As this year's season approaches, the question isn't so much, "Who's doing a 'cross bike this year?" as, "Who isn't doing a 'cross bike this year?"

In addition to the specialty artisans like Steelman and Rock Lobster, the players include Kona and Cannondale, Ritchey and Redline, Merlin and Moots. Some are doing more than one model.

Better yet, several are offering complete bikes at reasonable prices, which is good news for the one-stop shopper. This guy doesn't want a seminar in Cyclo-cross Technology 101. That's your field of expertise, and your problem. He just wants to get on and go.

And it's only to be expected. After all, how often does a mountain-bike or road wanna-be wander into your shop and say, "I'd like that frame and this crankset and those shifters...."

Same principle applies here. Take the neo-'crosser's money, give him a bike, and advise the local mental-health professionals that, yes, another lunatic with a mud fetish is at large and in search of amusement.

Send In The Clowns. The lunacy required to even consider racing a skinny-tired, drop-barred bike in the mud and snow is what drew me to 'cross in the first place. And I must confess to mixed feelings about how rapidly the contagion is spreading.

I got into bike racing during The Great Running Boom of the 1980s because I wanted to do something, anything, other than what the staggering hordes of gasping anorexics were doing. I march to the beat of my own special drummer, an anarchic pastiche of Gene Krupa, Ginger Baker and Todd Rundgren ("I don't wanna work, I wanna bang on the drum all day!"). And if everyone else was running, by God, I was going to shave my legs, put on some plastic pants and spend my Sundays caroming off fire hydrants.

Footloose. But then all these foot soldiers of fitness got shin splints, stress fractures and fallen arches, and decided that cycling would be The Next Big Thing. In the blink of an eye, everyone had a garage full of titanium, a closet full of Lycra and a bathroom full of leg razors. Transvestites quit shaving their legs so they wouldn't be mistaken for bike racers. Me, I took up running, reasoning that wherever the terminally hip weren't was where I wanted to be.

Well, next thing you know, the multisport thing rears its three lactic-acid-soaked heads. Suddenly, everyone was a triathlete, or a biathlete (soon to be rechristened "duathlete" because the real biathletes had guns and were getting cranky). And before you could say, "Buckaroo Banzai!", no matter where you were, there they were.

No place to run; no place to ride.

And then, a racing buddy told me about cyclo-cross.

The Irish Are Called "Bog-Trotters." "Oh, joy," I thought. "Racing in the dead of winter, through filth and slime, on a rarity of a bike with bar-end shifters and back-assward brakes. Not to mention running while carrying same, and the contraceptive nature of repeated, Nijinskyesque leaps into the saddle. "The Lycra Lemmings will never follow me here. It's cold, and messy, no one is watching, and you have to napalm your laundry afterward."

And so it was, for a handful of glorious years. Fields were smaller than the average bridge club, and the only thing harder to find than a real 'cross bike was a pair of knobby sewups. 'Cross was like the fraternity or sorority that shunned you in college because, well, you were just too damned odd.

Well, tap the keg, boys, because it's Rush Week, and there's a gaggle of Greeks leaning on the doorbell, asking if they can please, pretty please, roll around in the mud with all us freaks.

It's tempting to throw the deadbolt and go hide in the basement with all those dusty Suntour bar-cons, airless Barum sewups and rusty Lyotard 460 pedals with the double-steel toe clips and laminated straps.

I feel like my high-school girlfriend's parents must have when they saw me for the first time, with that pharmacological smile and yaklike coiffure. Not with my baby, you don't. I'm glad she's popular and all, but this is not at all what we had in mind. Not at all.

And this used to be such a nice neighborhood, too.

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© 1999 Patrick O'Grady/Mad Dog Media. First published by Bicycle Retailer & Industry News.

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c r o s s r o a d s
updated 11/24/99

An Acquired Taste.

The Racer Plays Promoter.

Theeeyyy're Heeeeere.

A Dead Snake Bites Back.

Yankees in King 'Cross's Court.

Bite this bone to return to the Columns.

Bite this bone to return to Mad Dog Media.