Biker chic, continued

This past January, a Consumed column on Timbuk2 dealt indirectly with the fixed-gear bike fad, noting that these bikes “have attracted interest from increasing numbers of people who five years ago might have been drawn to skateboards.” Over the weekend, the NYT (in the City section, which I don’t see because I read the national edition), had a more extensive look at the fixed-gear-bike thing, of interest because it was written by Jocko Weyland.

Fixed-gear bikes are being ridden all over New York, by messengers, racers, lawyers, accountants and college professors — a diverse and not necessarily youthful cross section of the city’s population. They’re being ridden by people who work in sandwich shops and don’t know or care about gear ratios and bike history, and by people who have been racing these bikes for years in places like the Kissena Velodrome in Flushing, Queens, with its banked, elliptical track. They’re ridden by militant vegans who are virtual encyclopedias of arcane bicycle history, by thrill-seeking members of renegade bike gangs like Black Label, by shopgirls, street racers, Critical Mass riders, your aunt.

Noted in Weyland’s piece: Coast Cycles owner Johnny Coast “laughs at the absurdity of a brand like Mountain Dew approaching Black Label with an offer of sponsorship, as he says happened last year, and is wary of exploitation of the fixed-gear bike culture by corporations that have little to do with biking.”