Every week at ST Towers we see the new, the reinvented, the innovated and, occasionally, the baffling or the flat out mental. Press releases claiming to have ‘literally reinvented the wheel’ (it’s a wheel, people), promising to ‘transform your ride experience’ (into what? A packet of crisps?), or touting ‘a revolution in bike technology’ (sentient e-bikes?). But some of these things are indeed innovative, and here the team pick their 15 most significant innovations from the mountain biking industry overthe last 15 years.
1. Dropper Posts
Keeping things tidy
They can be somewhat divisive, but we assume that those people who lavishly pour scorn on dropper posts mostly live in gently undulating places full of verdant wooded singletrack. But if you live anywhere steep and rocky, riding the aforementioned steep and rocky bits is much, much easier if your saddle is out of the way. And not having to stop to lower it? Perfection.
2. Tubeless Tyres
When they first appeared, tubeless tyres were seen as a way of lowering pressures and increasing traction. Well, yeeeees, up to a point. But the best thing about them is the sudden absence of anything approaching a snakebite. Which, if you live in the rocky places we’ve previously mentioned, is A Very Good Thing. While those early tyre/tube/rimstrip and milk combos were a little unreliable and finnicky, the systems of today are (nearly) simple and foolproof and so we rejoice!
3. Disc Brakes on every bike
Need to stop? Like to keep rims for more than a year or two? Hate the graunch, graunch graunch of riding rim brakes in mud? These things are wonderful, they really, really are.
4. 1x
Make bikes simpler for newbies who no longer need to attempt to choreograph front and rear shifting, which works in opposite directions. Lighten bikes by removing them from the shackles of front derailleur-hood. And make things easier for bike designers by removing the need to bolt important things onto important places. Honestly, one-by is ace.
5. Wheelsize choice
Seeing 6ft 6in guys on 26in wheels was never an edifying sight. We now have bigger wheels with their great rolling properties for racers and for riders who love to steamroll the countryside. There are 27.5in wheels for, well, everything, and even 26in is still around, though mostly (on new bikes) only with a 4in fat bike tyre. And let’s not get into tyre width (although we will in a minute…)
6. Enduro helmets
More aesthetically acceptable than in the past, more coverage, more safety acceptable weight, MIPS. The Enduro helmet has brought the trail helmet into heretofore unheard of territory. Plus you can strap little cameras to them! WIN.
7. Knee Pads you can pedal in
All morning climbing, which needn’t be followed by the embarrassing, shoeless, sweaty kneed dance of kneepad-putter-onerification. And it doesn’t feel like you’re extruding a little plasticine flesh-sausage from the hole in the back whenever you turn a pedal.
8. Wider bars and shorter stems
Keep the same overall weight distribution, but increase lateral stability, and drastically improve steering-feel, technical riding and other awesome things about mountain biking. Not quite as advantageous in very, very tight trees, but hey, you can’t have everything. And that’s what chainsaws are for (joke).
9. Modern Geometry
If you’ve only ridden an ‘old’ geometry bike, then the new breed can take some getting used to. You need to push them into corners more, put your weight more over the front, and generally ride them more aggressively than you did – but they repay your efforts with razor sharp handling, wonderful accuracy and stability at speed. It’s very, very hard to go back.
10. LED lights and better batteries
Hit the lights!
Remember the good old days when your lights were powered by some jumbo D sized batteries? And when your light gobbled said batteries so quickly that the only option was to fork out for some rechargeable jumbo D sized batteries, which you then had to recharge with ever increasing frequency as they gradually lost their charge holding properties? With a good set of new and fully charged batteries, you might pump out a whole 20 lumens for the first half hour of your ride, gradually decreasing unless you gave the light a good whack? But not too much of a whack because you didn’t want to break the filament in the bulb? Ah, those dark, benighted, hideous good old days.
11. GPS Units
No longer just a system for precision military strikes, the fact that the GPS system is accurate and everywhere can help with everything from accurate training, precise map-finding and directions that actually work. Having a digital watch on the bars – that tells you as much or as little as you want it to, is surely better than the tickover unit on your fork leg and that little spiky thing on a spoke that knocked it round once a revolution to record your mileage. Kind of.
