than another forecast of Chinese market share: not whether China wins, but what happens while everyone is trying to prevent China from winning.

This is not China versus Europe

This is also where I think we need to stop being frightened of having an adult conversation about China.

I understood the caution a couple of years ago, and I shared it.

There was, and still is, an obvious danger that legitimate concern about Chinese competition could become a convenient vehicle for protectionism, nationalism, xenophobia or the comforting fiction that European companies somehow deserve to survive simply because they are European.

I reject that completely.

If a Chinese company develops a better product, understands the European market, invests in the ecosystem, supports its dealers, provides proper service, respects the regulatory environment, contributes positively to cycling and demonstrates concern for the consequences created by its products, then I could not care less where its headquarters are located. I will applaud it.

Likewise, if a European company behaves irresponsibly, exploits short-term opportunities, ignores the consequences of its products and damages the ecosystem from which it makes its money, I see no reason why its European passport should protect it from criticism.

The distinction I am interested in is therefore not geographical.

This is not China versus Europe. It is one way of developing a business versus another way of developing a business.

And I think we have become so nervous about the possibility of the first interpretation that we have failed to discuss the second clearly enough.

There is nothing xenophobic about examining incentives. There is nothing protectionist about asking companies what responsibility they accept for the market from which they make money, and there is nothing anti-Chinese about recognising that companies whose strategic objectives, time horizons and dependencies differ from those of established European participants may behave differently as a consequence.

The passport is irrelevant. The incentives are not.

Building or extracting?

There may be a simpler way of describing the distinction I am trying to make.

For much of its history, the European bicycle industry has operated, imperfectly and certainly not altruistically, according to what I would describe as a largely constructive logic. Companies built products, but over time they also built dealer networks, supplier relationships, service infrastructures, communities, standards, sporting ecosystems, advocacy structures and ultimately the category itself.

Of course they wanted to make money. Dealers need margin, investors expect returns and businesses exist to create economic value. But commercial success depended to a significant extent on making the ecosystem around the product stronger because those companies expected to remain part of that ecosystem for decades.

A company that expects to be selling e-bike systems in Europe twenty years from now has an economic interest in whether European society continues to accept e-bikes, whether regulation remains sensible, whether dealers remain viable, whether consumers continue to trust the category, whether municipalities keep investing in cycling infrastructure, whether e-mountain bikes retain access to trails and whether bicycles continue to be perceived as bicycles rather than unregistered motorcycles.

This does not transform commercial companies into charities. It simply means that commercial self-interest and stewardship of the ecosystem can be aligned.

Increasingly, however, I see another logic becoming more prominent across the bicycle industry: an extractive one, in which the objective is to optimise the opportunity that exists today while worrying considerably less about the system that needs to exist tomorrow. It asks how much can be sold, how quickly it can be sold, what market share can be captured and what advantage can be extracted from the current moment, while responsibility for what remains afterwards becomes somebody else’s problem.

Extraction optimises the transaction. Construction protects the system that makes the transaction possible.

And this is where some of my recent experience with Chinese companies looking towards Europe has made me uncomfortable. I want to be precise because I am describing a pattern I have personally encountered, not claiming that every Chinese company thinks or behaves in the same way. There will obviously be exceptions, just as there are plenty of Western companies behaving extractively.

But repeatedly I have encountered enormous enthusiasm for Europe while Europe represents an abstract commercial opportunity. There are consumers here, purchasing power, established distribution structures, prestigious brands and retailers capable of providing credibility, and therefore an opportunity to sell.

The much harder conversation begins when the question changes from what can be extracted from Europe to what the company intends to build here: what kind of organisation it is prepared to create, what kind of dealer relationships it intends to develop, what happens after the sale, what position it wants to occupy five or ten years from now, what resources it is prepared to commit before the market gives it certainty and what responsibility it accepts towards the category it is entering.

That, to me, is the difference between entering a market and building one.

The uncomfortable part is that Western companies cannot stand on the other side of this discussion pretending to occupy some kind of moral high ground, because increasingly we appear to be adopting exactly the same logic ourselves.

Years of declining demand, excess inventory, collapsing margins and commercial pressure have pushed large parts of the bicycle industry into survival mode. Many companies are no longer asking what they should be building over the next decade; they are asking what they can sell next season.

When an extraordinary new technology suddenly generated enormous consumer interest in a market desperately searching for something capable of making people excited about bicycles again, many OEMs understandably grabbed it like a life raft. The decision made perfect commercial sense, but a life raft can take you somewhere you never intended to go.

By adopting the technology, putting established brands around it, distributing it through existing dealer networks and presenting it to European consumers, those OEMs did considerably more than purchase a component. They provided validation, legitimacy, distribution, credibility and access to the market, helping accelerate an ecosystem whose ultimate strategic intentions they may not have fully understood.

And now I am hearing that some of the companies that helped provide that legitimacy are already exploring alternatives and potential ways out.

If that is indeed what is happening, there is an uncomfortable lesson in it. The question was never simply whether the technology was good enough, because it very clearly was. The question should also have been what kind of competitive environment adopting it might help create three, five or ten years later.

That is what happens when constructive thinking gives way to extractive thinking: everyone optimises for the transaction immediately in front of them while nobody takes responsibility for the system those transactions are collectively creating.

Different dependencies create different behaviour

If Europe represents the core of your business for the next twenty years, you have powerful reasons to think about what Europe will look like twenty years from now.

If Europe represents one element of a much larger industrial strategy, the calculation can be very different. Your domestic business may provide scale, European presence may provide international legitimacy, volume may matter more than margin, rapid expansion may improve valuation, the objective may ultimately be an IPO, or Europe may simply be worth pursuing while growth is easy and no longer worth pursuing when uncertainty increases.

None of those objectives is inherently illegitimate, but they create different incentives.

If your strategic success does not depend on the long-term health of European bicycle culture, why should trail access ten years from now carry the same weight in your decision-making? Why should the gradual erosion of the distinction between bicycles and motorcycles matter as much as the sales opportunity created by greater power today? Why should the profitability of the European dealer network in 2032 influence a decision driven by volume targets in 2027?

This is the part of the discussion that I believe we have been afraid to articulate because it is too easily misrepresented as a judgement about nationality, when in reality it is a judgement about incentives, dependency and time horizons.

I increasingly suspect that some of the companies currently entering Europe simply do not have the same exposure to the long-term consequences of their decisions as the companies whose entire future remains tied to this market.

And that matters.

And eventually, someone else will decide

The clearest expression of this extractive logic may be the sentence I seem to hear everywhere at the moment: “If I don’t do it, somebody else will.”

It is an extraordinarily seductive justification because, viewed from the perspective of an individual company, it is often completely rational. If consumers want more power, somebody will give it to them. If a particular interpretation of the regulations creates a competitive advantage, somebody will exploit it. If one OEM adopts the technology generating all the excitement, its competitors will feel increasingly compelled to follow. And if a dealer refuses to unlock something that another dealer down the road is prepared to unlock, there is an immediate commercial cost attached to being the responsible one.

The problem is that industries are not shaped only by the rationality of individual decisions. They are shaped by their cumulative consequences, and a sequence of perfectly rational commercial decisions can collectively move an entire category in a direction that almost nobody consciously intended.

This is where I think the discussion around self-regulation has been misunderstood for years. Attempts by established industry players to establish boundaries around power, speed, tampering or the distinction between a bicycle and a motor vehicle have often been interpreted primarily through their commercial interests, and sometimes that scepticism was undoubtedly justified. But reducing the entire debate to incumbents protecting their businesses allowed us to avoid the much more uncomfortable question underneath: if everybody exploits every grey area available because somebody else will otherwise do it first, who is actually taking responsibility for where the category ends up?

Increasingly, I suspect the answer is nobody, which means that eventually somebody outside the industry will.

Regulators will ultimately have to decide where the boundary between a bicycle and a motorcycle sits, and when they do, the consequences will reach far beyond motor specifications. They could affect access to bicycle infrastructure, trails and public spaces, insurance requirements, vehicle classification and ultimately the extraordinary regulatory and social position that the bicycle and pedal-assisted e-bike currently enjoy.

At that point, whether an individual product technically complied with a particular interpretation of the rules will become considerably less important than what the cumulative behaviour of the industry has done to society’s understanding of what an e-bike actually is.

There is an enormous difference between asking “Are we allowed to do this?” and asking “What happens to cycling if everybody does this?” The first question focuses on the opportunity immediately in front of us, while the second forces us to consider the system that makes that opportunity possible in the first place.

One extracts value from the present. The other takes responsibility for building the future.

And this is what worries me most about the current wave of Chinese competition. Not that Chinese companies will necessarily conquer Europe, but that European companies become so frightened of being conquered that they progressively adopt the same short-term incentives they should be questioning.

We are importing more than products

We see an extraordinary new motor and decide that we need more power. Another manufacturer responds, a third concludes that it cannot afford not to, dealers begin demanding equivalent products, marketing departments turn specifications into competitive necessities and consumers gradually learn that larger numbers represent better bicycles. Before long, an entire industry is moving in a direction that almost nobody consciously chose, driven by a sequence of perfectly understandable individual decisions.

That is the strategic danger I find far more interesting than another debate about tariffs or another prediction about which Chinese brands will survive in Europe.

We are importing more than their products. We are importing their incentives.

And if we do that, we may voluntarily abandon precisely the areas in which the European bicycle industry retains its greatest competitive advantage.

Chinese industry can compete extraordinarily well on manufacturing, technology, integration, scale, speed and increasingly on product quality. Pretending otherwise would simply repeat the mistake we made during the previous decade.

But Europe possesses something different: cycling culture, accumulated trust, dealer networks, communities, advocacy organisations, infrastructure, institutional relationships, regulatory knowledge and brands whose connection to cycling has been built over decades rather than marketing cycles.

None of those assets guarantees survival, and none should become an excuse for complacency. Cultural heritage is not a business model, and being European does not entitle anyone to a customer, but these things are strategic assets if we understand how to use them.

The irony is that while some new entrants may underestimate their importance, European companies increasingly seem willing to sacrifice them in an attempt to compete on specifications, power, development speed and price. I struggle to understand why our response to Chinese industrial excellence should be to progressively abandon the things that differentiate us in order to compete primarily on the dimensions where Chinese industry is strongest.

Why would the European response to Chinese industrial excellence be to attempt to become a slower, more expensive version of China?

We need to stop being afraid of this conversation

There is a legitimate reason to be careful when discussing China. Generalisations are dangerous, cultures are complex, companies are different and criticism of business practices can very quickly deteriorate into criticism of people. We should resist that absolutely, but intellectual caution cannot become intellectual paralysis.

We should be capable of recognising extraordinary Chinese engineering, working with Chinese companies, investing in Chinese technology, selling Chinese products and celebrating Chinese success while questioning the incentives surrounding some of those businesses and demanding the same responsibility, transparency and strategic commitment that we should expect from any European, American, Japanese or Taiwanese company. By exactly the same standard, we should be prepared to criticise European companies when commercial desperation leads them to abandon long-term responsibility in pursuit of the next sale.

The passport is irrelevant. What matters is what companies are building, what they are extracting and what they leave behind.

For years, we underestimated China because we misunderstood what Chinese companies were capable of doing. Now I worry that we may make an equally serious mistake by assuming that extraordinary industrial capability automatically translates into strategic inevitability, and then responding to that perceived inevitability by destroying some of the very advantages that made the European bicycle industry valuable in the first place.

Whether Chinese companies eventually dominate significant parts of the European bicycle industry is therefore becoming, to me, almost a secondary question. What matters considerably more is what kind of industry will be left behind after we have all finished responding to them, and whether the decisions we are making in order to survive the next product cycle are simultaneously eroding the ecosystem on which our ability to survive the next decade depends.

Because if every company optimises for today’s sale, every dealer responds to today’s demand and every participant assumes that somebody else will worry about tomorrow’s consequences, eventually somebody outside the industry will do it for us. When regulators finally decide where the boundary between a bicycle and a motorcycle should sit, how much power is acceptable, where e-bikes can be ridden and how tightly the category needs to be controlled, explaining that we were merely responding rationally to consumer demand will not be much of a defence.

We spent years being afraid that China would learn how to do what we do.

Now we should be considerably more afraid that, in trying to compete with China, we forget why we did things differently in the first place.

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I am not questioning whether racing matters to cycling culture, whether professional athletes can contribute to product development or whether winning the Tour de France, a World Championship or a World Cup can generate enormous visibility and desirability for a bicycle brand. Of course it can, and there is more than a century of cycling history demonstrating precisely that. What I am questioning is whether the enormous amount of money bicycle brands collectively invest in professional racing every year is actually being converted into proportional commercial value, particularly by the overwhelming majority of brands whose riders are not standing on the top step of the podium.

Because behind professional sport lies an uncomfortable mathematical reality that seems almost too obvious to mention, yet fundamentally changes the economics of the entire proposition: most teams lose most of the time. If your commercial model for extracting value from racing depends primarily upon winning, you have built that model around an outcome that, by definition, only a tiny minority of the participants can achieve.

Take the Tour de France as an example. Twenty-three teams line up carrying some of the most valuable sponsorship real estate available anywhere in cycling, surrounded by extraordinary levels of media coverage and watched by an enormous international audience. Ask somebody who genuinely follows the Tour — not a casual observer outside cycling, but somebody already interested in the sport — to name the teams, and I suspect most people will produce a handful immediately before the exercise becomes considerably more difficult. Then ask them which bicycle brand each of those teams rides, and the number will probably fall again. Finally, ask the only question that ultimately matters commercially: did repeatedly seeing that bicycle underneath a professional rider materially change their probability of buying one?

Those are three completely different things — team awareness, bicycle-brand awareness and purchase consideration — yet the cycling industry has an extraordinary tendency to compress all three into the wonderfully convenient concept of visibility. We count television exposure, photographs, social impressions, logo appearances and media mentions and assume that somewhere along that chain commercial value has been created, when what we should really be asking is how much of that visibility actually transferred from the team to the bicycle brand and, more importantly, whether it changed anything in the relationship between that brand and a potential customer.

Winning obviously makes that process considerably easier. When a rider wins the Tour, a World Championship, an Olympic medal or a World Cup, there is an intuitive narrative connecting athlete, machine and performance: this person won on this bicycle, therefore this bicycle has demonstrated something exceptional. The athlete becomes the hero, the bicycle becomes the winning bicycle, the winning bicycle becomes evidence of performance and performance can become desirability. There is a reason brands have invested in racing for generations, and I am certainly not suggesting that this mechanism has suddenly stopped working.

The problem is that there are very few winners, while there are an enormous number of companies paying to participate in the same game. A brand can spend hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, on riders, mechanics, management, trucks, flights, hotels, bicycles, components, hospitality and race programmes, only to find itself somewhere in the middle of the results sheet on Sunday afternoon. The usual response is then a selection of photographs, a race report, some sponsor mentions and perhaps the obligatory great weekend of racing, before everybody packs the truck and moves on to the next opportunity to repeat exactly the same process.

This is where I struggle to understand the logic, because a professional race team should be one of the richest storytelling environments any bicycle company could possibly have access to. The expensive part has already been paid for. The riders are already under contract, the mechanics are already there, the truck is already travelling across Europe, the flights and hotels have already been booked, the bicycles have already been developed and an entire collection of fascinating human beings is spending eight or nine months of the year operating under extraordinary levels of physical, technical and psychological pressure.

Inside that environment there are injuries, recoveries, friendships, disagreements, mechanical failures, product-development decisions, fear, ambition, families waiting at home, rookies trying desperately to establish themselves, veterans wondering how much longer they can continue, mechanics working late into the night and engineers changing things on Friday that nobody outside the team knows about before the rider races them on Sunday. There are riders who have spent six months preparing for an event only to finish seventeenth, riders who crash on Saturday and somehow put themselves back on the start line the following morning, and people throughout the organisation whose stories could make the audience understand not only what professional racing looks like, but what it actually feels like.

In other words, the brand has already paid for an almost inexhaustible storytelling machine, yet too often it appears to wait until Sunday afternoon to discover whether that machine has produced anything valuable. This is where I think we fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between racing and marketing, because racing is not the content; racing is the raw material from which the content, the personalities, the relationships and ultimately the cultural relevance of the programme should be created. The race itself is simply the stage upon which hundreds of human stories are happening, and none of those stories suddenly becomes worthless because somebody wearing another jersey crossed the finish line first.

Victor Campenaerts provided a fascinating example of what I mean during this year’s Tour de France with Le Vlog, the series of videos he published on Instagram from inside Visma-Lease a Bike. I have no idea what the total reach of those videos eventually was, and frankly the number interests me considerably less than what they demonstrated. The content felt fresh, spontaneous, human and genuinely entertaining because it offered something the television broadcast, the results sheet and carefully polished team communications could not provide: access to the people behind the performance and to the small moments inside a Grand Tour that normally disappear without anybody outside the team ever seeing them.

Campenaerts did not need to win a stage for that content to work, nor did every episode require some extraordinary sporting achievement to justify its existence. The raw material was simply the reality already surrounding him: teammates interacting with each other, conversations before and after stages, personalities emerging away from the television cameras and the everyday absurdity, tension and humanity of spending three weeks racing around France. What made it engaging was precisely that it did not feel like another carefully manufactured piece of sponsor content; it felt as though somebody had opened a door and allowed us inside. The riders were already there, the staff were already there, the hotels had already been booked and the entire infrastructure was already moving around France, meaning the stories were effectively a by-product of an investment that had already been made.

I do not know how many bicycles Le Vlog sold, and I would be extremely suspicious of anybody pretending they could establish a simple causal relationship between an Instagram series and bicycle sales. But that is almost beside the point, because what Campenaerts demonstrated is that a rider can create attention, personality, familiarity and emotional connection without winning anything that afternoon, and that a professional racing programme can therefore produce cultural value every single day rather than waiting for the occasional moment when somebody happens to cross the finish line first. If one rider can turn the everyday reality of professional racing into something people actively want to watch, the obvious question is what the brands spending hundreds of thousands or millions to participate in those same environments are doing with everything happening around them.

This matters because some of those stories may ultimately be commercially more valuable than the victory itself. Consumers do not build long-term emotional relationships with finishing positions; they build them with people. I do not necessarily need your rider to win every Sunday, but I need you to give me a reason to care whether that rider wins. I need to understand who that person is, what it took to get there, what happened when everything went wrong, who the mechanic working beside them is, why something changed on the bicycle between Friday and Sunday and what goes through somebody’s head when months of preparation end in disappointment.

If you can make me genuinely care about the people inside that structure, the commercial equation starts to become much more interesting because you are no longer simply purchasing exposure. You are creating attention and converting that attention into affinity, while affinity can eventually become community, preference and commercial value. Crucially, none of those things requires your rider to cross the finish line first, which means the commercial productivity of the race programme no longer has to rise and fall entirely with the results sheet.

There is, however, another layer to this that I find considerably more uncomfortable, because some bicycle companies have become so culturally attached to racing that they seem almost incapable of understanding themselves without it. They describe themselves as performance brands, and somewhere along the way the logic has become circular: we are a performance brand, performance brands race, therefore we need a race team, and the existence of the race team then becomes part of the evidence that we are a performance brand.

But racing does not automatically make a company a performance brand, because performance is ultimately a perception that has to exist in the mind of the customer rather than a definition written into a corporate presentation. A company can have the factory team, the truck, the athletes, the hospitality, the matching clothing and an enormous annual race budget and still fail to create meaningful cultural relevance around any of it. Being present is not the same thing as being relevant, and paying to participate in performance sport is not necessarily the same thing as building a performance brand.

