Should We Be Angry at the Bike Industry?

Some believe that greed, price-gouging, and repeated mistakes are at the core of current woes in the bike industry. But, is that really what's happening?

Syd Schulz and Macky Franklin are professional mountain biker racers and YouTubers whose goal is to race the world’s best and most challenging mountain bike races. They got their start as enduro racers, racing Enduro World Series (now EDR) events all around the world. After years of struggling to make ends meet as sponsored athletes, they started a YouTube channel in 2018 and began to focus more on content creation and bringing stories about racing to a wider audience. As their focus on YouTube has grown, they've gone from enduro racers to dabbling in all disciplines, from cross country to endurance to singlespeed. As of 2024, they have raced professionally and made a living as sponsored athletes and content creators for almost a decade. You can find them on YouTube and Patreon. This article has been written by them and from their perspective.

Syd riding some rocky terrain.

A Season of Changes in Sponsorships

The end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 have been a bleak time to be a sponsored athlete. You've likely seen the headlines -- pro team after pro team shutting its doors. We've made a living via sponsorship, racing, and content creation for almost a decade now, and while we've seen several downturns in the bike industry, it soon became clear to us that this was unprecedented. As of early January 2024, we were looking at a 65% reduction in our sponsorship budget. And while we've worked hard over the past few years to diversify our income and make a situation like this not catastrophic, it was still a big hit. 

So, we did what we've done for the past five years every time something went wrong: we sat down with a camera and talked about it. 

In a recent video, we discussed how the bike industry downturn was affecting us personally as people who make a living via sponsorships and YouTube and how we were planning to fund our channel going forward (a greater focus on affiliate marketing and fan-supported platforms like Patreon). Most of the people leaving comments were extremely supportive. However, we were surprised to see how much anger at the bike industry seemed to be bubbling just below the surface, at least in the comments. 

When Seth approached us about writing a piece for this Substack, it seemed like the perfect moment to go a little more in-depth than we were able to in the video and address some of the concerns raised by these comments: Is the bike industry greedy? Are they price-gouging us? Is everyone at Specialized HQ getting rich and driving Lamborghinis (as one commenter posted)? Should we be majorly pissed off? Is this the end of mountain biking as we know it? 

Syd and Mackay have made their living as professional athletes now for a decade.

Assumptions, Misplaced Anger, and Frustration

For the past ten years, we have worked with many brands in the bike industry and have many friends and acquaintances who work in the same, so perhaps we see a different side than most. The side we have seen over the past three to four years has not been one of greed but rather one of real people trying to innovate and survive in a challenging industry in unprecedented times.  

Below, I’m going to discuss some of the most common assumptions that came up in our comments and why I think this anger is, if not unjustified, perhaps misplaced. 

Assumption #1: The downturn in the bike industry was caused by greed.