Something that never fails to amaze me, and saddens me a little, is the curious laziness of imagination and blinkered outlook so many people seem to have when it comes to envisioning their dream bicycle. You see this on cycling forums all the time: somebody will be planning on buying their dream bicycle to mark their 40th or 50th birthday and are casting about for inspiration and ideas, or else they just feel like posing (for the umpteenth time) the favourite old daydreamy question of what would be your ultimate, dream bike if money were no object.
It’s a grand question, rich in possibility, for cyclists, unlike car buffs for example, can have whatever they fancy custom built for relatively little money – a world of individualism and self expression awaits. Yet as you scroll down through these threads you see that the overwhelming majority of respondents simply point like setters to some pricey top-tier model of a mass-produced racing bike – Colnago, Storck, Parlee, De Rosa, Trek, Specialised, Cannondale, you name it.
With stunning herd mentality they cite make and model number, specify which of the factory’s range of paint options, liveries and finishes they most crave, and more often than not there will be plenty of fellow posters chiming behind them in with hearty ‘plus-ones’ to signify their agreement; they aspire to one of those too, although perhaps in a different colour and maybe Di2 instead of Campagnolo Record, or vice versa.
Not that I am suggesting there is anything intrinsically wrong with having, say, a Colnago C59 or a Parlee Z4 be your ultimate aspirational ‘dream’ bike. Far from it. They are very, very fine bicycles. And what’s nice, too, about them I suppose, from a daydream point of view, is that these bikes are also readily visualised and imagined – there’s no blank page, so to speak; all the creativity has been done for you already, by experts, and you can see the results in the ad or the review or on the TV screen, perhaps being ridden by a pro up the Col du Galibier with the glorious backdrop of the Alps behind it. Nor is it especially hard to imagine the act of obtaining one, for they are tantalisingly accessible, if you’re daring enough, and your better half is understanding enough, and your credit card can take the hit. All you’d have to do is go on-line, place your order and a few days later – presto! – your dream bicycle will appear on your doorstep, fully specced out in the size and colour you ordered and looking just like the image you coveted in the magazine reviews.
But truly now, would this really be your dream bike? The platonic ideal that encapsulates all that you love about cycling, bicycles and the open road, sums up the miles you’ve ridden thus far in your career and those you hope to ride in the future? I wonder. I can well accept that the R&D engineers, designers and marketing departments of the world’s great bicycle manufacturing companies are sufficiently attuned to the cycling zeitgeist to turn out some enviable high-performance eye-candy, but I find it hard to believe that their creations, however finely made and well-thought-out, could be so flawlessly in sync with the hopes, experiences and aspirations of their clientele at large as to be someone’s dream bike, or indeed, anybody’s dream bike, right out of the box. How could they? Perhaps this is the root of the old mathematical formula for the optimum number of bikes: n+1. Unfulfilled, we continue our search.
I’d love to read a thread sometime where people really did think through and describe their dream bikes, confront the blank canvas before them, explore what it is they love about bicycles and cycling, and at least put these ideas and inspirations into words, if not into actual carbon or titanium or steel.