This creates a particularly interesting distinction between companies that win frequently and therefore possess an obvious mechanism for translating racing into brand value, companies that may not win consistently but have learned how to transform racing into storytelling, personality, community and culture, and those occupying the much more uncomfortable position in which they neither win particularly often nor create anything especially compelling from everything happening around the racing programme. It is this third category that makes me wonder whether we have been asking the wrong question about sponsorship for a very long time.

Because at that point the question is no longer simply whether racing generates a sufficient marketing return. The more interesting question becomes how much of professional racing sponsorship in the bicycle industry is genuinely a commercial investment, and how much of it has become an expression of corporate identity.

The CEO loves racing, the product managers love racing, the marketing people frequently come from racing, the dealers follow racing, the specialist media covers racing and many of the people surrounding the company have spent their entire professional lives inside cycling. Everybody therefore reinforces everybody else’s conviction that racing matters, because almost everybody participating in the conversation already belongs to the same cultural ecosystem. Eventually the assumption becomes so deeply embedded that questioning the race programme begins to sound almost like questioning whether the company still believes in performance itself.

There is, however, one rather important person who risks disappearing from that conversation: the customer. Does the customer care? Quite possibly, but that is precisely why we should be able to demonstrate it rather than simply assume it. More importantly, we should understand whether professional racing programmes are actually helping bicycle companies create new customers and expand their cultural relevance, or whether a substantial part of that investment is being used to entertain, reassure and communicate with people who already ride bicycles, already follow professional racing, already understand the products and already know the brands involved.

That distinction becomes particularly important at a moment when the bicycle industry desperately needs to expand beyond the audience it has spent decades talking to. If millions are being invested in an activity whose communication overwhelmingly circulates among existing cyclists, dealers, specialist media and industry insiders, then the commercial question is not whether racing has value, but whether we are extracting anything close to the value that such an extraordinary investment should be capable of producing.

And this is where the performance brand can find itself trapped inside a remarkably expensive circle. The company defines itself through performance, racing becomes necessary to validate that definition, substantial resources are committed to the race programme, but the company cannot necessarily afford the tiny number of athletes capable of winning consistently. Without victories, differentiated visibility becomes harder to achieve, while insufficient investment in storytelling, personalities and community means that the organisation has not created another mechanism through which the programme can generate meaningful value. The return therefore becomes increasingly difficult to demonstrate, yet reducing or abandoning the programme becomes culturally almost impossible because racing has become part of the way the company understands itself.

I have started thinking of this as The Performance Tax: the money some bicycle companies effectively pay every year not necessarily because they have conclusively demonstrated that racing produces an appropriate commercial return, but because they have convinced themselves that being a legitimate performance brand requires them to be there. Once racing becomes part of the organisation’s self-definition rather than one of several possible tools for achieving a commercial objective, continuing to spend can become easier than asking whether the original assumptions behind that spending still make sense.

The irony is that the companies least likely to win should actually be the ones working hardest to extract value from everything surrounding the competition. If statistics tell you that your riders are going to lose most Sundays, then your marketing strategy cannot depend upon what happens on Sunday afternoon. A rider finishing seventeenth still represents an investment whose personality, preparation, failure, recovery, relationship with the mechanic, contribution to product development and connection with the community all contain potential value, while the race itself provides an extraordinary stage upon which those things can become visible and meaningful.

This is also why I am increasingly unconvinced by the argument that the bicycle industry simply spends too much money on racing. It may, in some cases, but I think the more interesting and considerably more embarrassing possibility is that the industry is simply extraordinarily bad at extracting value from money it has already decided to spend, because too many companies continue treating the race result as the product of the investment rather than understanding the entire racing ecosystem as an asset that has to be commercially activated.

The question, therefore, is not whether bicycle brands should stop racing, because that would be an extraordinarily simplistic conclusion from a much more interesting problem. Racing can create technical credibility, extraordinary stories, human connection, community, cultural relevance and, when everything comes together, some of the most powerful brand moments this industry is capable of producing. But none of those outcomes should be assumed simply because a company has written a cheque, put its logo on a jersey and sent a truck to the paddock.

Before approving next season’s budget, signing another athlete or deciding which championships the team wants to contest, every bicycle company funding professional racing should therefore be able to answer one deceptively simple question, not with a presentation about exposure, impressions and media value, but with a clear understanding of what that investment is supposed to create for the business and how the organisation intends to extract that value whether its riders win or not:

What exactly are we paying for?

A few days ago, in That Could Be Me, I wrote about the gap between the people who ride bicycles and the people the industry chooses to represent. The argument was fundamentally cultural: when brands repeatedly show us the same bodies, ages, lifestyles and definitions of what a cyclist should look like, they do more than describe their community. They define who is allowed to imagine themselves belonging to it.

But the conversations that followed that article raised another, considerably less conceptual question.

What if the people we barely show are also the people with the money?

Because this is not simply a discussion about representation, diversity or making somebody feel included. It may point towards a much deeper commercial contradiction sitting at the heart of the premium bicycle market: the people with the greatest capacity to buy expensive bicycles are getting older, while much of the industry’s cultural machinery remains designed to make cycling look young.

In other words, That Could Be Me asked whether people could recognise themselves in the world cycling presents to them.

This article asks what that failure of recognition might be costing the industry.

And the answer begins with a remarkably simple question.

Do we actually know who our customers are?

The 2025 E-MOUNTAINBIKE Reader Survey collected 15,498 responses from one of the most engaged eMTB audiences in the world. In Germany, Switzerland and Austria (the heart of the European premium e-bike market) the average age of its readers was not 34. It was not 44.

It was 54.

But the same survey revealed another number that should concern the industry just as much. In Germany, Switzerland and Austria, 95% of respondents were men. Women accounted for only 5%.

That figure does not necessarily mean that women represent only 5% of the entire eMTB market. This was a reader survey, not a census of every eMTB rider, and its results inevitably reflect the audience E-MOUNTAINBIKE has built. But with 15,498 responses globally, it remains a powerful indication of who is participating in the category’s specialist conversation and, more importantly, who is not.

These two figures expose different sides of the same problem. The industry appears culturally reluctant to show the older men who already constitute a central part of its premium customer base, while it has still failed to bring anything close to a comparable number of women into the category.

One audience is economically important but visually underrepresented. The other remains dramatically underdeveloped.

The first is a customer-recognition problem. The second is a market-growth problem. Both begin with the industry’s narrow definition of who an eMTB rider is supposed to be.

More than half of the survey respondents had already been riding eMTBs for over five years. These were not ageing outsiders observing the sport from a distance, nor occasional riders who had stumbled across a survey. They were people actively consuming specialist content, comparing brands, evaluating motors, questioning technological trends and thinking seriously about the products they might buy next.

In other words, they are not the audience the industry may have to sell to one day.

They are the market already buying today.

And the economic evidence points in precisely the same direction.

According to the latest Office for National Statistics analysis of household wealth, median household wealth in Great Britain increases progressively with age, reaching £502,500 among households headed by someone between 65 and 74. That is 33 times the median wealth of households headed by someone between 16 and 24.

The British data are not presented here as a perfect proxy for every European market, but they expose a broader economic reality that the cycling industry can no longer afford to ignore: in mature Western economies, a substantial share of accumulated wealth, property ownership, savings and financial security sits with older generations.

Of course, wealth is not the same as disposable income, and nobody over the age of 50 should be reduced to a single convenient marketing segment. A 52-year-old executive, a 68-year-old retiree and an 83-year-old pensioner do not have the same needs, physical abilities or spending priorities. “The over-50s” are no more homogeneous than “young people”.

But that does not make the commercial reality disappear.

A rapidly expanding part of the population has money, time, experience and an increasing determination to remain active for longer. The Outdoor Industry Association’s 2025 Participation Trends Report recorded a 7.4% increase in outdoor participation among seniors in the United States, helping to make the outdoor market increasingly multigenerational. This is not a cohort simply withdrawing from active life. It is a cohort continuing to participate , and in some areas increasing its participation, while retaining significant economic power.

At the same time, the e-bike has removed or reduced many of the physical limitations that once shortened a person’s participation in cycling. It allows people to ride further, climb more, stay with friends, explore new terrain and continue participating in a sport they might otherwise have left behind. Research highlighted by the European Cyclists’ Federation found that Dutch cyclists aged 75 and over were travelling 33% more kilometres as e-bike adoption expanded.

The e-bike has not simply created another bicycle category.

It has extended the economic lifetime of the cyclist.

That should be one of the most important growth stories in the entire bicycle industry. Instead, we continue to behave as though age were something from which the product must be protected.

Look at the cultural language used to sell performance mountain bikes. Look at the riders selected for campaigns, the bodies shown in product launches, the clothes, the locations, the music, the editing, the ambassadors and the lives presented as aspirational. Again and again, the message is built around youth, speed, risk, technical progression and an apparently unlimited supply of free time.

There is nothing wrong with any of that. Young riders are an essential part of cycling’s future, and aspiration has always been part of how sports products are sold. Nobody is suggesting replacing one narrow stereotype with another or turning mountain biking into a catalogue for retirement planning.

The problem appears when one cultural interpretation becomes so dominant that the people actually sustaining the premium end of the category can no longer recognise themselves within it, while millions of others are given very few reasons to imagine that the category was ever intended for them.

Because if the average engaged eMTB consumer in DACH is 54, why does so much mountain bike marketing still appear terrified of showing someone over 50?

Why does the industry sell €8,000, €10,000 and sometimes €15,000 bicycles using a cultural language built largely around people who are considerably less likely to be able to afford them?

Why do we assume that youth creates aspiration, but age destroys it?

Who decided that a 53-year-old rider should aspire to look like a 25-year-old, rather than seeing an exciting, credible and recognisable version of himself?

And why, after years of talking about participation and inclusivity, do women still account for only 5% of the respondents within the German-speaking audience of one of the world’s largest eMTB surveys?

This is where the issue stops being a conversation about representation and becomes a conversation about growth strategy, customer acquisition and the allocation of marketing resources.

The cycling industry is under pressure. Volumes have fallen, inventories have hurt margins, discounting has damaged brand equity and acquiring new customers has become increasingly expensive. Across the industry, companies are trying to identify the next growth market while fighting harder for the customers they already share.

Yet the same survey presents the industry with two enormous strategic questions: why does it barely represent the mature consumers already sustaining the premium market, and why has it still failed to make eMTB meaningfully relevant to far more women?

What looked in That Could Be Me like a problem of cultural representation begins, once the numbers are added, to look like a failure of commercial strategy.

That is not only a cultural blind spot.

It is an extraordinarily expensive commercial mistake.

The irony is that these mature consumers are not necessarily asking for cycling to become slower, safer, duller or less ambitious. The E-MOUNTAINBIKE survey shows almost exactly the opposite. These riders are interested in motor performance, reliability, natural ride feel, navigation, tracking, theft protection, ABS, gearbox systems and emerging technologies such as Avinox. They are experienced enough to question hype, but still curious enough to embrace innovation.

They are older, but they have not stopped moving, they have money, but they are not waiting passively to spend it and they are experienced, but they do not want to be patronised.

And they do not need a brand to remind them that they are no longer 25. They need brands capable of understanding that being 54 today does not mean what being 54 meant thirty years ago.

The same cultural limitation produces a different consequence for women. When a category repeatedly defines its centre through overwhelmingly male imagery, language, product narratives and media environments, it should not be surprised when women remain peripheral to the conversation. The issue is not that women need a simplified, softened or artificially feminised version of mountain biking. It is that the industry has spent decades treating the male rider as the default customer and everybody else as an audience requiring a special initiative.

A market does not broaden merely because a brand adds a woman to a campaign or releases a different colourway. It broadens when more people can see a credible place for themselves within the culture surrounding the product, when the product answers realities that matter to them and when the industry speaks to them as participants rather than demographic opportunities.

This matters far beyond eMTB.

Across outdoor, automotive, travel, fashion and technology, the traditional boundaries between age groups are becoming less useful. People are remaining physically active for longer, changing careers later, travelling more, adopting new technology and refusing to accept the narrow social roles previously associated with ageing. At the same time, women control or influence an enormous share of household purchasing decisions, yet many performance and outdoor industries still treat them as secondary consumers.

The commercial opportunity is not to sell older people products that make them feel younger, nor to sell women a cosmetically modified version of a product and call it inclusion. It is to understand that the market is already more complex, capable and diverse than the cultural shorthand the industry continues to use.

Some of the world’s strongest brands have understood this. They do not present age as decline, nor do they pretend it does not exist. They show experience, capability, confidence, curiosity and continued participation. They allow different generations and different kinds of people to inhabit the same cultural universe without suggesting that only one of them truly belongs there.

Cycling should be exceptionally well positioned to do the same. It is one of the few activities capable of combining performance, freedom, mobility, health, exploration, technology and social connection across an entire lifetime. An individual can encounter a bicycle as a child, rediscover it as an adult, use it for transport, embrace it as a sport and continue riding well beyond the age at which many other physical activities become inaccessible.

That is an extraordinary asset.

But only if the industry understands what it has.

The greatest opportunity may not be persuading 54-year-olds to buy bicycles. The data suggest that many of them already do. The opportunity is to speak to them with the same cultural intelligence, ambition and emotional relevance that brands routinely reserve for younger consumers.

Not as “older riders”, not as a concession to inclusivity, not as people winding down.

But as experienced, active and financially powerful participants who still want to progress, discover, belong and occasionally scare themselves on a bicycle.

At the same time, the industry must stop discussing women as though they were a niche adjacent to the real market. If only 5% of respondents in the E-MOUNTAINBIKE survey’s DACH audience were women, the question is not how to create a few more campaigns targeted at women. The question is what in the category’s products, retail experience, media, language and culture has prevented so many women from entering or from feeling that the specialist conversation belongs to them.

The cycling industry is not failing to attract older consumers.

Older consumers are already here.

They are reading the magazines. They are comparing the products. They are riding the bikes. And, disproportionately, they are paying for the premium end of the market.

Women, meanwhile, remain vastly underrepresented in the specialist eMTB audience. That is not evidence that the opportunity does not exist. It is evidence of how little of it the industry has managed to unlock.

The problem is not that cycling lacks potential customers.

The problem is that the industry has become culturally optimised for the people who admire its products, rather than commercially optimised for the people most capable of buying them or for the much broader population that would consider buying them if the category learned how to speak beyond its own reflection.

In That Could Be Me, I argued that representation determines who can imagine themselves belonging to cycling. The data reveal the other side of that argument: representation also determines whether the people already sustaining the market feel that the industry understands them at all — and whether those still standing outside can see any meaningful reason to enter.

For years, we have been asking where the next customer will come from.

It is time to ask whether we are even talking to the customers already standing in front of us.

A final note of thanks to Simon Cox for sharing some of the initial data and insights that prompted me to investigate this question more deeply. His contribution helped turn what began as a discussion about cultural representation into a much broader examination of market reality. The analysis and conclusions presented here are entirely my own.

Not because I had suddenly discovered that e-bike tuning exists. Everyone working anywhere near this industry knows it exists, everyone knows that people have been finding ways of circumventing the 25 km/h assistance limit for years, and everyone knows that drive-system manufacturers have spent considerable time and money trying (some harder than others) to make their systems more difficult to manipulate.

What stopped me was how completely normal the advertisement looked.

There was no shady website, no obscure internet forum and no badly filmed tutorial explaining how to hack an e-bike controller. This was a polished, professionally produced, paid social-media advertisement appearing directly in my Instagram feed (still wondering why if I am honest), selling a device whose commercial proposition is to remove the speed limitation of an e-bike.

And the headline?

“It takes 3.1 seconds to read this ad. The same time it takes your Avinox M1 to go from 0 to 60 km/h.”

Sixty kilometres per hour.

The caption underneath makes the proposition even clearer: “Delimit & tune your DJI Avinox e-bike past the 25 km/h limiter.”

My immediate reaction was obvious: how the hell is this being openly advertised?

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I was asking the wrong question.

The interesting question is not who is selling this thing.

The interesting question is: who the hell is owning the problem?

Because the European bicycle industry has supposedly been fighting e-bike tampering for years. CONEBI launched its Companies Against Tampering initiative in 2021, bringing together 15 national associations and 68 companies in a self-commitment against the manipulation of e-bikes. The industry has worked on technical standards and anti-tampering measures, CEN/TS 17831 was introduced specifically to address the issue, ZIV has been campaigning against tuning for years and has called for stronger legislation covering the advertising and sale of tuning devices, while manufacturers have introduced increasingly sophisticated technical measures designed to make manipulation more difficult.

So I am not suggesting that absolutely nothing has been done.

What I am questioning is whether anybody has taken responsibility for the outcome.

Because there is an enormous difference between being against something and owning the responsibility for preventing it from becoming normal.

If, in August 2026, I can open Instagram and receive a professionally produced paid advertisement promoting an e-bike around 0–60 km/h performance, then whatever we have been doing clearly isn’t enough.

And that is where this becomes much bigger than tuning.

Because the more I look at what is happening around the e-bike industry right now, the more I see the same pattern repeated everywhere: plenty of companies managing their businesses, plenty of organisations representing their interests and plenty of people developing products, but remarkably few willing to assume responsibility for where the category itself is going.

Bosch should, theoretically, be one of the obvious candidates. Few companies have done more to establish the modern European e-bike market, and few have accumulated the combination of scale, installed base, dealer relationships, service infrastructure and industry credibility that Bosch has built over the past decade. But right now Bosch seems to be going through some kind of corporate existential journey, trying to rediscover what Bosch eBike Systems is supposed to mean in a market that suddenly looks very different from the one it dominated so comfortably. It has enormous influence available to it, but instead of using that position to define where the category should go next, it appears much more occupied trying to understand where it fits within it.

DJI sits almost perfectly at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Avinox has arrived with enormous technological and commercial ambition, but I see very little evidence that DJI feels any responsibility for protecting the cultural or regulatory boundaries of the bicycle category it has entered. And why should we automatically expect it to? DJI didn’t create those boundaries, didn’t spend decades building the cycling ecosystem around them and doesn’t carry the same historical baggage as the companies that did. Its objective appears much simpler: build an extremely competitive technology platform, get it onto as many bikes as possible and sell as many systems as the market will absorb.

Frankly, I sometimes get the impression that if somebody discovered tomorrow that an Avinox motor was exceptionally good at powering a machine for making churros, DJI’s primary concern would be how many churro machines the customer intended to manufacture.

I am exaggerating, obviously, but only slightly to make the point.

Expecting DJI to arrive from outside the traditional bicycle industry and spontaneously assume responsibility for protecting the cultural definition of the European e-bike would be an extraordinary abdication of responsibility by those who have spent decades building that category.

And then there is Shimano.

Shimano is an even stranger case, because while Bosch appears lost, Shimano increasingly appears absent. There are rumours that something new may finally be coming, but at this point what that product might be is almost secondary to the extraordinary silence that has preceded it. There is an old philosophical question about whether a tree falling in an empty forest makes a sound, and Shimano may be about to provide the bicycle industry with its own version of the experiment, because you can spend years developing a new motor and eventually unveil whatever you have been working on, but if during those same years the market, the technology and, most importantly, the conversation have moved somewhere else without you, the real question is not how good the motor is but whether anybody is still standing in the forest when the tree finally falls.

