falling off bikes since 1975

Defining a bike only by it’s wheel size is just the sort of closed-mindedness that the 29er advocates are up against in trying to convert others to 29ers. I say convert carefully, not introduce, because there is usually an expectation on the part of the 29er advocate that the scales will fall from our eyes like St Paul on the road to Domestos and we will see the error of our 26er ways.

I say, why should people come round to their way of thinking if their own stance is so illogical and bigotted? So much so that the inquisitors even poo-poo the idea of 96ers.

Yet at the same time these people boast of a stable of 29ers. The first chinks in their doctrine appear.

Having more than one 29er! That in itself is an admission that there is no one ideal bike for everything. Once the 29er advocates have admitted that then surely they should acknowledge that when looking at what bike is best suited to a particular purpose you should look at all aspects of the bike in deciding what is best. I say “best suited” because I’m not sure you can ever get an ideal even for a niche. Constraining the design to 29er wheels when patently unsuitable is all the evidence I, and others who doubt, need of narrow-mindedness. The same narrow-mindedness that 29er advocates so despise when trying to convince people to go the 29er route.

For instance there are those who are so 29er dedicated that they even claim that downhillers should have 29er wheels. I know people will bring my attention to pictures of Jeff Jones downhilling on one of his 29ers, but a goodly amount of the reason those pictures exist is because of Jeffs skills as a rider, not the fact he’s riding a 29er. Slap Jeff on a 24 inch wheeled dirt jumper and he’d be ruling the same course.

The fact that there’s even a debate amongst 29er advocates about wheel strength for 29ers should warn them that they’re not going to be ideal for world class downhilling. Yet blind faith over all it seems. One the one hand worries about wheel strength, and on the other claims that 700c wheels can withstand Paris-Roubaix and should therefore be up to withstanding downhilling. This is so laughable that it weakens the whole position of the 29er argument.

Yet, for downhillers, wheel strength is just one of the issues to be addressed, what about front end geometry, the difficulties of building a long travel back end (because a 29er rear won’t eliminate the need for lots of travel), and halfway decent handling? None of which the 29er advocates can satisfactorily answer. Yet they are happy because faith that the 29er wheel is perfect outweighs all the disadvantages it causes.

It’s not just downhilling that causes problems for 29ers. At the other extreme, on smoother surfaces Alex Moulton realised that suspension can compensate for the problems of small wheels, and the Moulton featured 16″ wheels.

And even that halfway house, the kind of jey XC that exists on the 24 hour race circuit - and here I proudly tar myself with that jey XC brush - has problems. The research of folk like Lennard Zinn does prove that with an equivalent 26er and 29er the 29er is more efficient. But bikes don’t have to be equivalent. It was levelled at his experiment as a criticism by the 29er faithful, but what Dave Dave Harris’ revealed to us by not normalising the bikes is that a 26er with suspension can overcome the limitations of it’s wheel size compared to a 29er.

For the record I’ve ventured off road in an XC/CX style on 700c wheels for the last 13 years, and my own bikes have wheels in 700c, 26″ 24″ and 20″ sizes, so I don’t think I should be accused of being closed minded about wheel sizes.

Even so 29er debate has yet to convince me, and one of the reasons is that the 29er-uber-alles attitude speaks to me of faith rather than reason.

I don’t work on blind faith.