12. Clipless Pedals
Long in the tooth riders will remember the joy with which Shimano’s SPD pedals were greeted with 25 years ago. While before there had been the ‘pedal, flip, miss, pedal, flip, miss’ rigmarole to endure, now there was just a neat ‘snap, snap’ and you were on your way. While the prevalence of clipless pedals arguably encourages riders to be lazier in their technique, we’d say the same about suspension bikes vs rigid bikes and we don’t see them going away any time soon. Flat pedals might now be bigger and grippier, but a large part of the mountain bike world wouldn’t be without them.
13. Carbon
Carbon has been improved greatly over the last decade or so. It has become easier (though not cheaper) for companies to make bikes out of carbon in the Far East. There’s a generation of experience over there now of making carbon, so it’s not just limited to F1 style one-offs and production carbon mountain bikes can be made consistently. Carbon allows a frame designer flexibility to put suspension pivots exactly where they want, rather than where a straight tube can get to, or to trim weight on a svelte hardtail until it’s barely there, yet still strong enough to race on. And it seems we’re only just getting started. (Now they just need to work out how to recycle it…)
14. E bikes
We had some e-MTBs in last year, including this electric fat bike from Haibike. This still is the most booked-out magazine test bike we’ve ever had in. Everyone wanted a go. And love them or not, no-one who actually rode an e-MTB came back from the test ride saying ‘I don’t see the point’. Some people came back saying ‘Not for me, but now I understand’ – whereas the keener riders wouldn’t even give them back without a fight, such was their newfound love.
E-bikes, they’re coming, they’re getting better every day and they’re inevitable. Get used to it.
15. Wider Tyres
The trio of new WTB mountain bike tyres. The Breakout, Trail Boss, and Nine Line.
Back in the day, it was considered a bit risque to have anything more than a 2.1in tyre on your bike. After all, you needed it to be light enough to loft over trail obstacles, didn’t you? But in these enlightened days, we see that the most important thing about a tyre is its ability to actually keep you stuck to the ground. And in a great many places, that means widererer. Better cornering. Better terrain smoothing. Hugely improved traction. Just flat out (no pun intended) better – unless you’re slathered in Lycra, riding smooth hardpack on an XC bike.
Honorable mention: Waterproof Shorts
Style and grace just out of shot
Let’s face it, it rains in the UK, a lot. And in response to our friends in hotter countries, it’s frequently said that if we Brits waited for a dry day to go riding, we wouldn’t actually ride. Mudguards are all very well, but they either clog up far too much, or (far more common) look a bit stupid. So the potentially ridiculous-sounding idea of a waterproof short is actually a really, really neat one. Your arse remains dry, and – crucially – you and you bike retain the style and grace for which you’re naturally famed throughout the land.
And finally, here’s the gang of three live on Facebook talking about why they chose some of the items on this list.
[fbvideo link=”https://business.facebook.com/singletrackmag/videos/10153794115213612/” width=”650″ height=”400″ onlyvideo=”0″]
Can’t see the video? Click here
Comments (9)
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the proliferation of the internet shirley? being able to share knowledge of routes and trails and any other advice relating to it….
first 3 – no doubt…
Electric bikes??? Barking mad gentlemen
I must be old and skint. Only 3 of these apply to me!
But I cry foul as it is very biased towards the later part of the 15 years. I’d say that not mentioning better suspension is wrong. Particularly when e-bikes get a mention.
I certainly wouldn’t call clipless pedals an innovation of the last 15 years.
Good front mudguards?
E-bikes, I think they are a dangerous invention, one that will eventually lead to a decline in acess to rural areas. I think the execution of them is great, and I’m sure they are good fun to ride, but they’ll probably ruin it for the rest of us, being too close to a motorbike and all…
Nice mix in there. Some I agree with, some I don’t. Some innovations solve problems that you KNOW you have (e.g. disc brakes), whereas others solve problems you didn’t even know you had but rejoice it how much better they make your riding. I suspect 1x is in the latter camp 😉
Interesting list and certainly agree with most of it.
Surely suspension improvements comes in the list over e bikes though.?
I agree!