TQ occupies a different position again. It has built one of the most distinctive propositions in the market around compactness, natural ride feel and system integration, offering a credible alternative to the increasingly familiar competition around maximum torque and power. But product differentiation alone does not automatically translate into category leadership. TQ has the engineering credibility and independence to contribute a different perspective to where the e-bike should go next, yet it still needs to make that perspective considerably more visible beyond the products themselves.

Gobao, meanwhile, is interesting precisely because it appears to understand that a space is opening. There is product, ambition and apparently growing traction among OEMs, while its narrative around independence could become increasingly relevant as the market reorganises itself between established European players and increasingly powerful Asian technology platforms. But Gobao may also become another example of a company whose technological and commercial potential is seriously diminished by an outdated management culture. Gaining OEM traction is one thing. Building the trust, autonomy, responsiveness and local market intelligence required to establish a lasting position in Europe is something else entirely. If decision-making remains too centralised, hierarchical or disconnected from the realities of the market, Gobao risks wasting the opportunity it has correctly identified. The product may be ready to move considerably faster than the organisation behind it.

Beyond them, the picture does not become particularly reassuring at this very moment.

Everybody seems to be moving, reacting, repositioning, launching, restructuring, protecting margins, searching for differentiation or simply trying to get through another difficult year, but very few appear to be asking the much larger question of what kind of industry we are actually creating.

And that matters because the technological boundaries of the e-bike are moving much faster than the cultural and regulatory boundaries surrounding it.

For decades, bicycles have occupied an extraordinarily privileged position in European mobility and public space. We can ride them without registration, without number plates, without driving licences and, in most circumstances, without mandatory insurance, while accessing roads, cycle infrastructure, trails and environments from which motor vehicles are deliberately excluded.

The e-bike inherited much of that privilege because society and regulators accepted a very specific proposition: fundamentally, this is still a bicycle.

The 25 km/h assistance limitation is therefore not simply an annoying piece of European bureaucracy attached to the product. It forms part of the social and regulatory contract that allows an electrically assisted bicycle to continue being treated as a bicycle.

That distinction is enormously valuable.

And we are playing with it at precisely the moment when motors are becoming more powerful, batteries more capable, software more sophisticated and the technical possibilities available to manufacturers and consumers considerably broader.

The hiker encountering an e-MTB on a shared trail does not know whether its motor has been manipulated. The landowner does not know. The journalist does not know. The politician does not know. The parent walking with their children certainly does not know. They simply see something that looks like an e-bike travelling at a speed at which they never expected to encounter a bicycle.

If enough of those encounters happen, the political conversation will not revolve around whether Bosch, Shimano, DJI, TQ, Gobao or anybody else technically complies with EN 15194 when their systems leave the factory. The conversation will become whether e-bikes should continue enjoying the same access and regulatory treatment as bicycles.

And once that conversation begins, we should not assume that the people making the decisions will carefully distinguish between the legal 25 km/h e-bike ridden responsibly by millions of Europeans and the manipulated machine that frightened somebody at 55 km/h on a shared trail.

They will regulate what they can see.

And what they can see is an e-bike.

This is why I find the industry’s response to tampering so revealing. The problem isn’t simply that tuning devices exist; people will always find ways to modify machines. The problem is that an entire commercial ecosystem can develop around deliberately circumventing the boundaries that protect our category while the industry’s response remains largely technical, institutional and regulatory.

Real ownership would look very different.

It would mean continuously monitoring the commercial ecosystem surrounding tuning, systematically identifying companies selling and advertising these products, working directly with Meta, Google, Amazon, eBay and other platforms, providing enforcement authorities with evidence, coordinating legal action wherever legislation allows it and making it considerably more difficult to build a perfectly normal consumer-facing business around converting legally defined bicycles into something they were never intended to be.

It would also require communicating far more aggressively outside our own industry bubble, because another PDF, another position paper, another voluntary commitment or another working group does very little if the consumer can simultaneously open Instagram and receive a beautifully produced advertisement promising 60 km/h from the e-bike sitting in their garage.

And this is where I think the bicycle industry repeatedly misunderstands leadership.

Leadership is not simply developing the best product, gaining market share, signing another OEM, protecting margins or lobbying Brussels when regulation threatens your business model. Leadership also means protecting the conditions that allow your category to exist in the first place, particularly when technological development starts testing the boundaries upon which that category was built.

Right now, everybody owns something.

Bosch owns an enormous installed base and one of the most powerful service ecosystems in the business. DJI owns a rapidly expanding technological proposition. Shimano owns decades of engineering heritage. TQ owns a distinctive product philosophy and the independence to articulate an alternative vision. Gobao wants to own part of whatever comes next. Bicycle manufacturers own their brands and their customers. Industry associations own representation and lobbying. Dealers own relationships with riders.

But who owns the category?

Who is prepared to say not only how much torque we can put into an e-bike, but how much we should? Who is thinking about what happens when assistance, power, software and aftermarket manipulation collectively push the product beyond what society understands a bicycle to be? Who is protecting trail access before we lose it? Who is explaining the distinction to policymakers before policymakers decide they no longer care about the distinction? Who is making sure that the enormous technological opportunity in front of us does not ultimately destroy one of the things that made the e-bike such an extraordinary success in the first place: its ability to remain a bicycle?

The bicycle industry has plenty of companies fighting for leadership of the market, but what it increasingly appears not to have is anybody willing to take responsibility for leadership of the category.

That is the real problem exposed by the ridiculous advertisement that appeared in my Instagram feed.

Not the chip, not the company selling it and not even the 60 km/h claim, but the vacuum that allows all of this to happen while everybody can still point somewhere else and say that dealing with it is somebody else’s responsibility.

We have the manufacturers, the associations, the standards, the declarations, the working groups, the engineering, the lawyers and the lobbyists.

What we seem to be missing is ownership.

And if this industry does not start protecting the definition of the e-bike itself, eventually somebody outside the industry will do it for us.

I know. I know this sounds familiar. I know we have been talking about regulation, access, power, speed and the increasingly blurred line between bicycles and motor vehicles for years, to the point where repeating the warning can almost feel like repeating the same old story.

But there is a rather inconvenient reason why the story keeps coming back.

Because the problem hasn’t gone away. We have simply become accustomed to ignoring it.

And that, to me, is considerably more worrying than the tuning device that started this whole train of thought.

We are sitting on a collective risk that affects virtually everybody in this industry, regardless of whether you manufacture motors, bicycles, components or accessories, whether you run a bike shop, organise events, build trails, operate a rental fleet or simply make your living from the fact that millions of people are allowed to ride bicycles in places where motor vehicles cannot go. Our businesses may be different, but an enormous part of their value ultimately depends on something we rarely put on a balance sheet: society continuing to recognise a bicycle as a bicycle, and an e-bike as something sufficiently close to one to deserve essentially the same privileges.

And somehow, despite everything happening around us, we continue behaving as though that assumption were permanent.

It isn’t.

Access isn’t permanent. Regulatory classification isn’t permanent. Public acceptance isn’t permanent. The political goodwill surrounding cycling isn’t permanent. None of these things were handed to our industry by nature; they exist because over decades bicycles established a particular relationship with society, cities, public space and the people who share that space with us.

Technology is now testing that relationship faster than at any point I can remember, and instead of treating that as a strategic risk to the entire sector, we continue discussing motors, torque figures, battery capacity, market share, OEM contracts and next year’s product launches while assuming that somebody, somewhere, will somehow take care of the environment that makes all those products commercially possible.

Maybe that is why I keep coming back to this subject.

Not because I enjoy repeating myself, and certainly not because I think another article warning about regulation is suddenly going to fix the problem, but because every few months something happens that makes the underlying risk harder to dismiss. A more powerful motor arrives. Another boundary gets pushed. Another tuning solution appears. Another advertisement promises something that would have seemed absurd on a bicycle only a few years ago. Another conversation about trail access begins somewhere. And each time, instead of asking what all of those individual signals might collectively be telling us, we absorb them, normalise them and move on.

That is how risks become crises.

Not necessarily because nobody saw them coming, but because everybody saw enough individual pieces to know something was changing and nobody felt responsible for putting the pieces together.

And maybe that is the part of this whole thing that bothers me most.

The bicycle industry is not being blindsided by this.

We are watching it happen.

We just don’t seem to believe yet that it can happen to us.

Scale matters, purchasing power matters, manufacturing efficiency matters, logistics matter, technology matters, distribution matters and shared infrastructure certainly matters, particularly in an industry that has spent the last few years discovering just how expensive duplication becomes when volumes suddenly disappear. The argument for consolidation is therefore not particularly difficult to make, and I am certainly not going to pretend that every bicycle brand needs its own finance department, warehouse, IT infrastructure or completely independent supply chain simply in order to protect some romantic idea of authenticity.

But then look at the brands PON owns.

Santa Cruz, Cervélo, Cannondale, Gazelle, Kalkhoff, Focus, Urban Arrow, Reserve.

These are not simply different logos attached to bicycles, or at least they should not be, because many of them became valuable precisely because they developed their own interpretation of what a bicycle should be, their own engineering decisions, product obsessions, culture, people, relationship with riders and dealers and, in some cases, their own wonderfully irrational way of doing things.

And this is where I think PON may have a problem, because it is trying to build an industrial platform around brands whose value depends, to a significant extent, on resisting industrialisation.

The economic logic of an industrial platform is relatively straightforward: identify duplication, create synergies, reduce costs, increase leverage and improve margins, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of that until the duplication you are eliminating turns out not to be duplication at all, but differentiation.

This is where premium brands become particularly difficult animals to manage, because we tend to assume that efficiency is inherently good. If two companies can share purchasing, why wouldn’t they? If engineering resources can be combined, why duplicate them? If manufacturing platforms can be shared, why develop two? If distribution can be consolidated, why maintain parallel structures? If commercial organisations can represent several brands, why pay for several sales forces travelling to exactly the same dealers?

Look at each of those decisions individually and almost every one of them makes sense.

Put all of them together, however, and you may eventually discover that while the companies have become considerably more efficient, the brands have also become considerably less interesting.

I recently heard about what I understand to be a pilot programme in Spain that illustrates this tension particularly well, with PON apparently testing a model in which the same sales organisation represents several of its brands, including Cannondale, Santa Cruz and Cervélo. I don’t know the exact structure of the programme or how far PON intends to take it, but the principle itself is fascinating because, viewed purely through the lens of efficiency, the logic is obvious: why maintain three separate commercial structures when the same salesperson can visit the same dealer and potentially represent three brands, reducing duplication, increasing productivity and giving the retailer access to a much broader portfolio through a single commercial relationship?

The problem is that when you look at exactly the same decision through the lens of brand differentiation, it becomes considerably more complicated, because what exactly is that salesperson representing when he walks through the dealer’s door?

A great Santa Cruz salesperson should not merely be selling bicycles manufactured by a company that happens to be called Santa Cruz. He should represent Santa Cruz, understand its products, its culture, its riders, its history, its peculiarities and the reasons why a particular dealer should want Santa Cruz on the shop floor rather than another mountain bike brand. Exactly the same should apply to Cervélo and Cannondale, because otherwise what is the point of owning three supposedly distinctive premium brands in the first place?

And there is an even more uncomfortable commercial question here. What happens when the dealer has the budget, floor space or appetite for only one of them? What exactly is the salesperson supposed to defend? The brand that best fits the dealer? The one with the most inventory sitting in a warehouse? The one whose quarterly target is furthest behind? The one offering the group the best margin? The one headquarters has decided needs an additional push that month?

This is not some minor operational detail, because the moment the conversation changes from this is why Santa Cruz belongs in your store to this is the portfolio we have available and let’s decide which of our brands fits which space in your store, something fundamental has changed.

You have moved from brand advocacy to portfolio management.

Commercially, that may prove considerably more efficient, but those are two fundamentally different ways of building a premium brand, and it also demonstrates why the boundary between useful synergy and destructive synergy is so difficult to identify. You do not need to start sharing frames, engineering platforms or product development before differentiation begins to disappear; you can start eroding it simply by changing the way the brand reaches the market.

Because some of what looks like inefficiency from the perspective of an industrial owner may actually be part of the reason the customer wanted the brand in the first place.

A product manager insisting on developing something that will never achieve enormous volumes, an engineer obsessed with a solution that costs more than the obvious alternative, a proprietary platform, a particular suspension philosophy, a manufacturing process that is difficult to scale, a deliberately selective dealer network, a racing programme whose ROI is almost impossible to put into a spreadsheet, or a group of people who have spent fifteen years arguing about what their brand would and would never do can all look terribly inefficient from headquarters.

But they can also be the moat.

And this is where I think the bicycle industry needs to be extremely careful with the current obsession with consolidation and scale, because premium is not simply a higher price point or a nicer frame with more expensive components attached to it. Premium is difference, and more specifically it is meaningful difference, because the customer needs to believe that choosing one brand rather than another actually means something.

Santa Cruz cannot simply become another way of buying a PON mountain bike, Cervélo cannot become another way of buying a PON road bike and Cannondale cannot merely occupy another price point, category or distribution channel inside an efficiently organised portfolio, because if that happens the financial architecture may become stronger while the individual brands themselves become weaker.

And once that process begins, it can become extraordinarily difficult to reverse, because more synergies create lower costs, lower costs encourage greater standardisation, greater standardisation reduces differentiation, reduced differentiation weakens desirability, weaker desirability increases price pressure and price pressure inevitably creates demand for further efficiencies, until eventually the industrial platform begins consuming the very thing it was built to monetise.

During a conversation about this earlier today, somebody described the danger in a way that I thought was absolutely perfect: turning Ferrari into Fiat.

And before somebody completely misses the point, this is not about Fiat being bad or industrial efficiency somehow being undesirable. It is about recognising that you cannot manage Ferrari according to exactly the same logic you would use to optimise Fiat without eventually changing what Ferrari is, because some of the things that make Ferrari economically inefficient compared with a mass-market manufacturer are precisely the things that make people willing to pay Ferrari money for one.

Bicycles are particularly interesting products in this respect because they are relatively simple machines surrounded by an extraordinary amount of emotion, identity, history, tribalism and personal preference. Two bicycles can perform almost identically on paper and still mean completely different things to the people buying them, and that difference is not some irrelevant marketing noise surrounding the product.

That difference is part of the product itself.

Which brings me to Santa Cruz, because I think it is probably the clearest example within the PON portfolio of the tension I am talking about. The interesting question is not whether Santa Cruz can be made more efficient, because of course it can; the interesting question is whether Santa Cruz needed to be changed in order to remain viable, or whether it needed to be changed in order to fit the economic logic of the industrial platform that owns it.

Those are two radically different questions, and I suspect the bicycle industry is going to have to confront that distinction increasingly often because consolidation is probably inevitable. There are too many brands, too much capacity and too much duplication for the market that now exists, and the numbers simply do not support the structure the industry built during the boom, which means that scale, consolidation and shared infrastructure are going to become increasingly important.

But scale alone will not solve the problem, because the real challenge is going to be understanding what should be scaled and what absolutely must not be scaled.

Finance, IT, logistics, compliance, certain purchasing functions and plenty of invisible infrastructure can probably be shared without a single customer giving a damn, and if doing so makes the companies financially healthier, then by all means do it. But product philosophy, culture, engineering obsession, brand voice, community, dealer relationships and the small group of slightly unreasonable people who make one bicycle company feel fundamentally different from another deserve much more careful treatment, because once those things disappear, writing another cheque will not magically bring them back.

The biggest mistake an industrial owner can make is therefore to look at the inefficiencies of a premium brand without first asking whether some of those inefficiencies are actually part of what makes it premium.

And that, more than anything else, is the paradox I see in what PON is trying to build: the better its industrial platform becomes at eliminating inefficiency, the greater the risk that it also becomes extraordinarily good at eliminating difference, and without difference there is no premium, regardless of how valuable the logo on the downtube once was.

Cycling is certainly no exception. In fact, take almost any major bicycle brand and look at the way it presents a new performance product. Specialized is simply the first name that comes into my head, so let’s use them, although I could replace that name with almost any other brand in the industry and the argument would remain exactly the same. When the next high-end e-MTB is launched, I can tell you with reasonable confidence what the person riding it in the campaign will look like. What I can also tell you with considerably more confidence is that he probably won’t look anything like me.

I am 53 years old, I have two kids and, at around 100 kilos, I possess what could generously be described as the physique of a lumberjack with a slightly beer-enhanced dad body. I ride mountain bikes, I have been around bicycles for decades, I know what I like, I spend money on the sport and I am exactly the sort of person who could walk into a dealer tomorrow and buy a premium e-MTB. There are thousands upon thousands of people like me riding every weekend across Europe, and many of them have considerably more disposable income than the beautifully lean 28-year-old rider disappearing sideways through a cloud of dust in the advertising campaign.

And yet you very rarely see us.

This is where the subject becomes considerably more interesting than whether cycling advertising contains enough older people, enough women, enough different body types or any other demographic category we might decide to measure. Because what initially looks like a representation problem starts to reveal something much deeper about the relationship between cycling brands and the people who actually sustain them.

Go to a trail centre on a Sunday morning and look around. Spend an hour inside a good premium bicycle dealer and watch who comes through the door. Attend an e-MTB event in Germany, Switzerland or Austria and look at the riders. The real cycling community is wonderfully messy: people in their twenties riding alongside people in their sixties, extremely fit riders alongside people carrying an extra twenty kilos, former racers, weekend warriors, parents, beginners, people rediscovering cycling through an e-bike and people who have been riding mountain bikes since suspension forks were considered exotic technology. That is what cycling actually looks like.

Then open Instagram.

The difference between those two worlds is extraordinary.

And the more I think about that difference, the more I suspect that we have misunderstood something fundamental about modern bicycle marketing. Brands don’t represent their communities; they represent the communities their marketing departments imagine should exist.

That might sound like a relatively harmless creative choice, but I don’t think it is. Because every time a brand decides who gets to appear riding its products, it is also making a decision about who gets to represent cycling itself, and after decades of repeatedly making the same choices we have created an extraordinarily narrow visual definition of what a “real cyclist” looks like. The irony is that this imaginary community increasingly bears very little resemblance to the enormously diverse group of people actually keeping much of the bicycle industry alive.

And this is where I think the conversation becomes much more important than advertising, because the opportunity being lost here is enormous. For the last few years, the bicycle industry has spent an extraordinary amount of time talking about growth: how to bring new people into cycling, how to attract younger consumers, how to get more women riding, how to convert commuters, how to make e-bikes culturally relevant, how to protect participation after the pandemic and, increasingly, how to convince people who bought bicycles during that period not to abandon them again. We keep looking for the next customer while paying remarkably little attention to the extraordinary variety of customers already standing in front of us.

I have written before about what I call the Former Cyclist: the millions of people who once considered cycling part of their identity but gradually disappeared from the sport because life changed around them. Work became more demanding, children arrived, fitness disappeared, weight arrived, time became scarce and eventually the person who once thought nothing of riding for four hours on a Sunday morning started telling himself that cycling was something he used to do. I have also written about the Invisible Market, about people who don’t necessarily fit the industry’s traditional definition of a cyclist but who could nevertheless build a meaningful relationship with a bicycle if we stopped expecting everyone to enter cycling through the same cultural door.

The representation problem is connected to both of those things because before somebody buys a bicycle, joins a group ride, walks into a specialist dealer or decides that cycling could become part of their life again, something much more basic has to happen: they have to believe that this world has a place for them. That belief is influenced by many things, but the images and stories an industry puts into the world are unquestionably among them. If every representation of mountain biking tells you that mountain biking belongs to people who are younger, fitter, faster and more technically capable than you, we shouldn’t be surprised when millions of perfectly viable potential riders conclude, consciously or otherwise, that mountain biking simply isn’t for them.

