I've been thinking about the generational differences between old bike lovers and new bike lovers and I think it comes down to whatever you first saw when you came into the hobby. It's like musical tastes a bit, one is fond of the music one grew up with. I got serious about cycling about five minutes after seeing Breaking Away in August of '79, and if someone had come up to me then and said that the pinnacle of lightweight bikes was something from 1958 I would have laughed. I wanted what Dave Stoller was riding, what Bernard Hinault was riding. So it makes sense that someone today would like the new stuff. Only later, with education and perspective would the whole range of classic bikes become of interest if at all. But just today I was in a bike shop looking at a carbon fiber Look frame with Campagnolo Record carbon fiber bits and threadless stem and fillet brazed joints, spoke nipples in the hubs, 16 spoked wheels, and I was staring at it and looking closely and trying to understand how we came from Super Record to here. How this bike evolved from what I knew to be beautiful and functional to this machine in front of me. I left the store bewildered and a little like the turn of the century man I've found I've become. I felt out of my time and frame of reference. "Dang, that horseless carriage is noisy but folks seem to like it. I don't see much use for it myself, nor to flying neither--if that's even possible" And I wonder, too about the exposed cables protruding out from the brakes of the Shimano STI. If they can hang in the wind can't the brake cables be freed from under the oppression of the handlebar tape? And as much as I wondered at just how different this machine looked from my bikes---
---I still wanted to ride it.
Scott Smith
Perfect LA day (if you weren't an oil refinery that is)