On The Pedals
By Jason Giacchino

What’s In A Name?

What’s funny about the mountain bike industry is that we love labels. Try and deny it if you must but before firing off an angry email, think about it for just a minute. We have the big labels that help make sense of things: Cross-country race bikes are just that and you can pretty much figure out what you’re supposed to do on a downhill or freeride bike. The confusion starts to get heavy somewhere in the middle of the extremes I just mentioned. What’s the difference between a trail bike, an all mountain bike, an enduro or backcountry? Worse yet is that many of the bike manufacturers themselves aren’t even sure what specific characteristics define the classification system. As a result what qualifies as a trail bike from one company may well be considered an all mountain bike from another and so forth.

This whole debate really started cooking when we set off to test the Fuji Reveal 2.0 for this very issue. For those who haven’t gotten to the test yet, the bike is marketed on Fuji’s line as an enduro and, according to their web site, splits the difference between their XC line and All Mountain models. Easy enough to grasp. The problem didn’t really surface until our editors went about data collecting for the review and discovered that the definition of the enduro class of mountain bike was one of the most vague (which is quite an award considering how ambiguously the remaining categories are defined).

So we did what any good journalist would: We asked around the industry. The largest consensus seemed to regard the enduro bike as a lighter variation of the all mountain scene; a bike capable of some hard landings and light downhilling but still plenty light enough to endurance race. We liked that one. The second largest answer was that an enduro is the same as all mountain. Believers in this system cite the fact that the term enduro is all the Europeans needed to be satisfied while we Americans were looking for a way to boost sales and hence marketeers created the imaginary term, all mountain. Finally the third answer we came across was that enduro bikes actually surpass the idea of all mountain and lean closer toward the concept of a dedicated freeride bike with a larger selection of gears to chose from. Confused yet? You ought to be.

Keep in mind that we left it at that without bothering to ask how trail bikes, long-travel XC, and backcountry bikes fit into the arbitrary scale. Maybe we were better off! Perhaps the best answer we came across in our interviewing was simply that the entire classification system itself is nonsense. In the beginning of our young sport, the idea of mountain biking was bombing down the mountainside and surviving the trip. Pedaling back up hadn’t even been dreamt up (yet). Obviously with each model year comes a line with more and more variations to pick from. Beginners and outsiders need simplification as to what bike is intended to do what. Beyond that, most bikes today have incredible overlap of purpose. We’re not suggesting you bomb a shuttle run on a 3 inch travel xc bike or attempt to dethrone your local XC hero on a 50 pound downhill bike but at the same time don’t take every marketing label to heart either.

I frequent many similar industries in my job and the mountain bike scene is pretty unique in this regard. Take the automotive industry for example. Labels there are typically generally accepted and have solid distinction. Nobody mistakenly calls a Corvette a pickup truck and most individuals know the difference between an SUV and a roadster. Mountain bikes, for whatever reason, get lumped into a single basket from afar and perhaps overanalyzed by those in the loop. While we never did get a straight definition of the enduro concept, we certainly came away from the experience with a newfound respect for the notion of going down to your LBS and asking questions if in doubt. Remember that marketing teams earn their keep by selling products. The individuals who come up with many of the labels and names we cling to know little to nothing about the mountain bikes in question and even less about the individuals riding them. In that line of thinking its best to choose a bike based on your own set of criteria rather than naively following a non-universally accepted set of guidelines.

Questions? Comments? Love letters? Send 'em to Editor@mountainbiketales.com.