That seems like an extraordinary missed opportunity. If I am 53, have two children, weigh around 100 kilos and can look at somebody who resembles me riding a serious e-MTB without being treated as the comic relief, the beginner or the guy who needs an electric motor because he is no longer capable of riding a “proper” bicycle, something changes. I don’t need that person to be ordinary, slow or boring; I want him to be doing something that makes me think, fuck, I want to do that. The aspiration remains exactly where it was, but suddenly the distance between the person experiencing the aspiration and the person representing it becomes believable.

And that distinction is fundamental, because I think cycling has spent too long confusing aspiration with unattainability. Aspiration works when I can imagine a better, more adventurous or more exciting version of myself. It becomes considerably less useful when the person being presented to me belongs to an entirely different physical and cultural universe. A 53-year-old father doesn’t necessarily aspire to become 27 again, just as a 55-year-old woman doesn’t necessarily need a 24-year-old professional athlete to show her what adventure looks like. She may aspire to become the 58-year-old woman crossing the Alps, just as I might find the 56-year-old slightly overweight bastard absolutely flying down a trail far more compelling than another professional rider making an impossible section look effortless.

This is why I increasingly believe that representation in cycling should be understood as a growth strategy rather than a diversity exercise. The commercial question isn’t simply whether our campaigns contain the correct demographic mix; it is whether we are showing enough different versions of cycling for enough different people to imagine themselves becoming part of it. Every additional credible version of what a cyclist can look like potentially creates another entrance into the sport, another reason to stay in it and another way for somebody to recognise that the bicycle being advertised might actually have a place in their life.

Once you look at the issue through that lens, several conversations that cycling tends to treat separately begin to look like different manifestations of the same problem. The Former Cyclist, the enormous potential of e-bikes, women’s cycling, Europe’s ageing population and the difficulty the industry has attracting people who don’t identify with traditional cycling culture all raise essentially the same question: how many people could have a meaningful relationship with cycling but fail to recognise themselves in the version of it that we present to the world? Even the industry’s obsession with product specifications is part of this, because we continue to spend enormous amounts of energy explaining what a bicycle is while devoting considerably less imagination to showing all the different things a bicycle could allow different kinds of people to become.

There is an important distinction to make here, because the answer is obviously not to replace every professional athlete in a campaign with someone who looks like me. I don’t want cycling advertising to become deliberately ordinary, and I certainly don’t want brands to start assembling campaigns by demographic checklist, carefully adding one older rider, one woman, one heavier rider and one person of every required background before congratulating themselves on being representative. Apart from being painfully artificial, that would miss the point completely.

The question is not whether aspiration should disappear from cycling marketing. The question is why we have allowed ourselves to develop such an extraordinarily narrow definition of what aspiration looks like.

Somewhere along the way, cycling seems to have decided that aspiration has a relatively predictable physical form. It is young, lean, fast, technically gifted and usually operating at a level that most customers will never reach. This makes perfect sense when the person in question is an athlete and the purpose of the communication is sporting performance, but it makes considerably less sense when exactly the same visual language is applied to almost every product, every category and every customer. We have taken the imagery of elite sport and used it as the default imagery of cycling, even as the market itself has expanded far beyond the people who define themselves primarily through performance.

The strange thing is that aspiration doesn’t actually work like that in most people’s lives. At 53, I have absolutely no desire to become 25 again, partly because that would require some fairly advanced biotechnology and partly because I quite like being 53. What I can imagine, however, is being stronger at 55 than I am today, riding better than I do today, travelling somewhere extraordinary with my bike, learning to clear a technical section that currently scares the shit out of me, riding with my children as they get older or still being able to smash trails when I am 65. Those things are aspirational to me precisely because I can recognise myself somewhere inside them.

The same is surely true for millions of other people. A woman of 56 may find another woman of 60 completing an extraordinary bikepacking journey vastly more inspiring than a professional athlete half her age. Someone who weighs 120 kilos and hasn’t exercised seriously for fifteen years may find the story of somebody who rediscovered mountain biking through an e-bike genuinely life-changing. A 65-year-old rider might see another rider of the same age still tackling demanding trails and suddenly rethink what the next decade of his life could look like. None of these stories requires us to lower the bar or make cycling less exciting; quite the opposite, because what makes them powerful is that the achievement feels simultaneously extraordinary and imaginable.

Perhaps the mistake has been confusing aspiration with admiration. I can admire what a professional mountain biker does without imagining for one second that his or her life has anything to do with mine. Aspiration requires something else: enough distance to make me want to move forward, but enough proximity for me to believe that movement is possible. When that connection exists, a bicycle stops being merely an object being demonstrated by somebody else and becomes a tool through which I can imagine another version of myself.

For an industry currently struggling with growth, that distinction should matter enormously. We have become extraordinarily sophisticated at communicating technological improvement while remaining surprisingly unimaginative about human possibility. Every new generation of bicycle arrives lighter, stiffer, more powerful, more integrated, more connected and equipped with another collection of measurable improvements, yet the human being riding it often seems to have remained frozen in the same narrow archetype for decades. We broadened what the bicycle can do while barely broadening our imagination of who might want to do it.

E-bikes make that contradiction almost impossible to defend. Here is a technology that fundamentally changes the relationship between physical capability and participation, allowing people to ride further, climb more, compensate for differences in fitness, return after years away, continue riding as they age and share experiences with people they previously couldn’t keep up with. It may be the single most powerful participation technology cycling has developed in generations, and yet we frequently communicate it through imagery inherited from a culture obsessed with athletic performance. We have created a product capable of making cycling relevant to vastly more people and then often chosen to make it look relevant to exactly the same people as before.

There is also something culturally dangerous about that, because imagery doesn’t merely sell products; over time, it establishes norms. If the person repeatedly shown riding a serious mountain bike is young, lean and highly skilled, then that becomes our subconscious definition of who belongs on a serious mountain bike. Everyone else becomes an exception: the 55-year-old woman becomes ‘an older rider’, the 105-kilo man becomes ‘the big guy’, the beginner becomes someone who has not yet earned their place and the e-bike rider becomes someone requiring assistance rather than simply another cyclist. We create categories around people who deviate from the image we ourselves invented and then wonder why cycling can feel intimidating from the outside.

The irony is that some of the most compelling stories available to cycling brands are sitting precisely among those supposed exceptions, because a person still riding at 70 carries a story about longevity, someone returning at 50 carries a story about rediscovery, a parent and child riding together can tell us something about transmission between generations, a woman discovering mountain biking after raising a family can embody freedom, and someone whose body looks nothing like an athlete’s but who rides every weekend can tell an extraordinarily powerful story about belonging. These aren’t compromises to aspiration; they are entirely different forms of aspiration, and in many cases they contain considerably more emotional territory for a brand to explore than another perfectly executed corner in another beautifully shot forest.

This is also where I think cycling could learn something important about the difference between selling performance and selling possibility. Performance will always matter, particularly in a sport where products are genuinely capable of changing how fast, far or technically we can ride. But possibility is potentially much bigger because it allows the same product to mean different things to different people. The new e-MTB can be about outright speed for one rider, extending a ride from two hours to four for another, keeping up with friends for someone else, returning to the mountains after ten years away for another, or simply discovering that at 60 the most exciting part of your cycling life might still be ahead of you.

Once brands begin telling those stories, the addressable market can change without changing the product at all, and perhaps that is the biggest missed opportunity in this entire conversation. The bicycle industry has spent years searching for technological innovations capable of unlocking its next phase of growth while overlooking something considerably simpler: expanding the number of people who can look at cycling and genuinely think, that could be me. Those people are already there, walking into our dealers, standing at the trailhead on Sunday morning, riding e-bikes with their partners, coming back to the sport after fifteen years, getting older without losing their appetite for adventure and, yes, carrying a few more kilos than the people appearing in our campaigns. If the version of cycling we choose to show them bears increasingly little resemblance to the community they can see with their own eyes, perhaps the problem isn’t that cycling needs to find another audience at all. Perhaps we simply need to become considerably better at seeing the one we already have.

Those two transactions took place at a very particular moment for the bicycle industry. We were coming out of two years in which demand had exceeded anything most companies had planned for, supply chains were struggling to keep up, inventories had been depleted and bicycles had suddenly acquired a relevance that many of us had spent years arguing they deserved. E-bikes were growing rapidly, governments were investing in cycling and there was a widespread expectation that at least part of the behavioural change produced during Covid would remain. Looking back from 2026, some of the forecasts made during that period appear wildly optimistic, but pretending today that nobody believed them would be rewriting history. A great many people inside and outside this industry did.

PON and KKR were not making identical bets. PON was an industrial owner expanding a bicycle business it had been building for years, while KKR was acquiring Accell through a leveraged private-equity transaction, a difference that would eventually become enormously important. What both transactions represented, however, was the deployment of very large amounts of capital into an industry in which scale, consolidation and continued growth were expected to become increasingly important.

Four and a half years later, Accell is insolvent while PON Bike remains one of the largest bicycle groups in the world, which makes it tempting to conclude that one consolidation model failed while the other succeeded. I am not convinced it is that simple, because the more closely I look at what Accell spent its final years trying to do and what PON Bike is doing today, the more similarities I see between them.

The most obvious place to start is with the portfolios themselves and the extraordinary amount of overlap both groups accumulated while building them. Accell assembled brands including Haibike, Winora, Ghost, Lapierre, Koga, Batavus, Sparta and Raleigh, while PON built an even broader portfolio containing Cannondale, Santa Cruz, Cervélo, Focus, Kalkhoff, Gazelle, Urban Arrow, Schwinn, Mongoose, Caloi and others. Different brands obviously address different consumers, markets and distribution networks, and category overlap does not automatically mean consumer overlap, but there is no escaping the fact that both groups ended up owning several companies selling similar types of bicycles, often through many of the same dealers and sometimes to remarkably similar customers.

From the consumer side that can make perfect sense. Someone buying a Santa Cruz isn’t necessarily considering a Cannondale simply because both companies make mountain bikes, just as a Cervélo customer doesn’t automatically become a Focus customer because both brands make road bikes. Brands exist precisely because consumers attach different meanings to products that, viewed purely as machines, can perform very similar functions.

From inside a large organisation, however, the same picture looks rather different. Several brands can also mean several engineering organisations, product-development structures, sales teams, marketing budgets, logistics operations and manufacturing requirements serving categories and customers that frequently overlap. During a rapidly expanding market much of that duplication can be tolerated because every part of the portfolio is contributing growth. Once growth disappears, margins come under pressure and inventory starts consuming cash, the question inevitably changes from how much market all those brands can capture to how much of the structure behind them is genuinely necessary.

This is where “synergies” become more complicated than the acquisition presentations normally suggest. Sharing procurement, consolidating logistics and improving factory utilisation can all make perfectly good business sense, and removing genuine administrative duplication may allow more money to be invested in product, dealers and consumers. The problem begins when something the organisation identifies as duplication is also something the consumer identifies as differentiation.

Cycling is particularly exposed to this because bicycle brands are not simply logos attached to products coming from interchangeable industrial systems. Their value has been accumulated through engineering philosophies, particular technologies, racing programmes, people, geography, relationships with dealers and athletes and, occasionally, stubborn ways of doing things that look horribly inefficient when viewed exclusively through an Excel spreadsheet. Some of those peculiarities are expensive and some undoubtedly deserve to disappear, but others are precisely why consumers distinguish one brand from another and are prepared to pay for that distinction.

This creates a contradiction at the heart of consolidation that I don’t think our industry discusses enough. Groups acquire brands because those brands possess something different enough to be valuable, and then immediately have a financial incentive to identify everything those companies do separately that could instead be shared. The process is entirely logical until the duplication being removed starts to include some of the differentiation that justified the acquisition in the first place.

Santa Cruz provides an interesting illustration without requiring us to invent a causal relationship that we cannot prove. VPP became one of the technical characteristics most closely associated with Santa Cruz over several decades, yet the Vala departed from that architecture and adopted a four-bar suspension system. There may be very good engineering reasons for that decision and I have found no evidence whatsoever that PON instructed Santa Cruz to make it as part of a wider attempt to create group synergies. What interests me is that riders noticed immediately, because their reaction demonstrates how easily something that engineers regard as a technical choice can also form part of what consumers understand the identity of a brand to be.

GT gives us something much more concrete to work with. When PON acquired Dorel Sports it also acquired decades of GT history in BMX and mountain biking, from Gary Turner and Richard Long through racing, the Triple Triangle, Hans Rey and several generations of products and athletes. By the end of 2024, however, GT had announced what it called a strategic reorientation: new product introductions were paused, the organisation was dramatically reduced and existing inventory would continue to be sold.

GT has not legally disappeared and PON still owns the brand, so claiming that it has formally been killed would be inaccurate. But there is a meaningful difference between owning a trademark and maintaining an active bicycle company, and once most of the organisation, the normal rhythm of product development and much of the sporting infrastructure surrounding a brand have gone, the terminology becomes considerably less interesting than what has actually happened.

PON is a business rather than a museum of bicycle history and I don’t expect it to finance every company it has ever acquired indefinitely because some of us remember the bikes and athletes with affection. What GT demonstrates is something much more useful: being owned by an enormous and financially powerful industrial group does not automatically protect a historic brand when maintaining that brand in its existing form no longer makes sufficient economic sense.

Which brings us to Cannondale.

There is no public evidence that PON intends to close Cannondale, and I am not interested in turning industry rumours into facts simply because they would make this article more dramatic. Cannondale continues developing and selling bicycles, supporting dealers and operating as one of the major global performance brands inside PON. There are, however, two substantial and verifiable changes taking place around the company that deserve attention.

The first is the closure of Cannondale’s dedicated European assembly facility in Almelo, affecting approximately 120 positions, with production progressively transferred to other PON facilities. More interesting than the closure itself is PON’s explanation for it: the company is moving towards what it explicitly describes as an “integrated multi-brand production network”, something we can already see elsewhere in the group as several brands increasingly share manufacturing infrastructure.

The second is the decision to end Cannondale Factory Racing after the 2026 season, bringing to a close a racing presence that, in different forms, stretches back more than three decades. Cannondale has explained the decision as a reallocation of marketing resources towards a broader combination of athletes, creators, events, community activities and test opportunities, which may prove to be a much more effective use of those resources. Racing has nevertheless played an enormous role in Cannondale’s technical and cultural history, particularly in mountain biking, and its disappearance at roughly the same time as the brand loses its dedicated European manufacturing operation is difficult to ignore.

Neither decision demonstrates that Cannondale is in trouble. A dedicated factory can become economically inefficient and a factory racing programme can stop producing an adequate return on investment. What they do demonstrate, particularly when placed alongside GT and PON’s own language around multi-brand manufacturing, is that the relationship between PON and the individual companies it owns is changing, with dedicated structures increasingly having to justify why they should remain dedicated.

And this is where Accell becomes considerably more relevant to the PON discussion than I initially expected.

Accell has been the industry’s favourite punching bag for quite some time, and plenty of that criticism was deserved. The debt was real, the inventory problem was real, Babboe was real and the financial structure eventually became impossible to sustain. There is no point trying to sanitise any of that simply because the company has now entered insolvency. But while Accell was receiving criticism from practically every direction, it was also carrying out one of the most substantial operational restructurings seen in the European bicycle industry in recent years.

The numbers make the scale of that transformation difficult to dismiss. Accell reduced its international warehouse footprint from 85 locations to just 9, consolidated its manufacturing footprint from five plants to one — with a team of around 25 people remaining in Dijon for final assembly only — brought finished-bike inventory down from 340,000 units in November 2023 to 169,000 twelve months later, centralised back-office functions and progressively separated production capacity from individual brands. It subsequently sold Van Nicholas specifically as part of reducing portfolio overlap and, by April 2026, described its transformation from a decentralised house of brands into an integrated platform as essentially complete.

None of it saved the company, but that doesn’t mean the industrial logic behind all of it was wrong. Accell was trying to remove complexity, duplication and excess capacity at precisely the moment when its financial structure was removing the amount of time available to complete the job.

What fascinates me, having watched both companies from inside this industry over the last few years, is how differently we have tended to interpret remarkably similar decisions. Accell could barely move without somebody finding another reason to kick it. Factory consolidation was evidence of distress, restructuring was evidence that the strategy had failed and integration inevitably raised concerns about what was happening to the individual brands. PON, meanwhile, has generally enjoyed something much closer to the benefit of the doubt. GT can effectively be put into suspended animation, Cannondale can lose its dedicated European manufacturing operation, Cannondale Factory Racing can disappear after more than three decades and PON can openly talk about integrated multi-brand manufacturing, yet the instinctive interpretation tends to be that this is simply what a strong industrial owner does when it intelligently optimises its portfolio.

Maybe that interpretation is entirely justified. PON may simply be doing earlier, from a position of financial strength, what Accell was forced to do too late and under enormous pressure. If so, that may ultimately explain a considerable part of the difference between their outcomes.

But once you strip away the different corporate language, this is where the comparison contains some real dynamite.

Accell described the transformation it began in 2024 as moving away from a “decentralized house of brands” towards becoming an “integrated player”. PON continues to emphasise the individual identity of its brands and describes them as part of “one family”, while simultaneously developing an “integrated multi-brand production network” and removing dedicated structures where they no longer make economic sense.

Those descriptions are not identical and the circumstances could hardly be more different, but the underlying industrial problem looks remarkably familiar. Both companies accumulated an extraordinary number of brands, both created substantial overlap in doing so and both eventually had to confront the cost and complexity involved in maintaining those brands as largely independent organisations once market growth was no longer strong enough to absorb the inefficiency.

We may therefore have spent the last few years assuming that Accell and PON represented two fundamentally different approaches to bicycle-industry consolidation when they may actually be converging towards essentially the same industrial conclusion: the future of the bicycle conglomerate is not necessarily a collection of independent companies sharing an owner, but a common industrial platform supporting a collection of consumer-facing brands.

If that is where both models ultimately lead, the decisive difference between them may not be the destination at all. It may be the amount of time and financial flexibility available to reach it.

This is where Accell’s capital structure becomes impossible to ignore. In 2021, immediately before the KKR transaction, Accell reported €1.377 billion in revenue and an EBIT margin of 8%, hardly the numbers of a company that appeared to be heading towards insolvency. KKR subsequently took Accell private through a leveraged acquisition, and when the post-Covid bicycle market corrected far more violently and for far longer than many expected, Accell entered that correction carrying a financial burden PON simply did not have.

By October 2024, Accell acknowledged approximately €1.4 billion of debt and announced a restructuring intended to reduce that amount by roughly €600 million while injecting approximately €235 million of additional liquidity. That still wasn’t enough. Ownership subsequently passed to lenders and on August 6th, 2026 the company began insolvency proceedings.

Reducing that sequence to “private equity killed Accell” would be far too simplistic. The market collapse mattered, inventory mattered, operational decisions mattered and many companies across this industry made assumptions during Covid that became extraordinarily expensive afterwards. What cannot be dismissed is that debt changes the amount of time available to correct those mistakes. An operational problem that a strongly capitalised owner can spend several years repairing can become existential much faster when interest, liquidity and leverage are dictating the timetable.

PON entered the same market correction from a fundamentally different position. It is privately held, family controlled, operates substantial businesses outside cycling and does not have the same leveraged acquisition structure sitting directly above Pon.Bike. That doesn’t automatically make its bicycle strategy better, but it gives the organisation something Accell progressively lost: the ability to decide the pace at which the transformation takes place.

