A dropper post with a rider on top of it won Milan-San Remo this past weekend and now the Freds are in a froth:
“The team set up a bike for me. We had this plan for a long, long time now,” Mohorič said. “I was thinking at first it’s maybe not going to make a huge difference on the descent, but then I tried it in the training and the first time I tried it, I was amazed at how much safer [it is]. If you go normally, it gives you way more control of the bike, and if you go full gas, of course you can go a little bit faster. It’s easier to avoid mistakes, or correct them when they happen.”
Obviously this is a huge coup for makers of dropper posts, since this will officially give them access to the roadie market; basically, for a company like Fox, it’s like they’re Exxon and the federal government just opened up every single national park to unlimited oil drilling.
More importantly though, this is a boon to anyone who enjoys the pastime of Fredwatching, because watching everyone in the paceline lower their saddles for the short descent before the coffee shop in Piermont should be positively adorable, like a row of little ducklings:
Even the Retrogrouches will no doubt get in on it, and I’m obviously going to fit each of my Rivendae with one of these:
Even though I already had one and never used it:
Speaking of mechanical projects, I’ve got a misguided one on the offing, and in researching it I inadvertently came across this:
And no, my misguided project in no way involves adding an additional wheel to my bike, or indeed anything even tangentially related to this contraption.
Anyway, the idea of people riding these things on singletrack should be enough to give your local trailbuilder nightmares, because if thing takes off it’ll be like your local trail system just gave birth to quintuplets:
That said, I admire the ingenuity, and no doubt someone out there somewhere has a burning desire to scale a near-vertical mountain face on a bike/trike–and to store it in a cupboard when they’re done:
Good thing it has a dropper post.
