Cycling is the New Golf, And That’s Good

I used to cringe when I heard the title of this post spoken aloud — mostly because I visualized old retirees in Florida in plaid pants pulled up to their armpits taking short, sharp hacks at the ball with their pitching wedge and throwing turf everywhere. As you might guess, I have no fondness for golf as a sport — for me it’s more of a drinking game than anything else, and I’m usually half in the bag by the sixth hole.

The term, though, gets thrown around pretty derisively inside bike shops, and I see a lot of quiet hostility toward the doctors and lawyers that are coming in and dropping $10K to $20K on bikes. Most of that hostility seems to come from the hipster kids who are too shortsighted to see the benefits of having cycling be the new golf. And there are benefits outside of those to the riders.

To be fair, there are detriments. A lot of these guys are popping up on club and team rides, and don’t have the skills to ride in the pack. They’re camouflaged by the fancy bike, the team kit, and the ability to talk the talk, but when the rubber meets the road, sometimes these guys are causing skin to meet asphalt, too. And yeah, there’s the mindset of “buying their way in” and not paying their dues, but I think that’s generally a load of shit, when you consider the number of people lining up at Category 5 crits on $5K+ Dura-Ace equipped bikes with Zipp 404s are basically doing the same thing.

All that said, let’s look at the good stuff.

First, they’re bringing enthusiasm to the sport. I see a lot of these guys come into the sport, and if they’re with the right club/team, they end up becoming racers, and better depth of field is a great thing. They become advocates for the bike, and I love seeing people who are enthusiastic about what they do, especially when it’s cycling.

Second, for small businesses, these guys are exceptional customers. At one of the shops I previously worked at, we had a customer (a doctor) spend almost $20,000 on Trek Project One bikes in the span of two months. In a business where a small shop would consider $10K a fantastic day, and the average day in-season runs $3000-$5000, an extra $10K a month for two months is a hell of a windfall.

Third, there’s a significant segment of these guys who are going to get very badly hooked on this and spend the rest of their lives riding. For shops, that means customers returning year after year. For their kids, it means a good, healthy role model. For the country, it means more healthy people and less cost in Medicare/Medicaid. And for all of it, it means more people on bikes, more recognition that bikes aren’t just a toy, and that they have their place on the roads.

So yeah, you can bemoan the Forbes article that tells readers why they need a custom bike, you can bitch about how it’s ruining cycling, you can complain all you like — but you’re still wrong.

(Man, I wrote this at an ungodly hour of the morning — and it shows. Rambly, disjointed, and not as well thought-out as I had expected. I’m going to let it stand as-is. What’s your opinion on this whole “new golf” thing?)