There is another difference between the two groups that has shaped the way we perceive them. For most of the period during which Accell built its empire it was publicly traded and therefore obliged to show us considerably more of its financial reality. Revenue, margins, EBIT, product mix, geographical performance and eventually the scale of its problems became visible. PON is privately owned and publishes far less granular information about the performance of its bicycle portfolio. We know the revenues it chooses to disclose for Pon.Bike and the company has stated that the division remains profitable, but we cannot see the profitability of Cannondale, Santa Cruz, Cervélo, Focus or Gazelle individually, nor can we calculate from public information the return PON has generated on the $810 million it invested in Dorel Sports.

That doesn’t imply that something is wrong inside PON and it would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise simply because the information isn’t public. It does, however, mean that the comparison has always been asymmetric. Accell spent years operating with its scoreboard visible while PON never had to provide us with anything comparable, and inevitably the company whose problems everybody could see became the company everybody criticised.

This is why I am increasingly uncomfortable with the neat conclusion that Accell failed while PON succeeded. Accell unquestionably failed, and its capital structure ultimately left it without enough time for an operational transformation that was already well underway. PON unquestionably survived the same market correction and remains in a vastly stronger position. What we cannot yet establish from outside is whether its enormous bicycle consolidation experiment has produced the returns originally expected from it, nor what degree of rationalisation will ultimately be required across a portfolio containing more than twenty brands.

That is the part of the comparison I find most interesting now. Accell may not simply be the cautionary tale against which PON should be measured. It may also provide an accelerated view of some of the industrial questions PON itself now has to answer: how much complexity is sustainable, how much overlap can be justified and how far shared infrastructure can go before efficiency begins to erode the differentiation that made all those brands valuable in the first place.

The enormous advantage PON has is that it can answer those questions before its financial structure answers them on its behalf.

Accell didn’t get that luxury.

On January 4th, 2022, PON completed its $810 million acquisition of Dorel Sports. Twenty days later, KKR announced the €1.56 billion acquisition of Accell. Four and a half years later we know how the second transaction ended, while the first continues to evolve behind a level of financial visibility that makes direct comparison considerably more difficult than the industry’s prevailing narrative would suggest.

The question we should have been asking may never have been why Accell failed while PON succeeded. We may have been watching two companies trying to solve essentially the same industrial problem under radically different financial conditions.

Accell knew what it had to do. It reduced warehouses, inventory, manufacturing complexity, organisational duplication and portfolio overlap, but it was doing so while debt progressively removed the one resource its transformation needed most.

Time.

PON has it.

What we don’t yet know is what Pon.Bike will look like when it has finished using it.

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The Tour de France starts and, almost overnight, the rest of cycling quietly disappears. Product launches are timed around it. Marketing calendars suddenly become obsessed with yellow. Every brand rediscovers its racing heritage. Every social media feed begins to look suspiciously like the next one. For three weeks it feels as though nothing of any real importance can possibly happen anywhere else in cycling unless it is taking place somewhere between Lille and Paris.

None of this surprises me anymore.

I’ve been part of this industry for more than twenty years, but my relationship with the Tour goes back much further than that. Like countless Spaniards of my generation, I grew up with Pedro Delgado and then Miguel Induráin. Watching the Tour was never really a conscious decision. It was simply part of summer. In Spain, at four o’clock on a July afternoon, there were very few realistic alternatives. You either watched the Tour or accepted that the heat was going to beat you into having a siesta. Those long afternoons, the sound of helicopters hovering above mountain roads, Pedro Delgado attacking when nobody expected him to, Induráin riding with that impossible calmness... they became part of the rhythm of July. The Tour wasn’t simply a sporting event. It became one of those traditions you never stop to question.

I still don't. Every July I still look forward to the Tour, I still block time in my calendar for the mountain stages and I still enjoy hearing the familiar voices, recognising the climbs and trying to work out where the decisive attacks might come. Some traditions become so deeply embedded in your life that you stop questioning them altogether, which is probably why it took me by surprise to realise that this July I was looking forward to a different race altogether.

Without really planning it, I found myself spending considerably more time watching the Tour de France Femmes than the men’s race.

If I’m honest, I initially thought I understood why.

There was probably a little bit of rebellion involved. Over the last few years I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with the ecosystem that has grown around the men’s Tour. The race itself remains extraordinary. That isn’t the issue. Watching Tadej Pogačar ride a bicycle is watching one of the greatest athletes of his generation operating at a level that very few riders in history have ever reached. Anyone who genuinely loves cycling should appreciate that.

My discomfort comes from somewhere else.

The Tour de France has gradually become much bigger than the race itself. Every July it feels as though the industry becomes obsessed with celebrating its own mythology. Everything has to be iconic. Everything has to be legendary. Every activation is presented as historic. Every new product somehow becomes part of the Tour narrative. Every hospitality event suddenly acquires strategic importance. Somewhere along the way, the race itself has become surrounded by so much commercial noise that I sometimes struggle to separate the sporting event from everything built around it.

To be absolutely clear, none of that is ASO’s fault.

If anything, ASO deserves enormous credit. Very few organisations in sport have been as successful at transforming an already iconic event into a truly global property without destroying its identity. The production is exceptional. The storytelling is world class. The organisation is extraordinary.

The same is true of the Tour de France Femmes.

In a remarkably short period of time, ASO has managed to build something that no longer feels like an appendix to the men’s race. It feels like a proper sporting event with its own identity, its own heroes and its own personality.

There is, however, one issue that still puzzles me.

Depending on where you happen to live, following the Tour de France Femmes can still be surprisingly difficult. Television coverage remains inconsistent, access varies enormously from one country to another and, in far too many places, simply finding the race requires considerably more effort than finding the men’s Tour, whose coverage is almost impossible to avoid.

The fact that the Tour de France Femmes remains significantly harder to watch than the men's race is more than a broadcasting issue. It goes to the very heart of one of the industry's favourite arguments. We are constantly told that elite female athletes inspire more women to ride bicycles and I happen to believe that's absolutely true. But inspiration requires visibility. People cannot be inspired by athletes they struggle to watch and they certainly won't build lasting connections with a sporting event that remains unnecessarily difficult to access. If we genuinely believe that women's cycling represents one of the biggest growth opportunities for our industry, making its biggest race easy to watch should probably be considered a strategic priority rather than an operational detail.

Despite all that, I kept coming back to the Tour de France Femmes, initially assuming that curiosity, a certain rebellious instinct and even a conscious desire to support women’s cycling probably had something to do with it. It didn’t take me long to discover that the explanation was considerably simpler and, for me at least, far more interesting: stage after stage, I was simply enjoying it more.

The more stages I watched, the more I found myself looking forward to the following afternoon. It wasn't because the riders were stronger, nor because the race was somehow more important. The racing simply felt less constrained by expectation and considerably more willing to embrace uncertainty. Attacks failed. Tactical decisions backfired. Race situations evolved in ways that nobody seemed entirely capable of controlling and, as a spectator, that unpredictability made the whole experience remarkably engaging. Watching Tadej Pogačar perform at his current level is an extraordinary privilege and I don't mean that ironically. We are witnessing one of the greatest riders the sport has ever produced. But complete dominance inevitably changes the way a race is experienced from the sofa. Sport has always lived on uncertainty and, whether fair or not, I found considerably more of it in the Tour de France Femmes than I did in the men's race.

I also started paying attention to the conversation surrounding the racing, spending more time than usual scrolling through the social media channels of bicycle brands, component manufacturers, apparel companies and race partners to see how they were telling the stories of the two Tours. I wasn’t trying to prove anything or looking for somebody to blame; I was simply curious to see how an industry that has spent years talking about the importance of bringing more women into cycling behaved when its biggest female sporting event was actually taking place. The conclusion was depressing.

Not because men’s racing received more attention. That, to a certain extent, is hardly surprising given the audience figures, the commercial investment and decades of history behind the Tour de France.

What genuinely caught my attention was something much more subtle: the way many brands still talk about their female professional athletes and, time and again, refuse to allow those women to become the protagonists of their own stories.

Their victories were framed through the men’s race.

Their performances were mentioned alongside the men’s results.

Their achievements became an extension of somebody else’s narrative instead of being treated as narratives in their own right.

Sometimes it was obvious and sometimes almost imperceptible, but once I noticed the pattern it became increasingly difficult to ignore. One brand would celebrate the men’s stage in considerable detail before adding, almost as an afterthought, that one of its female riders had also produced an extraordinary performance; another would begin with the men’s race before eventually arriving at the women’s result several paragraphs later; others would congratulate “our athletes” while the imagery, language and emotional energy left very little doubt about which athletes were actually carrying the story. None of those examples would have bothered me much in isolation, but collectively they revealed something far more interesting than any individual communication decision: they revealed instinct, and instinct is remarkably difficult to fake.

This isn’t about counting posts, demanding identical levels of exposure or turning professional cycling into another tedious exercise in political correctness. It’s about narrative ownership. The order matters, the language matters, the images matter, the enthusiasm matters and, above all, the context in which an achievement is presented matters. When a female athlete does something extraordinary and the instinctive reaction is to explain that achievement through the men’s race, append it to the men’s result or somehow connect it to a story whose protagonist is already male, the message being communicated is considerably more powerful than the brand probably realises: the men’s race remains the main event, while the women’s race becomes relevant once it can be attached to it.

That is an extraordinary cultural reflex for an industry that spends the rest of the year telling us that attracting more women into cycling is one of its greatest strategic priorities. Winning the Tour de France Femmes does not require validation from the Tour de France, and the women racing it should not need to borrow narrative relevance from the men in order for their achievements to matter. They are not supporting characters in somebody else’s Tour. They are the protagonists of their own.

There is another aspect of this that I find genuinely insulting, and it has less to do with the athletes than with the audience. Communicating women’s racing in this way assumes that cycling fans somehow need the men’s Tour as a reference point before we can understand the significance of what we are watching, as though we were incapable of recognising a great sporting story unless somebody first explained why it deserves our attention. It underestimates the intelligence of the very people these brands spend enormous amounts of money trying to reach, because cycling fans are perfectly capable of distinguishing genuine excitement from corporate obligation, just as they are perfectly capable of recognising when an athlete is being celebrated as the protagonist of a story and when she has simply been added to somebody else’s.

And then came Mont Ventoux.

By that point I had already spent several days thinking about everything I’ve written above, wondering whether I was simply being provocative, whether my perception of the two races had been influenced by my growing frustration with some of the rituals surrounding the men’s Tour, or whether there really was something fundamentally different about the experience I was having as a spectator. Yesterday’s stage removed most of those doubts.

What I watched on Mont Ventoux was real, exciting and extraordinarily honest. It wasn’t perfect, and that was precisely the point. It was sport stripped of much of the predictability that increasingly surrounds elite competition, with riders taking risks, suffering, attacking, responding, making decisions under enormous pressure and exposing themselves physically and emotionally in a way that made it almost impossible to look away. I wasn’t watching because these were women and I wanted to support them. I wasn’t comparing power numbers, average speeds or wondering how the same climb would have unfolded in the men’s race. None of that crossed my mind because none of it mattered. I was watching a fantastic bike race and enjoying every bloody minute of it.

And that is ultimately why I find the way parts of our industry continue to communicate women’s professional cycling so frustrating. Yesterday didn’t need a comparison with the men’s Tour to become relevant, it didn’t need to be positioned as the female version of something else and it certainly didn’t need somebody in a marketing department to explain why we should care. The riders did that themselves on the road, on one of the most iconic climbs in the history of this sport, producing exactly the kind of spectacle that generations of cycling fans have spent their summers waiting to see.

Which makes the habit of communicating those women as an extension of the men’s story, or worse, as an afterthought to it, increasingly difficult to understand and even harder to excuse. Winning, attacking or simply producing extraordinary sport in the Tour de France Femmes does not require validation from whatever happened in the men’s Tour a few weeks earlier. These athletes are perfectly capable of owning their stories, and yesterday on Mont Ventoux they demonstrated that far more convincingly than any diversity campaign, corporate statement or carefully prepared strategy presentation ever could.

For years we’ve been asking how to persuade more people to care about women’s cycling, while yesterday I found myself glued to the television for a much simpler reason: I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next and desperately wanted to find out.

They are all perfectly reasonable questions and, in many respects, they are exactly the questions our industry should be asking. Any ecosystem that stops attracting new people has already begun its decline, and cycling is certainly no exception. New riders bring fresh perspectives, new expectations and, ultimately, ensure that the community continues to evolve rather than slowly becoming disconnected from society around it. The ambition to welcome more people into cycling is therefore not only understandable but essential.

What I have started questioning is not the objective itself, but the extraordinary imbalance in the way we think about it.

Almost every conversation about growth begins with acquisition. We instinctively assume that expanding the cycling community means persuading more people to enter it. Our strategic discussions revolve around first-time riders, participation rates, accessibility, affordability and demographic expansion because, consciously or unconsciously, we have come to define growth almost exclusively as the process of bringing new individuals into our world. What strikes me, however, is how rarely we devote the same intellectual energy to a question that seems equally important. Once somebody has already crossed that bridge, what exactly are we doing to ensure they never feel that cycling is no longer a place where they belong?

That question has been occupying my mind ever since I published The Cyclist Journey a few weeks ago. The purpose of that essay was to explore the process through which someone gradually becomes a cyclist, because becoming a cyclist has remarkably little to do with buying a bicycle. Purchasing the bicycle is simply the visible beginning of a process that unfolds over years rather than days. It is the countless rides before sunrise, the café that slowly becomes a weekly meeting place, the climb that evolves into a personal benchmark, the mechanic who remembers your name, the friendships that develop almost accidentally and the growing feeling that this activity has become something far more meaningful than exercise or transport. Without ever making a conscious decision, people eventually stop thinking of cycling as something they do and begin thinking of it as part of who they are.

That transformation is extraordinarily difficult to achieve. It cannot be accelerated through marketing campaigns, discounted through promotional offers or manufactured by launching another bicycle with marginally better specifications. It emerges gradually through experiences that accumulate over time until identity quietly replaces consumption as the real foundation of the relationship. In many ways, that is one of the most valuable achievements any bicycle brand, retailer or community could hope to contribute towards because products can always be replaced, whereas identities are built over years.

Perhaps that is why one particular comment left beneath that article has refused to leave my mind. Someone suggested that if understanding how people become cyclists is so important, perhaps we should devote the same effort to understanding how they stop being cyclists. At first, I accepted that observation without giving it much thought because it seemed perfectly logical. Every journey has a beginning and, sooner or later, every journey comes to an end.

The more I reflected on it, however, the less convinced I became that this was the right question.

Asking why people leave cycling immediately assumes that the explanation lies entirely with them. It assumes that life simply moved on. Careers became more demanding, children arrived, injuries accumulated, priorities shifted, free time disappeared and another activity eventually replaced the bicycle. None of those explanations are incorrect. In fact, they probably describe thousands of individual stories with complete accuracy. Life changes all of us, and it would be absurd to pretend that our relationship with cycling could somehow remain untouched while everything else around us evolves.

What concerns me is that these explanations have become so familiar that they have almost stopped us asking anything else.

They allow us to conclude that what happened was inevitable. They encourage us to believe that cycling simply lost the competition against the realities of adult life and that there was little anybody could have done differently. Once we reach that conclusion, responsibility quietly disappears from the industry’s side of the equation because the story becomes one of personal circumstance rather than collective reflection.

I am beginning to wonder whether that conclusion is too convenient.

The reality is that we have become so accustomed to asking why people leave cycling that we have never seriously considered the possibility that cycling sometimes leaves people.

The distinction may appear subtle, yet it fundamentally changes where we choose to look for answers. One question assumes that growth is primarily about attracting new participants. The other forces us to consider whether our responsibility extends far beyond the moment somebody buys their first bicycle and begins calling themselves a cyclist. It invites us to ask whether building a community should really be measured by the number of people entering it or whether it should instead be measured by our ability to maintain a meaningful connection with those who have already become part of it, even as their lives evolve in ways none of us can control.

That, I believe, is where the real conversation begins.

What makes this particularly interesting is that I am not convinced the bicycle industry has actually been losing customers in the way it believes it has. Customers, after all, are transactional by definition. They appear when somebody purchases a product and disappear when that product is no longer purchased. If we choose to look at cycling exclusively through that lens, then it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that somebody who no longer buys bicycles every few years is simply a customer we have lost.

The problem is that becoming a cyclist was never a transaction in the first place.

That is precisely why I struggle with the language we often use to describe these situations. We speak about customer retention, customer acquisition and customer lifetime value because those are the metrics every industry has become accustomed to measuring. Yet becoming a cyclist has remarkably little to do with any of those concepts. Nobody develops an identity because they completed a purchase. Nobody feels a sense of belonging because they received an invoice. Those things emerge through experiences accumulated over years until the bicycle gradually stops occupying the role of a product and starts occupying the role of a companion through different stages of life.

Seen from that perspective, what the industry loses is rarely a customer.

It loses a relationship.

That distinction may appear semantic, but I believe it changes almost everything.

Relationships require attention long after the initial excitement has disappeared. They evolve as circumstances evolve, adapting to new realities rather than expecting people to remain exactly as they were when the relationship first began. Every successful long-term relationship, whether between people, organisations or communities, survives because it continuously redefines what it means to remain relevant. The bicycle industry, however, often behaves as though relevance achieved once is relevance secured forever.

I am not convinced that has ever been true.

The greatest misconception we have created for ourselves is believing that our responsibility ends the moment somebody starts calling themselves a cyclist. In reality, that moment should probably be considered the beginning rather than the end of our responsibility, because helping somebody discover cycling is only the first chapter of a relationship that may last decades. The real challenge is ensuring that relationship remains meaningful as the person’s life changes in ways none of us can predict.

That is where I believe our industry has become trapped by its own definition of growth.

Every strategy presentation contains slides dedicated to attracting new audiences. We analyse demographic opportunities, identify underserved customer groups and discuss participation initiatives with remarkable sophistication because acquisition has become the dominant lens through which success is measured. I rarely encounter the opposite discussion. I rarely hear companies asking themselves how they intend to remain relevant to the people who already belong to their community once those people’s lives inevitably begin to change.

Those two conversations are not equally represented.

One dominates almost every strategic discussion.

The other barely exists.

Yet the second may ultimately prove more important than the first.

It is relatively easy to understand why somebody buys their first bicycle. The motivations are surprisingly consistent. Curiosity. Health. Transport. Adventure. Freedom. Social influence. Environmental awareness. The reasons vary, but they are generally visible and relatively easy to identify.

Understanding why somebody slowly disconnects from cycling is considerably more complex because that process rarely happens through a single event. Very few people wake up one morning and consciously decide that they are no longer cyclists. Relationships almost never end like that. They weaken gradually. One missed ride becomes several. The bicycle stays in the garage a little longer each week. Other commitments begin occupying the space cycling once held. Group rides become more difficult to attend. Conversations with riding friends become less frequent. Before long, something much more significant than reduced participation has taken place.

The relationship has quietly lost its place within that person’s identity.

Notice that I have deliberately avoided talking about kilometres ridden, bicycles purchased or money spent because those are consequences and not the problem itself.

The real question is whether cycling continues to occupy an emotionally meaningful place in somebody’s life, because human beings rarely abandon needs. They abandon the ways in which those needs are fulfilled.

That distinction, I believe, deserves far more attention than it currently receives.

