Purple chainring bolts, Part 2

 It has never been so easy to get sentimental over how good things used to be. The lack of other things to do during the long evenings of lockdown has led me to have an unprecedented amount of time to drink too much and think about things. When the only things you're allowed to do are work, walk and ride your bike, nostalgia forms a nice cosy rose-tinted safety blanket to keep the darker thoughts at bay.

It's so easy to look back to a time and pretend everything was brilliant. From today, the early 90s in cycling look like a golden age of optimism and hope. With each passing year, huge leaps were made in bike design and performance, and each generation of a product would show a significant development (a stark contrast to today's world of marginal gains, where it seems with each thing gained, a little something is lost). One year it might be threadless headsets, the next an extra gear, integrated shift levers, hydraulic brakes... 

Maybe it was summer all the time. Everyone rode around smiling in a big pair of Oakleys from the saddle of a gleaming Klein in iridescent purple that weighed less than your lunch, a triumph of anodized aluminium glistening in the sun. Forget the punctures, and the chainslap, and the thumb shifters, and the buckled wheels, and the...

Things from a little further back somehow seem to escape all the harsh judgements we impose on our recent past. Ask someone how they feel about their ex a week after they broke up, and they'll be full of resentment and regret. Ask them again a few years down the line and maybe they'll see a few more of the positives. Perhaps this is the same with bikes.

Maybe this is why I look back at the bikes of my early riding years and just see the negatives. Things from the recent past just seem a little embarrassing. Compare them with what you have now, and its hard to see past all the ways they're not quite so good. It's almost as though you can see what the designers were aiming for, and how they fell short. The confidence and hyperbole of the marketing doesn't help, when radical and modern begin to look conservative and dated.

In a few short years, the elegant ARC with all its boutique anodized parts from small companies like Ringlé had been replaced by these inelegant lumps. At the time, these bikes were the future, and their designers knew it - they didn't need to worry about making it look elegant when it had 200mm of frame travel. These bikes are bold and brash, with huge logos emblazoned across their massive tubes. Yet(i) only ten years later, this Yeti 303 looks incredibly dated - mtb design has done an about turn since this left the factory. Head angles have slackened, seat angles have steepened, wheels have grown, stems have shrunk, wheelbases and reaches have lengthened... While they might have looked incredibly cool to a freerider in 2010 who knew what they were looking at, they probably didn't look that great to anyone else. They certainly have a style of their own, but I'd say its an acquired taste - they're not imbued with any natural elegance. These old bikes just look kind of naff now - as dated to look at as they are to ride, without any of the saving graces of the older bikes.

Who knows, maybe in another decade these will have developed a new kind of cool of their own, but somehow I struggle to see that happening.

Perhaps Yeti was the wrong brand to pick on for this, as they don't have a DH bike currently in production, but their biggest, burliest Enduro SB150 is probably a more capable descender than the old 303 was, and it goes uphill too. And it looks rather nice.

Maybe it is the simplicity of the old and the new designs. The frames of the early 90s had clean, uninterrupted lines thanks to their simple construction and design. They looked clean, purposeful, light and elegant. That seemed to get lost as suspension travel grew, tubes thickened and logos got stuck to every inch of free space. Coming out of the 2010s, some of this elegance has come back. Bigger wheels, longer reaches and newer manufacturing techniques have seen a return of clean designs, without all the gussets, braces and angular complexity of the years in between. Bikes that look purposeful, light, strong and elegant.

Or at least, they do for now. Maybe in another ten years we'll be laughing about it.