If you’ve been following social media at all, there’s a chance you ran across a piece by Ian Austen of the New York Times regarding the inherent danger of carbon fiber bicycles. Austen’s central thesis is simple enough, that the use of carbon fiber to make ultra-light bicycles is resulting in more crashes and injuries. Simple enough, yes. But wrong, also.
And if you were lucky before your blood pressure geysered like that water main here in LA, you ran across this excellent rebuttal by Matt Philips of Bicycling. Matt is a fine writer and one of the most experienced bike reviewers on the planet. He did the bike world a solid by taking apart Austen’s piece point by point, demonstrating places where language conflated unrelated events and attributed causality where nothing more than coincidence existed.
I wouldn’t be weighing in now were it not for the fact that after digesting Matt’s dismantling of what was to any educated cyclist a really sloppy piece of writing that should have been beneath the Times to publish, Austen took to Twitter to both defend himself and throw his editor under the bus. It might be fair to characterize the injuries both suffered as road rash.
There are some assertions that he has stuck by that continue to irk me.
First, Austen’s definition of crashing is so nonstandard as to recall Bill Clinton’s need to define “is.” I think we can generally agree that if someone tells you they crashed we will conclude that they deck checked. Conversely, if they didn’t hit the ground, they didn’t actually crash, right?
Fundamentally, what I, and plenty of others, find so troubling about this story is his baseless assertion that riders are hitting debris, downed bikes, other riders, etc. in circumstances that he qualifies as a crash, but would otherwise have been able to ride out had their carbon fiber frames not detonated beneath them. I can hear the slogan now—Ride steel to keep riding.
It’s a point that is as wrong as evolution-denying.
My own experience of decelerating from 30 mph to wham in less than a second is a fair testimony to just what a carbon fiber bike can withstand. Would a steel frame have fared as well? I hope so, but I can’t say for certain.
This highlights another distinction Austen fails to either understand or explain is that a carbon fiber bicycle is designed to be able to withstand certain impacts, certain loads. Riding your bike straight at a curb may cause you to crash, but unless you’re going 40 mph, there’s a fair chance the bike will survive that impact and if you’re sufficiently skilled, you might even ride that situation out. However, no one is designing carbon fiber bikes to withstand a hammer strike to the tubes. In other words, carbon fiber is designed to withstand the forces you encounter while riding, not the forces you encounter once you’ve crashed.
As part of his defense on Twitter, he said that materials engineers have told him that “metallic frames more likely to bend rather than fragment….” Technically, he’s correct, but what he seems to be trying to suggest is that metallic frames (steel and titanium in particular) have an ability to flex that will allow a rider on a metal frame to ride through a crash without going down because his bike exploded. What he doesn’t understand is that carbon fiber frames flex as well. Further, what he also doesn’t understand is that the force required for a 150-lb. pro rider to break a carbon fiber frame by plowing into something unmovable (say a brick wall, or Congress) is almost identical to the force required for the same rider to hit something hard enough to bend a steel or aluminum frame. A frame made from titanium is the least likely to bend in the event of a crash due to its superlative elongation properties.
Austen also paints the landscape of what the pros are riding as one where the riders have been victims of overzealous bike manufacturers who are foisting unworthy carbon fiber frames on the peloton. He claims in his piece that riders are complaining that their bikes break in crashes. What he doesn’t also say is that riders want the lightest, stiffest bikes they can ride—a point highlighted by Philips. As we know, reduced weight aids acceleration and climbing. Stiffness is necessary for control and power transfer. No one has figured out how to make a frame that weighs 800 grams, stands up to a Marcel Kittel sprint and can withstand a 28 mph front impact.
Austen’s overarching point is that bikes break more often now than they did in the past because they are made from carbon fiber and because they are underbuilt because manufacturers are chasing weight and performance without enough attention paid to safety.
But there’s more to broken bikes than carbon fiber. The peloton travels at speeds that were unthinkable in Eddy Merckx’ day, so when crashes happen, there is more force at work. There’s also more pressure on riders to deliver results at the Tour, so riders are more aggressive today. They ride closer together and that has increased the number of crashes as well.
I rang an engineer I know to ask him what he could tell me about the forces necessary to cause a carbon fiber bike to break while you were riding it, but would otherwise have allowed a steel bike to escape and the rider to remain upright. He laughed. What he told me was that in testing he had done, impacts sufficient to break a carbon fiber bicycle are such that the rider is thrown from the bike long before the bike breaks. It’s a matter of weight distribution, he said; the bike simply gets upended because all the weight is up high. Being on steel won’t help.
There’s a final factor that Austen’s piece and his subsequent Twitter defense completely underestimated. Whether or not the frames in question have passed all the relevant safety testing standards (and everything on the market has passed stringent tests), there’s another force at work where carbon fiber bikes are concerned. If the teams really thought that a manufacturer was making a crap product, they wouldn’t renew the sponsorship agreement. There are other companies out there that would be happy to sponsor a pro team, even if the cost of that sponsorship is more expensive than sending your family to college. And finally, there’s the market itself. If consumers had the impression that a Specialized Tarmac was a $5k ticket to the emergency room, they wouldn’t buy them. If carbon fiber deserves such a categorically bad reputation that people far and wide should assume the bike would crumple beneath them, steel frame builders ought to have wait times that exceeded their life expectancy, right?
I’d love to see steel builders get more business, but trying to convince the public that carbon fiber is patently unsafe is no way to do it. Again, I’m stunned that the Gray Lady would publish such an irresponsible piece of work.