People do not suddenly stop needing freedom because they become parents.

They do not stop needing adventure because their careers become more demanding.

They do not stop seeking belonging because they now have less free time.

Nor do they suddenly lose their desire for challenge, exploration, friendship or personal achievement simply because they ride fewer kilometres than they once did.

Those needs remain remarkably constant throughout our lives.

What changes is the activity through which we satisfy them.

That is why I have gradually come to believe that the bicycle industry’s real competitors are not other bicycle brands.

They are every other activity capable of satisfying exactly the same human needs.

Running does not compete against cycling because it is more efficient than a bicycle.

It competes because it offers belonging.

Hiking competes because it offers exploration.

Climbing competes because it offers challenge.

Even family life, travel or entirely different hobbies compete for the same emotional territory that cycling once occupied in somebody’s life.

Once we begin looking at the industry through that lens, the question changes completely and we should stop asking ourselves why people stopped buying bicycles.

We should start asking ourselves when cycling stopped being the most meaningful way for them to experience freedom, belonging, challenge or adventure.

Because the answer to that question has remarkably little to do with products.

It has everything to do with relevance.

This is why I keep returning to the same question.

Do people leave cycling... or does cycling leave people?

Not because I believe the industry is responsible every time somebody rides less or decides to pursue another passion. That would be an absurd conclusion. People’s lives evolve in ways no brand, retailer or organisation can ever hope to control, and pretending otherwise would simply ignore the realities of adulthood. Children arrive, careers become more demanding, bodies become less forgiving and priorities inevitably shift. None of us should expect cycling to remain untouched while everything else in our lives changes.

What I am suggesting is something rather different.

I am suggesting that we have become so focused on introducing new people to cycling that we have almost forgotten the responsibility that comes with helping them remain connected to it. We celebrate the beginning of the journey because beginnings are visible. They can be measured, photographed and presented in annual reports. We know how many first-time buyers we acquired last year. We know how many people attended a demo event. We know how many bicycles left the warehouse.

What we rarely know is how many people quietly stopped feeling that cycling still had a meaningful place in their lives.

That, to me, is a far more interesting question.

Not because it is easier to answer, but because it forces us to look beyond transactions and begin thinking about relationships. The bicycle industry has become exceptionally good at discussing products, technology, pricing, distribution and participation, yet remarkably little attention is paid to the continuity of belonging. We seem to assume that once somebody has become a cyclist, the relationship will somehow sustain itself indefinitely, despite the fact that every other meaningful relationship in our lives requires continuous care if it is to survive the inevitable changes that time brings.

Perhaps that is because we still think of ourselves primarily as an industry.

Industries sell products.

Communities protect identities.

Those are two fundamentally different ambitions.

If our objective is simply to sell more bicycles, then acquisition will always dominate the conversation because every new rider represents another potential sale. If, however, our ambition is to build a healthier cycling ecosystem capable of remaining relevant for generations, then the conversation inevitably becomes much broader. It becomes a conversation about belonging, about identity and about whether people continue recognising themselves within the community long after the excitement of buying their first bicycle has disappeared.

That distinction may ultimately prove to be one of the defining challenges facing our industry over the coming decade.

The bicycle industry has spent years asking how to bring more people into cycling.

It is a necessary question however I simply wonder whether it is sufficient.

Because crossing the bridge into cycling is extraordinarily difficult. It requires years of accumulated experiences before somebody genuinely feels that they belong. It requires trust, relationships and memories that cannot be manufactured overnight. Once that bridge has been crossed, allowing the relationship to quietly disappear should concern us far more than I believe it currently does.

Truth is that growth has never been solely about increasing the number of people entering the community.

Perhaps it is equally about ensuring that the community remains capable of evolving alongside the people who already belong to it.

There is an important difference between building a community that people enter and building one that people never feel compelled to leave. The former measures success by arrivals. The latter measures success by continuity. One focuses on expanding the community. The other focuses on strengthening the invisible connections that make the community worth belonging to in the first place.

For years, we have celebrated every new cyclist who joins our world.

I believe it is time we started paying just as much attention to those who are quietly drifting away from it.

Not because they no longer love bicycles or because they have somehow failed as cyclists.

But because somewhere along the way, as their lives changed and their identities evolved, the relationship weakened until cycling no longer felt like a place where they naturally belonged.

If that is true, then perhaps the industry’s forgotten customer is not the person who has never ridden a bicycle.

Perhaps it is the person who once proudly said, “I’m a cyclist,” and who, without ever consciously deciding to stop, gradually stopped believing that those words still described who they had become.

And if we genuinely believe that cycling has the power to change lives, then perhaps our greatest challenge is not simply helping people discover that world for the first time.

It is ensuring they never feel that the world they once discovered no longer has a place for them.

I have started thinking about it as organisational metabolism.

The comparison with biology is not accidental. Just as metabolism determines how efficiently a living organism converts energy into movement, organisational metabolism determines how efficiently an organisation converts reality into meaningful action. Markets constantly generate information in the form of customer behaviour, technological change, competitive moves, economic uncertainty, political decisions and cultural shifts. Every organisation is exposed to exactly the same reality. The defining difference is rarely the information itself. It lies in what happens after that information enters the organisation.

Some organisations absorb new information, distinguish signal from noise, make decisions, execute those decisions and begin learning from the consequences before the environment has materially changed again. Others receive exactly the same signals yet gradually slow the process through additional layers of analysis, internal alignment, governance, presentations, meetings and approval structures until they eventually reach a conclusion that may be entirely correct but no longer particularly relevant.

That distinction has very little to do with intelligence. It has very little to do with engineering capability, financial resources or even the quality of leadership. More often than not, it reflects something much more fundamental. It reflects the organisation’s metabolism.

One of the reasons this characteristic is so difficult to recognise is that organisations almost never experience declining metabolism as declining metabolism. From the inside, the opposite often appears to be happening. Decisions seem better informed than ever before, governance becomes increasingly robust, risk appears more carefully managed and alignment across departments continues improving. The organisation feels increasingly sophisticated precisely because every important decision now involves more people, more analysis and more certainty than it once did.

I have lost count of how many times over the past twelve months I have heard remarkably similar sentences from completely unrelated people from completely different organisations. "We're still aligning internally." "The decision has been postponed." "We need another round of discussions." None of those conversations appeared particularly remarkable in isolation because every organisation occasionally experiences delays. What gradually became remarkable, however, was how consistently those completely unrelated conversations described exactly the same organisational behaviour. Different companies. Different countries. Different leadership teams. Yet the underlying pattern remained almost identical.

The market, however, never sees any of those internal processes. It only experiences their consequences. Customers never experience governance, retailers never experience internal alignment and competitors certainly don't experience organisational politics. What they experience is how quickly an organisation recognises that reality has changed and whether it is capable of changing its own behaviour before somebody else defines the next stage of the market.

Before going any further, I would like you to perform a very simple experiment.

Think about the bicycle industry for a moment and allow one company to come to mind. Not necessarily the largest, the most innovative or even the most successful, but simply the organisation that you instinctively associate with slow decision-making.

Don’t tell anybody which company you chose.

In fact, the identity of the company is completely irrelevant.

What matters is whether one appeared in your mind almost immediately. If it did, then that organisation’s metabolism has already become visible from the outside. Long before it appears on any dashboard, performance review or internal discussion, it has already become part of the company’s reputation.

That is the most uncomfortable characteristic of organisational metabolism. It almost always becomes visible to the market before it becomes visible to the organisation itself. Suppliers notice it. Customers notice it. Retailers notice it. Competitors certainly notice it. Yet from inside the organisation, the same behaviour is often interpreted as discipline, rigour or good governance. The organisation rarely feels slow. It feels responsible.

That distinction has become increasingly important because the competitive environment has changed far more quickly than many organisations have. Twenty years ago, product cycles were longer, technological disruption was less frequent and competitors generally evolved at a pace that allowed even very large organisations to respond without fundamentally changing the way they worked. A slower metabolism was rarely fatal because the environment itself moved relatively slowly.

That environment no longer exists.

Today, companies receive new information every single day. A new technology appears. A competitor enters the market. Consumer expectations shift. Software capabilities evolve. Manufacturing models change. Entire business models emerge that would have sounded unrealistic only a few years earlier. The flow of information has accelerated dramatically, yet many organisations continue processing that information at almost exactly the same speed they always have.

This is where organisational metabolism becomes a strategic variable rather than simply an operational one.

The defining competitive advantage of the coming decade may not be superior engineering, larger budgets or even better products. Those things will always matter, but they are increasingly becoming the consequence of something deeper. Organisations that consistently convert information into coordinated action more quickly than their competitors will inevitably learn faster, adapt faster and, over time, build better products precisely because they have shortened the distance between reality and organisational learning.

One of the greatest misconceptions in business is that speed necessarily means recklessness.

It doesn’t.

A healthy metabolism is not about making decisions impulsively.

It is about removing unnecessary friction between reality and action.

There is an enormous difference.

Every organisation needs governance.

Every organisation needs alignment.

Every organisation needs thoughtful decision-making.

The problem begins when governance becomes an objective rather than a mechanism, when alignment becomes more important than adaptation and when reducing internal uncertainty becomes more important than responding to external reality.

One question keeps coming back to me.

If organisations invest enormous amounts of time and money recruiting experienced CEOs, CFOs, COOs and other senior executives because they trust their judgement, why do so many strategically important decisions still spend months moving through endless layers of internal alignment before anyone actually makes a decision?

At what point does alignment stop improving the quality of a decision and simply become a substitute for making one?

Every additional governance process, every new approval layer and every extra steering committee is usually introduced with entirely rational intentions. Nobody deliberately sets out to build an organisation that responds more slowly to reality. Every additional layer exists because, at some point in the past, somebody genuinely believed it would improve the quality of future decisions.

Individually, those decisions often make perfect sense.

Collectively, however, they can produce something entirely different.

An organisation that has become exceptionally good at managing itself while gradually becoming less capable of responding to the world outside its own walls.

That, perhaps, is the defining paradox of organisational metabolism.

The idea behind this essay did not emerge from a management book or an academic paper. It emerged gradually over months of conversations with people from across the bicycle industry. Different companies. Different countries. Different leadership teams. Yet I kept hearing remarkably similar sentences.

“We’re still aligning internally.”

“The decision has been postponed.”

“We need another round of discussions.”

And, perhaps the most revealing behaviour of all, complete silence.

Not because people intended to be disrespectful, but because organisations had become so consumed by their own internal processes that they simply stopped communicating altogether. Emails remained unanswered. Promised follow-ups quietly disappeared. Decisions drifted into organisational limbo where nobody was prepared either to move forward or to say no.

And, perhaps the most revealing behaviour of all, complete silence.

Not because people intended to be disrespectful, but because organisations had become so consumed by their own internal processes that they simply stopped communicating altogether. Emails remained unanswered. Promised follow-ups quietly disappeared. Decisions drifted into organisational limbo where nobody was prepared either to move forward or to say no.

None of those situations appeared particularly remarkable in isolation. Every organisation occasionally delays decisions and every company sometimes struggles to reach internal alignment. What gradually became impossible to ignore, however, was how consistently completely unrelated organisations displayed exactly the same behaviour. At some point I stopped seeing isolated situations and started recognising the same organisational pattern repeating itself over and over again.

That was the moment I began thinking about organisational metabolism.

It also made me realise why declining organisational metabolism is so extraordinarily difficult to recognise from inside the organisation itself.

It rarely feels like decline.

Quite the opposite.

Every additional governance process, every broader alignment exercise and every new coordination mechanism usually reinforces the belief that the organisation is becoming more disciplined, more rigorous and ultimately better managed than ever before. From the inside, those changes feel like progress. The uncomfortable possibility is that they may simultaneously reduce the organisation’s ability to adapt to an environment that is changing considerably faster than its own internal processes.

That may explain why organisational decline so rarely announces itself through obvious incompetence.

It almost always arrives disguised as maturity.

The organisation becomes increasingly convinced that it is making better decisions because every decision is now supported by more analysis, broader consensus and more comprehensive governance than at any previous point in its history.

Meanwhile, the market continues moving.

Competitors continue learning.

Technology continues evolving.

Consumer expectations continue changing.

Reality never pauses while organisations continue aligning internally.

This is why I increasingly believe that organisational metabolism may become one of the defining competitive advantages of the coming decade.

Not because speed, in itself, creates competitive advantage. It doesn’t. Fast organisations are perfectly capable of making terrible decisions just as slow organisations are perfectly capable of making excellent ones.

The real advantage lies somewhere else.

Organisations with a healthy metabolism shorten the distance between reality and learning. They recognise change earlier, make decisions earlier, begin adapting earlier and, perhaps most importantly, begin learning earlier. While slower organisations are still debating whether the environment has fundamentally changed, healthier organisations are already accumulating experience from their response.

Learning compounds.

Every completed cycle of observation, decision, execution and reflection increases an organisation’s understanding of the market it serves. The organisations capable of repeating that cycle more frequently do not simply move faster. Over time, they become considerably better at interpreting reality itself.

Perhaps this also explains why disruption so often appears to surprise established organisations.

Most of them see disruption.

Most of them understand the technology.

Most of them recognise the competitor.

What they underestimate is the cumulative cost of organisational delay.

Every postponed decision appears insignificant in isolation.

Every additional month of internal discussion appears professionally justified.

Every request for broader alignment appears entirely reasonable.

The market, however, experiences those delays cumulatively rather than individually.

By the time the organisation finally responds, competitors may already have completed another entire cycle of observation, adaptation and learning.

That difference compounds year after year.

Which brings me back to the question with which this essay began.

Perhaps we have been measuring the wrong things.

Perhaps the defining competitive advantage of the next decade will not be superior technology, larger budgets or even better products.

Perhaps it will simply be organisational metabolism.

Because every organisation has one.

The only question is whether it still allows the organisation to adapt before reality changes once again.

Betriebsblindheit.

As he searched for the closest English translation, I instinctively opened Google myself. A few seconds later I was looking at a definition that was surprisingly easy to understand. It described the gradual blindness that develops when people become so familiar with an organisation, an environment or a way of working that they slowly stop noticing things which would immediately stand out to somebody seeing them for the first time.

The definition itself didn’t surprise me in the slightest because, if I’m honest, I have the feeling that I spend a significant part of my professional life observing exactly that phenomenon. What genuinely caught my attention was something entirely different. The Germans had identified it so precisely that they had given it a word of its own. That immediately suggested something much bigger than the cycling industry. Languages don’t usually invent specific words for isolated situations. They tend to do so when something appears often enough to become instantly recognisable. In other words, if Betriebsblindheit exists as a word, then the phenomenon behind it probably exists everywhere.

The more I reflected on it, the more convinced I became that this wasn’t really an organisational problem at all. Organisations simply provide the environment in which it becomes visible. The mechanism itself is profoundly human.

Across the cycling industry, and I suspect across almost every other industry as well, there seems to be a remarkably consistent pattern. People spend years, sometimes decades, doing things in broadly the same way until, almost without noticing, they reach a point where those decisions stop feeling like decisions altogether. Processes become routines. Routines become habits. Habits gradually become part of the company’s identity. Somewhere along that journey, and I honestly couldn’t tell you exactly where it happens, questioning those habits slowly stops being something people naturally do. The status quo acquires the appearance of permanence, almost as though it had become a law of nature rather than the consequence of countless decisions made under circumstances that may no longer exist.

I don’t believe this happens because people become less intelligent. If anything, the opposite is usually true. The organisations I spend time with are often full of exceptionally capable people who know their products, their customers and their businesses far better than I ever will. That is precisely what makes the phenomenon so interesting. The issue isn’t a lack of competence. It is the gradual conviction that what has worked for years must, almost by definition, continue working in the future. Eventually that conviction becomes so deeply embedded that proposing a different approach no longer feels like exploring an alternative. It feels like questioning common sense itself.

I still remember meeting a senior product manager from one of the industry’s most recognisable brands. We had exchanged a couple of messages beforehand, so when somebody introduced us I walked over, shook his hand and expected the usual introduction that accompanies almost every first meeting. Instead, before either of us had even had the opportunity to exchange the usual pleasantries, he looked at me and said, “I don’t like what you’re doing.”

Naturally, I asked him what he meant. Was there a particular article he disagreed with? A specific argument? Something I’d written that he thought was simply wrong? His answer was surprisingly clear. He told me that what he didn’t like was the fact that we were talking publicly about the things the cycling industry was doing wrong.

That response has stayed with me ever since, not because I found it offensive, but because I found it deeply revealing. My answer was that before any industry can solve its problems, it first needs to be able to talk openly about them. In fact, even before that, it needs to accept that those problems actually exist. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make an industry stronger. It merely postpones the moment when reality forces the conversation anyway.

Looking back, I don’t think that conversation was really about the Brixen Papers. Nor do I think it was about me. It reflected a way of thinking that I’ve encountered many times over the years, both inside and outside the cycling industry. Whenever somebody questions the status quo or proposes doing things differently, the instinctive response is often some variation of “We’ve always done it this way.” Sometimes the sentence ends with “...and it’s worked perfectly well.” Sometimes it doesn’t even need saying because everyone in the room already assumes it. Either way, the underlying belief is exactly the same. Yesterday’s success is unconsciously treated as evidence that tomorrow will probably look very similar.

History suggests almost the opposite. Markets change. Customers change. Technologies evolve. Entire industries are reshaped by forces that often remain almost invisible until the moment they become impossible to ignore. Success has an extraordinary ability to convince organisations that the formula which brought them this far will also take them where they need to go next, even though history repeatedly demonstrates that this is far from guaranteed. Nokia, BlackBerry and Kodak didn’t become unsuccessful because they suddenly forgot how to innovate or because they were managed by incompetent people. Quite the opposite. They had become exceptionally good at operating within a reality that no longer existed. By the time they realised that the landscape itself had changed, many of the beliefs that had made them successful had quietly turned into liabilities.

The uncomfortable part is that I don’t think this happens because companies resist change. I think it happens because human beings are remarkably efficient at economising effort. Our brains constantly simplify the world around us. They transform repeated experiences into mental shortcuts because doing so allows us to function without having to question every decision we make every single day. Most of the time that mechanism is not only useful but essential. Without it, everyday life would become cognitively exhausting. The problem is that exactly the same mechanism that allows us to become more efficient also makes it progressively harder to notice when the environment itself has changed. Our ways of thinking stop feeling like assumptions. They simply become reality.

That, at least to me, is the true meaning of Betriebsblindheit. It isn’t organisational blindness. It is the moment at which familiarity quietly replaces observation and certainty begins replacing curiosity. Perhaps that explains why outsiders often notice things that insiders no longer see, not because outsiders are necessarily more intelligent, but because they haven’t yet had enough time to normalise what everyone else has already accepted as inevitable.

That is also why I keep returning to exactly the same themes, even when I think I’m writing about something completely different. Whether I’m talking about community, legitimacy, product strategy, the Invisible Market or Horizontal Social Expansion, I increasingly have the feeling that they are all different expressions of exactly the same underlying problem.

The more I think about it, the less convinced I become that the cycling industry’s biggest challenge is a lack of innovation. If anything, our industry has spent decades becoming extraordinarily good at refining what it already knows how to do. Every year we launch lighter frames, more powerful motors, more sophisticated suspensions, better batteries, smarter electronics and increasingly complex product portfolios. None of that happens by accident. It is the result of thousands of highly talented engineers, product managers and designers solving incredibly difficult problems with remarkable consistency. If the objective is to build better bicycles, then there is very little doubt that we have become exceptionally good at doing exactly that.

