If The Gravel Bike Didn’t Exist

If the gravel bike didn’t exist, it’d be necessary to invent it. In fact, I believe that’s what we’ve seen occur over the last several years of frenzied gravel innovation.

Speculation

The reason that we didn’t really have something we called a “gravel bike” before was because we had the venerable and (recently) often-referenced 90s mountain bike. 

In fact, there has always been some variety of bike that was intended to take on as much terrain as possible and walk the narrow path between being good at everything and being really good at one thing. They’ve just had a variety of different names and incarnations throughout the years.

We ended up in a situation, fairly recently, where the existing bikes were specialized enough that there was a gravel-bike-shaped hole and room for serious improvement.

Road and CX Bikes

If you conjure an image of “gravel bike,” it’s likely that you’re thinking of something shaped a lot like a road bike or a cyclocross bike. Neither of those really fit the bill, though.

Road

I really mean “bikes that look like you could race them on pavement” in a general sense, here. Just by looking at them, it ought to be pretty obvious that they’re good at going fast on paved surfaces and are far from a reasonable choice for a lot of gravel and dirt and what-have-you.

CX

Does anyone remember these? It feels like they’ve been superseded, entirely, by gravel bikes. I had a few cyclocross bikes pass through my hands over the years and they were reasonable for certain kinds of gravel and mixed terrain use. Singletrack was kind of fun until you ran into something that rattled a tooth loose and the charm wore off.

I think there were two design limitations that afflicted cyclocross bikes. One: they were subject to the UCI mandating tires no wider than 33mm in a lot of cases. This meant that you gave up a lot of useful tire size for tougher terrain. Two: they were really built with short cyclocross races in mind and, as such, they didn’t have to be maximally comfortable over the rough stuff. They just had to be comfortable enough that you’d finish the race and maybe (if you were so fortunate) swap for the bike you had in the pit if something went wrong.

Mountain Bikes 

The first mountain bike I bought when I was getting into cycling a bit over a decade ago had way more in common with the 90s mountain bikes that I had experience with as a kid than it did with what I currently ride. It featured tires that weren’t quite two inches wide, 90 millimeters of suspension, and a triple chainring setup. The biggest difference was that it had 29-inch wheels, which was enough of an advancement to completely boggle my mind back then. It should be noted that I’m describing a cross country mountain bike – there were other flavors of bike meant to handle increasingly more demanding terrain. I distinctly remember really wanting one of those dual-crown downhill beasts before I understood much about pedaling or going up hills.

The description of the bike is key because it was obviously intended to handle a variety of conditions and excel at one of them (cross country-style singletrack). Long before there was gravel-specific anything, I took this bike all over on minimum maintenance roads, gravel roads, singletrack, pavement, snow, etc… It was better at some of those things than others but I was generally happy with how it performed and it certainly echoed the versatility that I remembered from my mountain bikes as a kid.

My most recent mountain bike does a good imitation of a versatile bike but there are some drawbacks. Wide handlebars that are super useful on the trail become a liability when you want to swap out some hand positions and alleviate fatigue. The tires are significantly wider (and I’m not even running the widest, just a spry and nimble 2.4-inch tire front and rear!), and that brings a higher degree of rolling resistance for smooth stuff. The gearing is biased toward climbing and the fastest ratio available to me is still fairly slow. In all, it’s a fantastic bike for trail and decidedly mediocre for gravel.

Specialization

I don’t know if this is still the argument of the day, but I recall seeing a lot of criticism leveled at gravel bikes because they were just a modern way to sell a 90s mountain bike back to you.

The sanest response to that is “yeah, and?”

I say that because, when viewed in the abstract sense, the 90s mountain bike ticked a lot of boxes. Ride a wide variety of surfaces, carry stuff if you want, have some fun, race it as often as you want. Just about every other garage has that kind of bike squirreled away somewhere. If you ask someone to draw a bike from memory, they’re going to do two things: screw up the double triangle design (probably) and make it look like a 90s mountain bike (probably).

Specialization of the various archetypes of bikes available is exactly why we ended up with the gravel bike.

Power Vacuum

This aforementioned specialization led to a gravel bike being described by the negatives of all other available kinds of bikes.

Mountain bikes are fine, except that they’re kind of way too much bike for chill gravel or smooth dirt. They don’t go very fast on paved surfaces relative to other kinds of bikes.

Road bikes are fine, except that they can’t handle anything too rough. We even have subtypes of road bikes meant to better handle particularly rough pavement or cobbles.

Cyclocross bikes were fine, except for the design limitations imposed by the very kind of racing they were meant for.

Touring bikes are fine, except for their bias in favor of carrying a lot of things all over the place. Sometimes they don’t handle as well as you’d want if you don’t have them loaded up. Sometimes they have accommodations that you generally don’t always need, like a very upright position and a tremendous array of available gears, in case you need to haul every worldly possession up a mountain pass on your bike.

Taking these exceptions together, you kind of construct the shape of the thing that plugs the hole and seals off the metaphorical vacuum. It looks a bit like a bike that can handle a wide variety of surfaces without being too specialized in handling one, can maintain a reasonable pace on asphalt, has plenty of tire clearance, has concessions to comfort for longer rides on rougher surfaces, and options to maybe carry a bit of stuff but not have handling biased toward carrying everything.

Parting Question

Will gravel bikes encounter this same degree of incremental specialization? Will it mean that we get to repeat this entire cycle in another 30ish years?

I find it unlikely because, despite the name, gravel bikes really specialize in being able to handle some general surfaces. What are they going to do, get better at being kind of good at a lot of things? I hope so!