Originally Posted by Trakhak

The advent of gravel bikes and the like had nothing to do with Grant P.'s pushing his niche non-racing bikes and everything to do with U.S. bike racers becoming fascinated by cyclocross racing, a sport that originated in Europe in 1902. U.S. cyclocross, having become a dominant segment of the bike racing scene in this country, then begat gravel racing and purpose-built gravel bikes.

And endurance bikes are road racing bikes that still look the part but are optimized for aging riders who have put on a little too much weight. Again, nothing to do with GP. (And, by the way, not sure what the decline of XC mountain bike racing has to do with this topic.)

Grant P.'s main accomplishment, from the point of view of a guy who got into racing bikes in the early '60s and has enjoyed tracking all the subsequent trends in the industry as they came and went, was that he persuaded a small coterie of acolytes that they're actually secretly cooler than the bike racers that they had hitherto felt intimidated by. It's geeks versus jocks.

And that was a stroke of genius on his part. Guys who remembered the feeling of being invisible to the cool kids in high school only to find themselves in the same position all over again rallied to Grant's flag. Some of the worst trolls here outside of Politics and Religion are the guys (and they're all guys, it would seem) who, lacking the considerable rhetorical skill of Grant himself, deliver themselves of unnuanced, bilious diatribes against carbon, aluminum, lycra, electric shifting, derailleurs, hybrids, any bike that isn't a recumbent, any bike that isn't a Dutch bike, etc., etc., etc.

That antagonism is, I believe, Petersen's primary legacy, and that's what I dislike about Rivendell and its effect on the cycling community in this country. Bike riding in the U.S. is tough enough, when all of us feel targets on our backs when we're out there contending with drivers who believe we have no right to take up room on "their" roads. Dividing us from within serves no purpose.