For decades however, one assumption has remained almost completely unchallenged. We have behaved as though the future of cycling would be determined primarily by our ability to build better bicycles than our competitors. As a consequence, we have invested extraordinary amounts of talent, time and capital into improving the product itself. Yet if we take a step back for a moment, a rather uncomfortable question begins to emerge. What if product quality was never the real constraint? What if the number of people entering cycling has far less to do with the quality of the bicycles we manufacture than with the relevance that cycling itself occupies in people’s lives?

That possibility changes everything because it immediately shifts the conversation away from engineering and towards culture.

Perhaps this is why I have spent so much time over the last year writing about concepts such as community, legitimacy, the Invisible Market or, more recently, Horizontal Social Expansion. At first glance they appear to be completely unrelated topics. One article talks about social dynamics, another about marketing, another about the industry’s relationship with society and another about long-term growth. Looking back now, however, I realise they have all been attempts to describe exactly the same underlying problem without ever having the language to connect them together.

The Invisible Market was never really about identifying another customer segment. It was about recognising that the vast majority of our potential future cyclists are currently invisible to us because we continue looking at the world through the assumptions of an industry that largely talks to itself. Horizontal Social Expansion was never intended as another commercial strategy. It emerged from a much simpler observation. If the number of people who identify themselves as cyclists remains relatively stable, then competing ever more aggressively for the same people eventually becomes a zero-sum game. One company wins market share because another loses it. One dealer grows because another disappears. One brand celebrates while another restructures. From the perspective of individual businesses those victories are real. From the perspective of cycling as a whole, however, very little has actually changed.

And that, more than anything else, is the consequence of Betriebsblindheit. We become so accustomed to competing within the existing boundaries of our industry that we gradually stop questioning whether those boundaries should exist in the first place. We become better at redistributing demand than creating it. We optimise an ecosystem whose overall size barely changes and congratulate ourselves each time we capture a slightly larger piece of it.

History offers remarkably few examples of industries that have achieved long-term growth simply by becoming more efficient at competing internally. Far more often, sustained growth comes from expanding the relevance of the category itself. The smartphone didn’t transform society because manufacturers built marginally better phones every year. Streaming didn’t replace physical media because platforms became better at competing with one another. They succeeded because entire industries fundamentally changed the role they occupied in people’s lives.

Cycling is no different.

Our biggest competitors are not other bicycle brands. They are inactivity, convenience, digital entertainment, changing urban habits, lack of confidence, lack of infrastructure and, perhaps more than anything else, the simple fact that millions of people never seriously consider cycling as something that belongs in their lives. Those people will never compare motor systems, suspension kinematics or battery capacities because they never reach that stage of the decision-making process. We cannot solve that problem by refining products that they have already decided not to consider.

That is why I increasingly believe that the industry’s future will not be determined solely by those companies capable of building the best bicycles. It will be determined by those capable of making cycling itself more relevant, more visible, more desirable and more culturally significant than it is today. Engineering will continue to matter enormously, of course, but engineering alone cannot create a cyclist. At some point, every industry reaches a stage where technical excellence becomes the minimum requirement rather than the defining competitive advantage. When that moment arrives, the battle inevitably shifts somewhere else.

That is precisely where the real opportunity now lies.

Ironically, all of these thoughts began with a single German word that I had never heard before.

Not because Betriebsblindheit taught me something entirely new, but because it gave a name to something I had been observing for years without ever being able to describe with the same precision. It made me realise that many of the conversations I’ve been having, many of the articles I’ve written and many of the mental models I’ve challenged were, in one way or another, pointing towards exactly the same underlying idea.

That, ultimately, is the real value of a word like Betriebsblindheit. Not because it describes a uniquely German phenomenon, but because it gives a name to something all of us are capable of. The greatest danger facing any industry is rarely a lack of talent, innovation or ambition. It is the gradual conviction that the way we have always understood the world is still the best way to understand the one that is quietly emerging around us. The moment experience quietly replaces observation, certainty replaces curiosity, and the world changes before we realise that the way we have always understood it no longer applies.

Standing in front of almost 500 suppliers, the world’s largest car manufacturer openly acknowledged that yesterday’s success offers absolutely no guarantee of tomorrow’s survival.

At first glance, it might sound like another CEO talking about uncertainty and disruption. I don't think it was. What struck me wasn't the warning itself. It was who was delivering it.

I don’t think this was that.

What struck me wasn’t Toyota’s warning itself. It was the fact that one of the most successful industrial companies ever built felt the need to publicly question whether the very foundations of its success would still be enough for the future.

That is an extraordinarily difficult thing for any market leader to admit.

Because it requires accepting that the competitive advantages which allowed you to dominate an industry for decades may no longer carry the same strategic value in the decades ahead.

And that raises a much more interesting question.

Why would Toyota say something like that now?

I suspect the answer has very little to do with Toyota itself.

It has everything to do with the fact that the nature of competitive advantage is changing.

For decades, companies built competitive advantage through superior engineering, manufacturing excellence, purchasing power, patents, distribution networks and scale. Those capabilities created formidable barriers to entry, and in many industries they still matter enormously.

The problem is that they are no longer sufficient on their own.

Not because engineering has become less important, but because technology is becoming more accessible. Not because manufacturing excellence no longer matters, but because more companies are becoming exceptionally good at it. Not because dealer networks have lost their relevance, but because customers increasingly expect value that extends well beyond the point of purchase.

In other words, the foundations are shifting.

And once you start looking at the bicycle industry through that lens, Toyota’s comments become much easier to understand.

DJI is not simply competing with Bosch by building another motor. They are questioning assumptions that many believed would remain unchallenged for years. Gearboxes are not simply another drivetrain option. They question one of the industry’s oldest technical conventions. Artificial intelligence will not simply make customer service more efficient. It will redefine what customers expect from every interaction they have with every brand.

What we are witnessing is not simply another product cycle. It is a shift in the very foundations of competitive advantage, and that is precisely why so many of the assumptions on which our industry has operated for decades are beginning to look increasingly fragile.

One of the most common responses I see is for brands to move further upmarket. Faced with growing competitive pressure, particularly from China, many companies seem to believe that premium has become a safe haven. The underlying assumption is relatively straightforward. If competing in the middle of the market is becoming increasingly difficult, then moving further up should provide a degree of protection. Premium, in other words, has become a defensive strategy.

I understand the logic. The problem is that this entire strategy rests on the assumption that the definition of premium has remained unchanged, and I don't believe that assumption is true anymore.

Too many companies continue to define premium through a lens that belongs to another era. Exceptional engineering. Outstanding manufacturing quality. Heritage. Exclusivity. Higher prices. Aspirational products that people admire from a distance and dream of owning one day.

For a long time, that was enough.

Today, I don’t think it is.

Not because engineering has become less important, nor because heritage has suddenly lost its value. Quite the opposite. Those things remain essential. They have simply stopped being sufficient on their own.

Chinese manufacturers are already proving that outstanding engineering, advanced technology and exceptional product quality are no longer exclusive to long-established Western brands. If those attributes can increasingly be matched, then product excellence alone can no longer define premium.

What makes this moment particularly interesting is that many brands see premium as a place to hide from disruption, when disruption is already reshaping the meaning of premium itself. In other words, they are seeking protection inside a concept that is undergoing the very same transformation as the market around it.

Which inevitably leads to a much more uncomfortable question. If product excellence alone is no longer sufficient to define premium, what exactly is?

I increasingly believe that the answer lies in everything that exists around the product.

The customer prepared to spend €10,000, €12,000 or €15,000 on a bicycle expects far more than exceptional engineering. They expect authenticity. They expect outstanding service. They expect experiences worth remembering. They expect to feel part of something bigger than the product itself. They expect belonging.

That, in my opinion, changes everything.

Belonging is a very different competitive advantage from engineering excellence because it cannot simply be reverse engineered. A competitor can analyse your suspension platform, your motor integration or your carbon lay-up and eventually build something similar. Reproducing trust is considerably harder. Reproducing culture is harder still. Reproducing a community that genuinely wants to see your brand succeed may well become one of the most difficult competitive advantages to replicate over the coming decade.

The relationship between brand and customer can no longer remain transactional. It needs to become social. Brands must stop asking how they sell another bicycle and start asking how they become part of someone’s life. Community is no longer a marketing initiative. It is becoming a strategic asset. Culture is no longer something nice to have. It is rapidly becoming one of the strongest forms of competitive differentiation available.

The irony is that I don’t think this idea is particularly controversial anymore.

Every time I have these conversations with CEOs, founders or executive teams, the reaction is remarkably similar. Most people nod. Most people agree. Most people recognise that the direction is probably correct.

And yet remarkably little changes. The more conversations I have, the more convinced I become that the obstacle is not a lack of understanding.

I increasingly believe the answer has very little to do with courage and almost everything to do with measurement.

For the last two decades, companies have learned to manage what they can measure. Impressions. Clicks. Website traffic. Lead generation. Quarterly sales. Dealer sell-through. Return on advertising spend. Dashboards provide immediate reassurance because they produce numbers that can be reviewed every week, every month and every quarter.

The problem is that the variables which may define competitive advantage over the next decade refuse to fit inside those dashboards.

How do you measure trust? How do you quantify belonging? How do you calculate the value of legitimacy before it appears in revenue? How do you justify investing in culture when the financial return may not become visible for another three, five or even ten years?

I increasingly think we are facing what could be called the measurement barrier.

Not because organisations lack vision.

Not because they lack ambition.

Because they lack metrics.

And organisations naturally optimise whatever they can measure, even when those metrics are gradually becoming less relevant than the things they are ignoring.

Perhaps this also explains why so many strategies continue looking remarkably similar. Companies feel comfortable investing in product development because they know how to measure it. They feel comfortable expanding dealer networks because they know how to measure that too. They feel comfortable optimising quarterly sales because investors expect quarterly numbers.

Very few feel comfortable investing in cultural relevance, social capital or belonging because none of those variables offer immediate validation.

And that is precisely where I believe the opportunity lies.

Because while almost everyone is trying to improve next quarter’s numbers, remarkably few organisations are seriously asking themselves a much more uncomfortable question.

What will make our brand indispensable five years from now?

Not more desirable, not more visible but simply indispensable.

Because I rarely hear conversations about where a brand should be in five or ten years’ time. Most strategic discussions remain dominated by the next product launch, the following sales season or the next quarterly results. Those conversations matter, of course they do, but they are no longer sufficient. The companies that emerge as leaders during the next decade will almost certainly be those that begin building today the relationships, the communities, the trust and the cultural legitimacy that their competitors will only realise they needed once it has become impossible to replicate.

The companies that define the next decade will almost certainly not be those with the best specifications, the biggest dealer networks or even the strongest heritage. They will be the ones capable of creating something that competitors cannot reverse engineer, cannot manufacture and cannot simply buy.

Trust. Belonging. Cultural legitimacy.

Those may well become the most valuable competitive advantages of all.

Because the real moat is no longer built around the product. It is built around the people who choose to build the brands the market will need tomorrow.

That was precisely why I argued that Europe’s future could not depend on trying to beat China at its own game. Competing on manufacturing efficiency, vertical integration or development speed is a battle that Europe is increasingly unlikely to win. If European companies still possess a meaningful long-term competitive advantage, I suggested, it lies somewhere else entirely. It lies in everything that cannot simply be replicated by hiring another hundred engineers, building another factory or accelerating another product cycle. It lies in trust, legitimacy, reputation, long-term relationships and the kind of cultural relevance that takes decades to build but can influence purchasing decisions in ways that no specification sheet ever will.

I still believe that.

What has changed over the past few weeks is not the conclusion.

It is the reason why I have become even more convinced of it.

Since publishing The Moat, I have continued spending a considerable amount of time talking to Chinese companies preparing their expansion into Europe. Some of them are still relatively small organisations trying to establish themselves outside their domestic market for the first time. Others have already become industrial powerhouses with technological capabilities and financial resources that most European brands can only admire. Those conversations have been fascinating, not because they have challenged my original argument, but because they have exposed something I genuinely wasn’t expecting to find.

In fact, I expected the exact opposite.

The natural assumption is that companies capable of designing world-class products, attracting outstanding talent and building genuinely global organisations would also possess an equally sophisticated understanding of the markets they intend to enter. That assumption becomes even stronger when you look at the people leading many of these businesses. Their résumés are impressive. Many have studied at Western universities. Many have built international careers. Many have spent years working with European customers, suppliers and partners. These are highly capable people leading highly capable organisations.

Which is precisely why I continue to leave many of those conversations with exactly the same question.

Why does so much of the discussion still revolve almost exclusively around engineering?

Regardless of the company sitting across the table, the conversation almost always follows a remarkably familiar path. Better motors. Better batteries. Better software. Faster innovation cycles. Greater manufacturing efficiency. More vertical integration. Lower costs. Greater production capacity. Every one of those topics is important and every one deserves serious attention because there is no question that engineering excellence has become one of China’s greatest strengths.

What surprises me is not what gets discussed.

It is what barely enters the conversation at all.

Very little time is spent discussing how trust is actually built in Europe. Very little attention is given to understanding why certain brands continue to enjoy extraordinary levels of credibility even after competitors have caught up technologically. Rarely do I hear meaningful conversations about why some dealer networks become strategic assets while others remain purely transactional, why communities create value that no amount of engineering investment can replicate, or why two products that are technically almost indistinguishable can produce completely different commercial outcomes.

Those are not marketing questions.

They are strategic questions and more importantly, they are competitive questions.

The more conversations I have, the more convinced I become that many Chinese companies have learned how to build products for Europe without first learning how to build businesses for Europe.

Because those two, ladies and gentlemen, are not the same challenge.

Building a product is fundamentally an engineering exercise. Building a business is an exercise in interpretation. It requires understanding how trust develops, how legitimacy is earned, why local organisations matter, how distribution creates value beyond logistics and why customers often make decisions that cannot be explained purely through technical superiority. None of those things reduce the importance of engineering. They simply recognise that engineering alone does not determine commercial success.

Our own industry has demonstrated this repeatedly over the past (at least) twenty years.

If superior products automatically created successful businesses, history would look very different. Every technically superior bicycle would have become a commercial success. Every engineering breakthrough would have created a lasting competitive advantage. Every innovative company would still be thriving today.

We all know that isn’t what happened.

Some outstanding products disappeared because nobody understood how to build a business around them.

Some average products survived far longer than they deserved because the companies behind them had earned something much harder to measure than product performance.

They had earned trust.

What makes this observation even more fascinating is that China has already demonstrated, in other industries, that it knows exactly how to solve this problem. The automotive industry provides perhaps the clearest example. Chinese manufacturers didn’t become credible in Europe simply because they built competitive vehicles. They invested heavily in understanding European customers, recruited local leadership, established engineering and design centres across the continent, adapted customer experiences and accepted that succeeding in Europe required much more than exporting outstanding products. They understood that entering Europe wasn’t simply an engineering challenge. It was a market interpretation challenge.

Which leaves me with a question I genuinely struggle to answer.

If Chinese companies have already demonstrated that they know how to make that transition in other industries, why does so much of the bicycle industry still appear to believe that Europe is primarily an engineering problem waiting to be solved?

Before anyone points to DJI/Avinox, let me be absolutely clear.

I believe these guys have achieved something remarkable.

Not simply because they built an outstanding drive system, although they undoubtedly did, but because they demonstrated something equally important. They listened. They identified frustrations that had been building within the European market for years and developed a platform that addressed those frustrations with remarkable precision. Their success wasn’t simply the result of excellent engineering. It was the result of engineering directed by an unusually accurate interpretation of what the market had been asking for.

That, however, is only the beginning.

Building a product that riders admire is not the same as building a company that Europe ultimately embraces because those are different challenges.

They require different capabilities, different investments and, above all, different time horizons.

Trust cannot be compressed into a product launch the same way legitimacy cannot be accelerated through software updates.

Communities do not emerge because a specification sheet happens to be better than last year’s.

They emerge because companies consistently demonstrate that they understand the people they serve, not just the products they sell.

Which brings me back to The Moat.

When I wrote that article, I argued that Europe’s greatest opportunity was cultural rather than technological. Looking back, I would probably refine that idea because I no longer think the discussion should be framed as product versus brand. That is a false choice, and one our industry has repeated for far too long.

The companies that will shape the next decade won’t be those building the best products at the expense of their brands, nor will they be those relying on the strength of their brands while neglecting product development. Both approaches eventually reach the same destination. An exceptional product without a business capable of creating trust, legitimacy and long-term relevance may generate excitement, but excitement is not the same as sustainable competitive advantage. Equally, even the strongest brand eventually loses its credibility when the product no longer deserves the reputation surrounding it. Markets are remarkably patient with companies that continue to earn their trust, but they are equally ruthless with those that start living on yesterday’s achievements.

The real winners will understand that engineering and brand-building are not competing priorities but complementary disciplines. One without the other creates an incomplete business. Outstanding engineering earns a company the right to be taken seriously. A business that understands its market transforms that credibility into long-term relevance. That is where trust is built. That is where communities emerge. That is where competitive advantage stops being measured in newton metres, battery capacity or grams saved, and starts becoming significantly more difficult for competitors to replicate.

Perhaps that is where my thinking has evolved most since writing The Moat.

I no longer believe Europe’s opportunity lies simply in having stronger brands than its Chinese competitors.

I believe it lies in having spent decades learning that building products for Europe and building businesses for Europe are two fundamentally different disciplines.

The first demands exceptional engineering.

The second demands an equally exceptional understanding of the market.

The companies capable of mastering both won’t simply participate in the next chapter of this industry.

They will write it.

That interpretation is perfectly understandable. Both companies generated enormous attention throughout the week, both unveiled technologies that quickly became the centre of countless conversations and both reinforced a feeling that has been quietly growing inside the industry for some time now: the centre of gravity of e-bike innovation is shifting.

My own visit to Eurobike was actually much shorter than usual. I only spent a few hours walking around the Messe before heading to another commitment. Oddly enough, that made one thing even more obvious. When you keep finding yourself drawn into exactly the same conversations despite barely scratching the surface of a trade show of that size, you begin to suspect that something more fundamental is taking place. It didn’t seem to matter whether I was speaking with OEMs, suppliers, product managers or industry executives. Sooner or later, almost every meaningful discussion gravitated towards the same two names. The conclusions varied enormously. Some people were genuinely excited. Others remained openly sceptical. Many were simply trying to understand what they had just seen. Yet despite those very different reactions, everyone appeared to be wrestling with the same underlying question.

I left Frankfurt convinced that most people were looking at the wrong story.

Looking back, I don’t think Eurobike 2026 will ultimately be remembered because DJI introduced another motor or because Gobao demonstrated another integrated gearbox. Those were simply the visible manifestations of something considerably more important that was quietly unfolding beneath the surface. The more I reflect on what happened during those few hours, and on the conversations that followed over the subsequent weeks, the more convinced I become that the industry wasn’t simply evaluating new products. It was beginning to reconsider one of its oldest assumptions.

That distinction matters because products and architectures follow very different rules.

Products compete with one another. One motor replaces another. One suspension platform outperforms another. One battery offers more range than its competitor. Architectures are different. They define the rules within which every product competes. Once an architecture becomes widely accepted, companies gradually stop questioning it and instead devote their energy to refining it. Innovation becomes incremental because the underlying assumptions no longer feel open to debate.

For decades, that is exactly what happened with the bicycle drivetrain.

