Bikodiversity

As trade show season rolls around once again, you can guarantee that certain kinds of bike will be flavour of the year and others (quite probably the ones that were the Next Big Thing last year) will not. You can also guarantee that, whichever sorts of bike are currently in and out, there'll be more different ones than ever. Think of a style of bike and someone probably makes it. Freeride hardtail? Take your pick. Long-travel XC? Yup. Downhill 29er? You're clearly on crack, but yes. I haven't seen a 29in jump bike yet, but there's probably someone somewhere working on it. Presumably he's nine feet tall and, once he's finished the bike, will be starting on building jumps 40% bigger upon which to ride it. But I digress.

It never used to be this way, of course. Back in the sepia-toned late 80s and early 90s there were just mountain bikes. There was a bit of variation in angles and lengths but by today's standards everything was essentially the same. To give you some idea, sloping top tubes seemed pretty radical - had web forums existed, they'd have been alive with flat vs sloping top tube arguments for months.

Now, of course, hardly a niche remains unturned. Some people seem to think that this is a bad thing, that it's all marketing, that manufacturers keep coming up with weird new kinds of bike so that we all feel compelled to try and cram something else into our bulging sheds. And while there's undoubtedly some truth in that, it's not a bad thing. In nature, biodiversity is a sign of a healthy ecosystem, and so it is in bicycles.

While the mountain bike pork pie gets sliced ever more thinly, so the jelly of innovation surrounding each meaty niche acts to flavour the all-round good egg in the middle - every weight, strength or performance improvement made in a niche bike will eventually find its way into a do-it-all bike, with such bikes ultimately getting even more capable.

And there's the thing. If you want a bike that'll do one or two things incredibly well, you can have one. But if you want a bike that'll do nearly everything very well, you can have one of those too. There's no denying that too much choice can make your brain attempt to crawl out of your ear to escape. But jam a finger in there, take a deep breath and think positively. Whatever riding you like to do, the perfect bike is out there somewhere.