Posts tagged “interbike”  

Matt Haughey is a fellow cyclist and bike racer. We cosponsor the Buy Local Team. He’s also internet famous and a colleague who blogged with us during Interbike.

Last night Matt tweeted:

I passed out at home had a seizure, went to ER, did a cat scan and they found a growth. Awaiting surgery in the next week to remove it.

and the community responded with well wishes. We tweeted too and are sending him a care package today.

Get well Matt. Fix your head. The interwebs are a better place because of you.

The annual Spokesmen Live television event from the Interbike Media Center with David from The FredCast Cycling Podcast, Carlton from BikeBiz.com/ Quickrelease.tv, me, Jeff from Velo Reviews, and Joe Lindsey from Bicycling Magazine.

Worth noting that a bike magazine and bike bloggers met for the first time and got along just fine.

About the weirdest thing I saw at Interbike was this full carbon step-thru frame…with fender, rack and disc brake mounts. Of course it was at one of those dozen or more booths occupied by generically-named Asian factories. Coming to an eBay near you soon!

Taiwan and China are the sources for most carbon fiber frames and components. Sometimes a European or American company owns a factory there, sometimes they have an exclusive deal with the factory, and sometimes they just slap their logo on a part that the factory was shopping out to anyone with money.

Is this good or bad? For most companies, it’s just the way it’s done if you want to sell carbon fibre. The consumer market has spoken, and they want affordable carbon. For all the interest in steel, people buy carbon more than ever and don’t seem to care that much where it was made.

Oh, but not you though, huh? You only buy American? Well, I suppose your bike’s shifters are American-made, right? How about your computer monitor?

Dahon’s folding, travel helmet.

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iPhone

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Some people have New Year’s Day resolutions; I have pre-Interbike resolutions to stop buying stuff. These resolutions usually fail too, because after Interbike I always come away with a wish list of acquisitions. Number one on the list is a Bianchi Cross Concept Carbon frameset.

In what maybe considered the best day ever for a cyclist like Eric Steele, he rode with us down the Vegas strip in the Mobile Social Interbike

and then won a Novara Fusion

Photo: Byron on Eric’s Camera.

Eric provides a variety of marketing services for the outdoor and hospitality industries at Steele Media and is based in Idaho Springs, CO.

He gets his Fusion next week and will upload the photos. REI is giving away more Fusions online via Facebook.

Now that we’ve all gotten back into the groove from Interbike we wanted to reach out and give a thanks for the great Mobile Social event, and provide a bit of our thoughts about thank REI, Globe, and Dahon).

It’s hard to believe that this was just the third year that Bike Hugger was at Interbike, the response we got to the Mobile Social was fantastic. Within days of announcing the logistics for the event we had 100 people pre-registered for the event. We gave out all 250 wristbands we brought, and had more people come through our tent to watch the crit and hang out, including Gary Fisher, who had a few beers and chatted with our attendees.

Interbike is a place where dreamers sell their dreams, where corporations present consumer traps, where marketing people gamble their skills. Not everyone can be a winner, but sometimes you just have to call out the losers…when the product is just shamelessly rubbish. For my inaugural “Poop on Wheels” Award, I present to you Puma’s 2010 fixed gear.

Fixed gears are HOT…all the kids are doing it, right? Puma just needed to make a bike the same way they make all those “limited edition” shoes…by using this year’s hot colour ways to cover up a complete lack of engineering and craftmanship.

Slate Olson from Rapha shows us his bespoke suit.

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iPhone

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That big-ass wheel we spotted in Hed’s booth? They’re bringing it to market for downhillers that want more aero

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iPhone

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For 2010, MonkeyLectric has a programmable pro version and more.

Watch now on YouTube or download and sync to iTunes, your iPod, iPhone. Subscribe to the Huggacast Feed for more episodes.

iPhone

iPhone users can download and watch now and access our Huggacasts via the iTunes Store on a Wi-Fi or cellular network.

Mark V is in Taiwan with other bloggers and journalists for a cultural tour, including Cyclelicious.

Mark left for the tour on Friday, the day after Interbike and our Mobile Social.

Last year I spotted Speedplay’s prototype offroad pedal, and now it’s just a bit closer to production. And it has a name: SYZR (pronounced as “scissor”).

The SYZR will be a complete departure from the Frog, Speedplay’s current mtb pedal. Conceptually, the SYZR takes the features of the highly successful Zero road pedal and applies them to an offroad pedal. The pedal is a resin and stainless steel construction with the spring latch pivoting on the axle in much the same way as a Crank bros. However the front latch surface has a resin wedge on the front that helps the pedal kick over into position, since the the SYZR is a 2-sided pedal as opposed to the Crank Bros Pedal being 4-sided. This year’s prototype seems more polished than last year’s, which also lacked the resin portions.

We had a fabulous time at the Bike Hugger Mobile Social Interbike 2009. Thanks so much to our partners Novara, REI, Globe and Dahon. We’ll write more about this after we’ve slept a bit and get all the images into the Hugger Flickr stream, but in the meantime, here’s the Flickr group of the images I shot of us riding down the Las Vegas strip and hanging out at our VIP tent course-side at the Crits.

We were thrilled to meet so many of you all (we had more than 250 people attending our booth, including Gary Fisher). We gave away a ton of schwag and raffle prizes, including Hed Wheels, Sun-Ringle wheels and a fantastic Novara bike.

This ride was by far the best part of Interbike for me, so thanks personally to everyone who made this such a great night.

Because of his flamboyant sense of style, Gary Fisher is one of the most visible people at Interbike. This has been the case for the decade or so I’ve been attending the show. He’d be pretty recognizable even if he weren’t dressed to kill.

But as anyone who has approached him knows, he’s also one of the most grounded and friendly people in the business. Gary is stopped constantly by people asking for a photo with him, and he always obliges.

He was also nice enough to accept our offer to hang out in our VIP tent at the Mobile Social and drink a few beers and watch a bit of the Crit finals, mixing it up with our attendees and posing for yet more photos with us.

Thank you Gary for embodying what the sport of mountain biking was all about when you invented it.

We've all drooled over the wood fenders that make your bike look like a classic Chris Craft. But there's one problem: most wood fenders are flat from side to side. But mud and water spray and bounce in all directions coming off your spinning tires.

Taiwanese innovation to the rescue! Yesterday I checked out some beautiful, light, and stiff bamboo fenders sporting a compound curve--just like fenders in plastic and metal. The prototypes I saw are developed by Sunny Wheel and not in distribution yet.

We had a quick fashion show with the guys from Outlier yesterday. What they showed us is exactly the kind of stuff I've wanted someone to produce: street clothes that are comfortable in the saddle and utilitarian but don't shout "I rode my bike today!!"

Their cuts are traditional in durable fabrics and super-supple merino wool with well-thought-out features to make them comfortable on a bike.

A few favorites:

Straight-ahead slim cut t-shirt in 17.5 micron merino. No weird "sporty" gussets or flat stitching and no scratchiness.

Merino wool hoody. Hood is large enough to go over a helmet.

Workwear pants in a tough, stretchy cordura nylon, fit like a pair of straight leg jeans.

We've got more photos on our Flickr Interbike set.

Our Day Two coverage of Interbike 2009 is flowing over on the Interbike Hub. Click on over for today’s super-hotness.

Just out for an everyday ride on a Davidson titanium carbon belt drive travel bike in Vegas.

Uploaded by mathowie | more from the Bike Hugger Photostream.

Photos from the MASH SF Stage Race at Interbike 2009.

Uploaded by davidjschloss | more from the Bike Hugger Photostream.