The real irony to your statement here is that Pon Holdings owns Scwhinn… Hahahah! and does exactly as you state, by selling to big box stores with the name of one of its brands on it(Mongoose, GT, IronHorse).
I don’t know that you understand how big Decathlon is, nor its structure. Decathlon is actually much more similar to Pon, than Schwinn… if we want to stick to your examples. Decathlon owns more than 20 brands/subsidiaries, one of which is Van Rysel. Decathlon had a 50% higher revenue compared to Pon in 2023, $15B vs $10B.
And to further tie in your reply, I think Van Rysel is actually very comparable to Enve as a business… Sure Van Rysel is a newer name, and yet to have the “street cred”, but as far as business structure, both are a very small portion of a larger parent company, Amer Sports in Enve’s case, with a focus on cycling components.
All this to say, I get what you’re saying, and I’m not arguing with you, just kind of “defending” Van Rysel a bit, for no reason… lol
That strategy far predates PON’s ownership of Schwinn. The move to mass merchants for the brand was the result of Pacific Cycles acquisition of the old Schwinn / GT company in 2001. And honestly, it was the right decision for the brand at the time. It was one of the few bike brands that had immediate consumer recognition.
The move to mass for Mongoose goes back even earlier, to the late 90’s. Ironically, it was probably the second-most recognized name for the everyday consumer. Many shoppers recognized the brand from its BMX heyday in the 70’s and had positive associations with it.
It’s interesting how different the people in the UK (or maybe Europe?) seem to see this than the Americans. I don’t mean to speak for the whole country, but most of the people I know in the US see this like “wow, a pro team is riding Walmart bikes”. I’m specifically using Walmart as the example even though it’s a bit off because I’m guessing those across the pond don’t know what Dick’s, REI, etc are.
I don’t disagree that the hot take was a not a good one, which is why I already said that above.
I brought up Pon as being similar to Decathlon, e.g. agreeing with your point, I think you may have misinterpreted this part though:
Pon is similar to Decathlon in that they both own bike brands. Pon is different to Decathlon in that you can’t go to stores and buy PON branded bikes. They keep their brand identities separate from themselves and I’d wager they’d ideally prefer consumers to not even know that Ceverlo, Cannonade, Santa Cruz, etc are all owned by the same company. It erodes the illusion of competition and leads to accusations like people made that the Cervelo ZFS-5 is just a repainted Santa Cruz Blur (which it’s not).
I caught up on a prev episode of Cycling Podcast after I made my original post. I was not familiar with Decathlon outside of their website. I was surprised by the degree to which Daniel Friebe stated his love for Decathlon and also by how big of a company it is. To me it seems like REI is the best analogy, but I can only assume it’s much bigger & better than REI based on Daniel’s statements.
They do have that category, definitely. However for most all sports they also have some very good quality options as well. Especially for the value. It’s one of the first places I look if I want to buy anything sports/outdoor related that’s not cycling. Some of my snowboarding gear is from there, my hiking/trailrunning stuff is from there, anything sports/hobby related for my kids is from there.
You can go from super basic stuff to pretty advanced and well researched products.
They offer good value for money. And I guess for cycling now as well.
I noticed on the Lachlan Morton-Keegan Swenson Cape Epic film that they were talking about how to make their partnership work given they both ride for “different” bike brands, which while it might be superficially true, is absolutely not the case for Cannondale and Santa Cruz
Hopefully Pog will treat the Giro like a training camp and only go hard when necessary. Then, maybe he’d have some matches left for the TdF if that’s also a goal this year.
Would think he’ll have an eye on the Olympics. Long and attritional course should suit him fairly well. I think he wants to win every major race in his career. Which means adding Giro, Vuelta, Olympics, Worlds, MSR and Paris Roubaix. I don’t think he beats Vingegaard at the Tour unless he either makes the Tour the main focus of his season and/or Vingegaard isn’t quite in top form himself, either through injury or other disruptions to his season (which might include targeting the Giro himself at some point). Not sure he is ready to do that just yet, but adding some or all of the Giro, Olympics and Vuelta to his palmares in 2024 would make it more likely he can do a big focus on regaining the Tour in 2025 and beyond.
Part of me wants him to race the Giro to win then deliberately lose time in the tour so he can stage hunt. How many stages could he win just focusing on that? 6? 8? That would be fun to watch.
I also do not think he can beat Jonas if he also wants to race well in the Spring. Just too much of a tradeoff vs. a pure GC type.
New team kits for 2024…some pretty big changes for some teams. Still a metric crapton of blue-based jerseys in the peloton, though.
Also worth noting that Visma has switched to Giro helmets…not surprising really since they switched to SRAM last year and Shimano owns Lazer. Bit of a blow for Lazer, though they got a lot of mileage out of the team, IMO. Noticeable uptick in people riding Lazer from my observations last year.
I typically enjoy Watts Occurring more than normal GTCC episodes. More inside takes and perspective on how races are unfolding vs in his interviews recently it seems like he’s done little to no prep and is just making things up as he goes. I can’t blame him entirely because his day job clearly has priority, but the contrast between how much time, energy, and polish goes into a Cycling Podcast episode vs say GTCC is stark to say the least.
People give commentators crap at times for being talking heads… but turns out that talking is also a skill.
Ha yeah, it is a bit hard to have sympathy for his incessant complaining about having to get paid to go ride in Mallorca. And on the dieting front, I’m a similar age to him and have recently given up drinking outright and started counting calories pretty strict just because that’s what it takes if you want to try and hold onto performance as you approach 40. If it were my actual job to be fit it wouldn’t even be a question.
That said, 17 years is a long time in the pro peloton and it seems to be wearing on him a bit. I’m surprised he signed a 2 year extension based on his recent comments. He sounds more like he really only has 1 more year in him.
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