Sorta Cutting Edge News - No. 12

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Hoo-boy! All sorts of random things to throw in the mental hopper this week. Specialized Bicycles (wait, make that the whole bike industry) wants your girlfriend; Surprise! The French are copying something American; IMBA is ringing the warning bell for California mountain bikers; and could this be the year that Mike Ferrentino gets his due slice of Mountain Bike Hall of Fame glory?

GETTING FEMALE-FRIENDLY

A recent survey by the National Sporting Goods Association (NSGA) found that 44 percent of cyclists are women, with a grand total of17.2 million women reported to be cyclists. Could this be true? Well, to be honest, the numbers that get spit out by trade organizations are usually a little…oh…crazy-as-a-shitbird-on-crack.

Trade associations have a vested interest in showing that large numbers of consumers are interested in the products produced by their industry. To “prove” that there is tremendous demand for upright cake mixers, backyard wood-chippers and (in this case) bicycles, they tend to stretch the definition of what it means to be a cake mixer, wood chipper or cyclist. Case in point: The NSGA study defined a cyclist as someone who rode six or more times during the year. So, let’s say that the lady down the street with the orange hair and Danzig tattoos straddles her rusty Free Spirit and wobbles on down to the local 7-Eleven in search of a case of Wild Turkey or Rose 20/20. Furthermore, let’s say that she’s a fairly conservative drinker and only needs to pedal down to the liquor store once every two months. Well, by the NSGA definition, Thelma-Lou is a certifiable cyclist. Gotta love them statistics.

While the NSGA is probably playing fast and loose with the numbers, they are, in truth, also probably scratching the surface of a true phenomenon. More and more women are cycling these days. Perhaps the best indication of this is the growing number of bike companies targeting female consumers. For years, one company did a good job of building bikes for women—Terry Precision. From the early 1980s on, the Rochester-based company produced a slew of small-wheeled road bikes and Holstein-hued rigid mountain bikes for the female set. In the late 1990s, however, major bike suppliers like Trek and Specialized moved into the game—and they wouldn’t be content to push cow-colored bikes.

Trek was one of the first major companies to really target the female mountain biker. In 1999, they produced women’s-specific versions of fairly high tech mountain bikes (such as their 8000 model). Trek also made a point of showing women cyclists in all of their catalogs. Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement. If you flip through the last 2 or 3 years worth of Trek catalogs, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single cyclist in there with hardware between their legs (except Lance Armstrong, of course, who understandably gets a shitload of ink).

The women in the Trek catalogs are on road trips, they’re out camping, they’re riding road bikes. It’s a friggin’ subliminal Lilith Fair on two wheels…and it appears to be working. Demand for Trek’s women’s-specific cycling products has increased each year, resulting in more and more female-friendly offerings. This year, Trek opened up the flood gates with a whopping eight high-end, women-specific bikes, including a monocoque carbon fiber bike (the $2,699 5200 WSD), which required laying down a big chunk of change in order to create new OCLV molds.

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