The industry spent years discussing gear ranges, electronic shifting, clutch mechanisms, chain retention, cassette sizes, wireless communication and weight reduction. Shimano and SRAM competed fiercely, constantly pushing one another towards increasingly sophisticated drivetrains, yet both companies were fundamentally refining the same idea. Even the arrival of the e-bike, arguably the biggest technological transformation cycling has experienced in modern history, left that assumption almost entirely intact. Motors became more powerful, batteries became smaller and software became increasingly intelligent, but power still travelled through an external chain, a cassette and a derailleur before eventually reaching the rear wheel.

What makes the current moment so interesting is not that alternatives suddenly exist. They have existed for quite some time. Pinion has spent years questioning conventional drivetrain architecture. Valeo approached the problem from a different direction by integrating the motor and gearbox into a single unit. Revonte, Owuru and several other companies have all explored alternative ways of transmitting power. None of these ideas first appeared in Frankfurt.

What changed wasn’t the technology.

It was the conversation surrounding it.

For the first time, it felt as though several companies, arriving from completely different directions and pursuing entirely different technological solutions, had independently reached the same strategic conclusion. Whether through integrated gearboxes, continuously variable transmissions or motor-transmission integration, they all appeared to be questioning the same underlying assumption. Not which derailleur should define the next generation of e-bikes, but whether the derailleur should remain at the centre of that discussion at all.

That is a profoundly different question, and one that extends far beyond drivetrains themselves.

It also explains why I increasingly believe the real significance of Eurobike 2026 had surprisingly little to do with DJI or Gobao. They simply happened to be the companies that made a much broader shift impossible to ignore.

One of the most interesting moments of the week, however, wasn’t actually taking place inside the Messe.

Gobao’s strategy could hardly have been more transparent. The company brought fully assembled bicycles equipped with its integrated gearbox platform, invited visitors to ride them and appeared perfectly comfortable allowing the product to speak for itself. That confidence matters because every emerging technology eventually reaches the point where presentations, animations and technical specifications stop being enough. Sooner or later, it has to survive the judgement of riders, engineers and OEM product managers.

DJI approached the same challenge rather differently.

Its new MG platform was clearly visible throughout the exhibition, mounted on several prototype bicycles developed together with OEM partners. The message was unmistakable. Integrated gearboxes were no longer experimental engineering exercises hidden inside R&D departments. They had become part of real product development programmes. Yet there was one detail that many visitors found curious. Unlike Gobao, DJI wasn’t offering anyone the opportunity to ride the technology that had generated so much anticipation.

The explanation, if the conversations I had during and after Eurobike are to be believed, is perhaps even more revealing than the product itself. Throughout the week I heard remarkably consistent accounts from several people whose judgement I trust. None of them had any reason to coordinate their stories, yet they all described essentially the same process. Selected OEM partners were reportedly invited to a second location a short walk away from the Messe, where they were able to ride what more than one person independently referred to as a “Frankenbike” equipped with an early A-sample of DJI’s integrated gearbox.

Whether every detail of those conversations is perfectly accurate is, in many ways, almost beside the point.

What interested me wasn’t the existence of the prototype itself.

It was what that strategy suggested.

Gobao appeared determined to demonstrate that its technology was ready for the market. DJI appeared equally determined to control exactly who experienced the next stage of its development. Those are very different approaches, yet both point towards the same conclusion. Neither company appears to be thinking in terms of individual components anymore. Both appear to be thinking in terms of complete systems.

The significance of that distinction only became fully apparent once Eurobike had finished.

The strategy behind those demonstrations became considerably clearer once everybody had returned home.

The most interesting conversations I had about integrated gearboxes didn’t actually take place inside the Messe. They happened during the following days and weeks, once people had compared notes and started thinking less about individual products and more about their implications. The more people I spoke to, the more I realised that the truly significant story wasn’t whether Gobao’s solution felt better than DJI’s or whether one technology appeared more mature than the other. The real story was how quickly those products were beginning to influence the thinking of companies that hadn’t even exhibited a comparable solution in Frankfurt.

One particular conversation has stayed with me.

A company that had been quietly working on its own integrated gearbox platform for several years had apparently informed selected OEM partners that its development programme was now being accelerated dramatically. A launch that had originally been expected around the beginning of the next decade was suddenly being brought forward by approximately three years, with commercial availability now targeted much closer to 2028.

I have no intention of identifying the company because, ultimately, its identity isn’t the interesting part of the story.

The interesting part is that somebody felt compelled to change the timetable.

That may sound like a relatively small observation, but I believe it represents one of the clearest indicators that something fundamental is happening. Companies do not suddenly compress multi-year engineering programmes because a competitor launches an interesting product. They do it because they conclude that the assumptions upon which those programmes were originally built are no longer valid. Bringing a launch forward from 2031 to 2028 does not suddenly transform a company into the technology leader. If anything, it is often an acknowledgement that the market has started moving faster than expected and that catching up has become more urgent than executing the original plan.

That, to me, is the real significance of Eurobike 2026.

Not that integrated gearboxes suddenly became technically credible. Companies like Pinion, Valeo and others demonstrated years ago that alternative drivetrain architectures were perfectly feasible. The technology itself isn’t new. What appears to have changed is the industry’s perception of when that technology might become commercially unavoidable.

There is a profound difference between a company introducing a disruptive technology and an entire industry deciding that it can no longer afford to ignore it. The first moment belongs to engineers. The second belongs to strategists. My impression is that Eurobike 2026 marked the beginning of the second.

That inevitably raises a far more interesting question.

If companies like Pinion, Valeo and others have been pursuing integrated transmissions for years, why didn’t they change the industry long ago?

It is an entirely fair question and, in many ways, answering it is considerably more important than comparing the specifications of the latest gearbox.

Looking back, I increasingly wonder whether the industry’s biggest mistake has been assuming that technologies transform markets the moment they become technically viable.

History suggests something rather different.

Electric cars existed long before Tesla became commercially relevant. Artificial intelligence existed long before ChatGPT reached one hundred million users. Smartphones existed before the iPhone. In every one of those cases, the technology arrived before the market was ready to reorganise itself around it.

Perhaps integrated gearboxes have been following exactly the same path.

Ten years ago, most e-bike motors produced significantly less torque than they do today. Riders expected assistance, but they were not yet demanding fully integrated riding experiences. Automatic shifting was still perceived as an interesting feature rather than an inevitable progression. Software played a much smaller role in the riding experience. Maintenance costs were accepted as part of ownership and very few OEMs were thinking in terms of complete platforms rather than individual components.

The question wasn’t wrong.

It was simply being asked too early.

Today the context looks entirely different.

Motor outputs continue to increase. Riders increasingly expect seamless integration between hardware and software. Fleet operators and leasing companies care far more about maintenance than they did only a few years ago. Automatic shifting no longer feels futuristic and OEMs are beginning to think less about combining individual components and more about selecting complete technological ecosystems.

The technology has undoubtedly evolved.

The market has evolved even faster.

Perhaps Pinion wasn’t ahead because it built a gearbox.

Perhaps it was ahead because it started asking the right question before the rest of the industry realised that the question itself mattered.

That distinction may ultimately prove far more important than the gearbox itself.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Shimano.

It is impossible to discuss the future of integrated drivetrains without first recognising the extraordinary scale of what Shimano has achieved over the last fifty years. The company didn’t simply become the world’s dominant drivetrain manufacturer. It defined the architecture around which the modern bicycle organised itself. Product development, aftermarket support, workshop procedures, supply chains and even the competitive relationship between Shimano and SRAM all evolved around exactly the same assumption: power would be transmitted through an external chain, cassette and derailleur.

That success is precisely what makes the current moment so fascinating.

If integrated gearbox platforms become the preferred architecture for premium e-bikes during the next decade, Shimano will almost certainly have to compete in that space. Allowing somebody else to define the next generation of drivetrain architecture simply isn’t a realistic option for a company that has spent decades defining the previous one.

Yet embracing that transition creates an uncomfortable paradox.

Every successful integrated gearbox Shimano sells potentially reduces demand for some of the very products that helped build the company into the industry leader it is today. Fewer chains. Fewer cassettes. Fewer derailleur replacements. Less workshop maintenance. Lower recurring aftermarket revenue. Competing successfully in the next architecture may gradually reduce the economic importance of the one that created your leadership in the first place.

Understanding why this dilemma is so difficult requires looking beyond Shimano itself.

For more than half a century, the derailleur has been far more than an ingenious mechanical solution. It has quietly become the foundation of an entire industrial ecosystem. Chains wear out. Cassettes wear out. Chainrings wear out. Derailleurs need replacing after crashes. Workshops generate revenue through servicing and adjustments. Distributors maintain inventories. Suppliers manufacture specialist tools, lubricants and replacement parts. OEMs develop complete product strategies around a component architecture that has remained remarkably stable for decades.

This is why I believe the discussion surrounding integrated gearboxes is so often misunderstood.

They are not simply proposing a different way of changing gear.

They are proposing a different economic architecture.

The real disruption isn’t the derailleur itself.

It is the ecosystem that has grown around it for more than fifty years.

Once viewed from that perspective, Shimano’s dilemma stops looking like an engineering problem and starts looking like a strategic one. The question is no longer whether the company is capable of developing a world-class integrated gearbox. Of course it is. The more difficult question is deciding when the right moment arrives to begin competing against an architecture that continues to generate enormous value today while knowing that somebody else may eventually define the one that replaces it.

SRAM faces many of the same questions as Shimano, although from a very different starting point.

For more than three decades, SRAM has built its reputation by challenging Shimano’s dominance. It questioned pricing, product design, gearing philosophy and, more recently, redefined what electronic shifting could look like. Products such as Eagle Transmission represent an extraordinary engineering achievement and demonstrate just how far conventional drivetrain architecture can still be refined.

Yet there is an uncomfortable reality hidden behind that success.

SRAM challenged Shimano’s products.

It never really challenged Shimano’s architecture.

Every major innovation introduced by SRAM has remained firmly rooted in exactly the same assumption. Chains became stronger. Derailleurs became more precise. Electronic shifting replaced cables. Mounting systems evolved. Gear ranges expanded. But the underlying architecture remained remarkably familiar. The competition was fierce, but it was taking place inside the same set of rules.

That is precisely why the emergence of integrated gearbox platforms feels so different.

Companies such as Pinion, Valeo, Gobao and DJI are no longer trying to build a better derailleur. They are asking whether the derailleur should continue occupying the same place within the drivetrain at all.

Those are fundamentally different conversations.

One seeks to optimise an architecture.

The other questions whether that architecture should continue to define the market.

The implications extend far beyond drivetrain manufacturers.

For decades, bicycle brands have differentiated themselves by selecting the right combination of components. Bosch or Shimano. Fox or RockShox. SRAM or Shimano. DT Swiss or Newmen. The bicycle manufacturer acted as the system integrator, combining the best technologies available into a product that reflected its own priorities, riding philosophy and brand identity.

Integrated architectures begin to change that relationship.

Once the motor, gearbox, software, torque management, automatic shifting and electronic controls are designed as a single system, the role of the OEM inevitably starts to evolve. Instead of integrating individual components, manufacturers increasingly find themselves selecting complete technology platforms.

That may appear to be a subtle distinction.

I don’t believe it is.

For decades, competitive advantage was created by choosing the right components and integrating them better than everybody else. If the future belongs to fully integrated systems, a growing part of that value inevitably shifts towards the companies developing those systems. The question is no longer simply which motor to specify or which drivetrain to combine with it. Increasingly, the question becomes which technological ecosystem a brand is prepared to build its future around.

That may ultimately prove to be one of the biggest strategic consequences of this transition.

The companies attracting the greatest attention today are no longer trying to dominate individual component categories.

They are trying to define complete platforms.

That distinction also forces us to look differently at companies such as Bosch.

For years, Bosch established itself as the reference point for e-bike drive systems. It combined outstanding engineering with an unrivalled dealer network, diagnostics, software updates and after-sales support, creating an ecosystem that proved extraordinarily difficult for competitors to match. Its leadership was never based solely on motor performance. It was based on everything surrounding the motor.

The emergence of integrated gearbox platforms raises an obvious question.

Who owns that ecosystem tomorrow?

If software, torque management, automatic shifting, predictive algorithms and the transmission itself increasingly become part of the same integrated platform, where does the centre of gravity move? Does it remain with the motor manufacturer? Does it shift towards whoever controls the complete riding experience? Or does it move back towards the OEM?

I don’t think anybody knows the answer yet.

What seems increasingly clear, however, is that the next competitive battle will look very different from the previous one.

For decades, the industry compared motors against motors, drivetrains against drivetrains and batteries against batteries.

The next decade is likely to be defined by something very different.

Platforms against platforms.

Complete systems against complete systems.

Architectures against architectures.

The companies that dominate the next decade won't necessarily be those that build the best components. They'll be those that persuade the rest of the industry to build around their architecture.

That is why I don’t believe Eurobike 2026 will ultimately be remembered because one company unveiled a better gearbox or another launched a more sophisticated motor.

I believe it will be remembered because it marked the moment an entire industry started questioning assumptions that had remained virtually untouched for more than half a century.

Whether integrated gearboxes eventually become the dominant architecture for premium e-bikes remains impossible to know. Conventional drivetrains will almost certainly continue serving millions of riders for many years to come, and neither Shimano nor SRAM should ever be underestimated. Companies that have successfully led an industry for decades possess engineering capabilities, manufacturing expertise and market relationships that newcomers can only dream of.

But perhaps that is no longer the most interesting question.

The more interesting question is not who builds the best derailleur.

It is who defines the architecture around which the next generation of bicycles will be built.

Those are profoundly different conversations.

History rarely changes because somebody builds a better product.

History changes because enough people begin questioning assumptions that once appeared unquestionable.

Looking back, I have the feeling that Eurobike 2026 may eventually be remembered as one of those rare moments.

Not because the bicycle industry found its next great answer.

But because it finally realised it had started asking a different question.

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Over the past twenty years, companies have become remarkably sophisticated at understanding how customers discover brands, compare alternatives, make purchasing decisions and, hopefully, become loyal advocates afterwards. Entire departments exist to analyse every stage of that process because everyone understands the logic behind it. The better you understand your customers, the better equipped you are to serve them and, ultimately, to grow your business.

The bicycle industry has embraced that way of thinking just like almost every other sector.

We spend countless hours discussing brand awareness, retail conversion, dealer experience, after-sales service, customer retention and lifetime value. None of that is misplaced. Quite the opposite. Understanding customers has become one of the defining competitive advantages of modern business, and there is no reason why cycling should be any different.

And yet, over the past few months, I have found myself coming back to the same uncomfortable thought.

What if we have become exceptionally good at understanding the wrong journey?

Not because the Customer Journey isn’t important. It obviously is. But because it only begins once somebody has already decided they want a bicycle.

That decision, when you stop to think about it, may actually be the least interesting part of the story.

The far more interesting question is what happened before.

Imagine asking the CEO of almost any bicycle company a deceptively simple question.

How does somebody become a cyclist?

Not buy a bicycle.

Become a cyclist.

I suspect most of us could talk for hours about acquisition funnels, customer segmentation, dealer strategies or conversion rates. We could explain how different price points influence purchasing decisions or debate the strengths of one distribution model over another.

But ask us how somebody who has never really considered cycling eventually reaches the point where they genuinely think of themselves as a cyclist, and I suspect the conversation becomes much less structured.

That strikes me as odd.

Because without that first journey, the second one never happens.

Every Customer Journey depends on a Cyclist Journey having happened first.

And yet one has become the subject of endless analysis while the other has remained surprisingly invisible.

Looking back, I don’t think the Cyclist Journey is defined by kilometres, bicycles or years of experience.

I think it is defined by three remarkably simple questions.

Could I do this?

Do people like me belong here?

Am I a cyclist?

Everything else happens somewhere in between.

Every one of us entered cycling through a different door. Some of us raced as children. Others started commuting. Some discovered mountain biking through friends, while others returned to cycling decades after leaving it behind.

The stories are all different.

The questions, I suspect, are always the same.

The more I think about it, the less I believe this is simply an oversight.

For most of the bicycle industry’s history, we probably didn’t need to think about it.

Cyclists emerged almost naturally.

Children rode bicycles because that was simply what children did. Teenagers used bikes to meet friends and explore their surroundings. Families went cycling together at weekends. For many people, the bicycle wasn’t a hobby they consciously chose. It was simply part of everyday life and, for a significant proportion of them, that familiarity gradually evolved into something much deeper.

Society itself produced cyclists.

The industry’s role began later.

Its job wasn’t to create cyclists.

Its job was to build bicycles for people who had already become cyclists.

That distinction may sound subtle.

I don’t think it is.

Because if society was doing most of the work of creating future cyclists, then it made perfect sense for the industry to concentrate almost exclusively on products, technology, distribution and retail.

It wasn’t ignoring the first half of the equation.

It simply didn’t need to own it.

The problem is that the world changed.

Children spend less time outdoors than they once did. Independent mobility has declined. Families ride together less frequently. Competing forms of entertainment occupy more of our free time. For many people, the bicycle has quietly disappeared from everyday life.

And yet our thinking has barely changed.

We continue refining the second half of the equation while assuming that the first half will somehow continue taking care of itself.

I’m no longer convinced it will.

What makes this particularly interesting is that becoming a cyclist isn’t a transaction.

It’s a transformation.

Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to become “a cyclist” in the same way they decide to replace a washing machine or buy a new laptop. Somewhere along the way, something changes. An activity gradually becomes a habit. The habit slowly becomes part of someone’s identity and, almost without noticing, they stop saying, “I ride a bike,” and start saying, “I’m a cyclist.”

That transformation doesn’t happen because somebody saw a particularly clever advertising campaign.

It happens through experiences.

A first ride that feels enjoyable rather than intimidating.

A route that leaves somebody wanting to come back.

A conversation that answers a question without making them feel inexperienced.

The quiet confidence that grows every time they discover they can ride a little further than they thought they could.

And, perhaps more than anything else, the feeling that this is a place where they belong.

Once you start looking at it this way, the bicycle itself begins to occupy a very different place in the story.

It remains incredibly important, but it is no longer the protagonist.

It becomes the enabler.

The object that makes those experiences possible rather than the reason they exist.

That distinction may sound philosophical, but I don’t think it is.

Businesses behave very differently depending on where they believe value is actually created.

If value is created by products, then naturally your attention gravitates towards better engineering, better specifications, better technology and better marketing.

If value is created by people gradually becoming cyclists, the questions begin to change.

Instead of asking how to persuade somebody to buy your bicycle, you start asking what makes somebody curious enough to try cycling for the first time. What gives them the confidence to come back after that first ride? What makes them stop thinking of themselves as someone who occasionally rides a bike and begin to think of themselves as a cyclist?

Those are fundamentally different questions.

One tries to optimise a purchase.

The other tries to understand a transformation.

Perhaps that is why I find myself increasingly convinced that the bicycle industry has become extraordinarily good at understanding customers while paying surprisingly little attention to understanding cyclists.

The first has generated decades of commercial innovation.

The second may well determine whether our industry continues to grow over the next twenty years.

Because every customer was a cyclist first.

But not every cyclist became one by walking into a bicycle shop.

Most became cyclists because, somewhere along the way, cycling stopped being something they did and became part of who they were.

That journey has always existed.

We’ve simply never stopped long enough to understand it.

Perhaps the question the bicycle industry should now be asking itself is no longer how to optimise the Customer Journey.

Perhaps the more important question is this.

If our real job is to help more people complete the Cyclist Journey... what would we do differently?