Bob, Chad and Molly

Decades ago Trek Bikes took a steaming great shit all over Greg LeMond, they basically took a multi million dollar business partner behind the wood shed. What resulted was a messy legal nightmare of corporate America kicking the living shit out of one of the most loved cyclist the sport has produced and I took the stance that “I’d never be seen dead on a Trek”.

I’ve changed my view and it’s basically down to one man. Chad Brown.

Chad works for Trek, I’m not too sure what he does there but if you follow him on Twitter he’s doing something more important to me than talking about bikes or men’s racing. Of course there is that stuff but if you look beyond that he’s also very big on cyclocross and his enthusiastic support for equal prizes and equal race lengths have him on my twitter radar, those people that you don’t scroll past and his sort of enthusiasm is contagious to the point that I think I could quite give cross a go, although that would mean getting over my loathing of dirty bikes and getting personally muddy.

When you have other brands pulling out the women’s market because it’s too small to achieve profitability targets companies like Canyon and Trek stay loyal in their support, I don’t like the way Canyon mikes look, in fact when it comes to good looking bike the Trek Madone 9 H2 is, in my opinion as a design engineer, the best looking bike on the market.

If you just rolled your eye because I judge a bike on looks you need a slap, you have to been seen on your bike and there’s a reason in my mind why anyone would by something that looks ugly, and at £3000 for the frameset you bloody well know it’s going to perform, I dare say it’s a far better bike frame than I deserve and  most probably won’t be able to afford it and have to choose something else.

Trek also announced this year that it would be continuing a relationship with Drops cycling, there are a few things here. Firstly lovely Bob Varney of drops signed Molly Weaver, I fucking love Molly, she’s a proper hard arse and I found her crash recovery quite inspirational when it came to my recovery from breaking my back and the rest of me. I kept tabs on her recovery and it’s amazing that someone can hit that hard and still be competitive, the down side is though I feel old, I remember being her age when recovery is something that happened between breakfast and lunch. I can say that without her recovery I may well have taken up golf.

It’s just a list of small things really that would be easy to overlook, but those small things matter far more than the grand gestures and when a big company wins awards for supporting cycling were it matters, at the grass roots that has to count for something and the way sponsorship should work is that we recognise the input of business and reward that investment with our custom.

I don’t even know if I’ll be riding next year, my frame is too big, bought in haste with brain damage, my vertigo head pains and massive nose bleeds keep me from riding outside and while I don’t mind turbo training in winter as things warm up it’s going to be frustrating and I hate that I’m going to have get into debt to buy something that that I would have just bought before the crash left me unable to do my job, there’s a sadness to it being stuck in a space where you want to continue but you don’t know if your body would let you