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Montreal loves a sporting event. I think this city loves any event, really. Hockey games? Electric! Music festivals? Wild! Formula One? What a party! This city loves anything that gets people out of the house to cheer and celebrate someone doing something cool. So when I found out we were hosting the World Championships, the excitement hit differently. We are already pretty lucky to have a UCI race here every year, but Worlds felt like something else entirely. It meant the greatest riders on the planet would be in the city for a week. It meant countries would be represented and celebrated. It meant that you might ride with some pros if you got lucky enough to find them (felt like I was hunting Pokemon all week). It meant Montreal would turn into a cycling haven. And at a time when the average citizen of this city is constantly hating on cyclists, this event felt important. Especially with our (newish) mayor going on record warning that the traffic alone was going to be hell (not that she was wrong, but she didn’t need to pour gas on the fire).

And boy, did we deliver. Give yourselves a standing ovation. Montreal is awesome.

We did get lucky, the weather cooperated. Having 7 days of sun in late September is a rarity. It’s usually cold and rainy this time of year. And I’m pretty sure that played an important role in the success of this event. Not because good weather equates to better racing (obviously it does), but because we know winter is about to start and we’ll all be hibernating in no time. I don’t even want to think about setting up my bike on the indoor trainer. So it’s safe to say this weather motivated everyone, cyclist or not, to be outside and just enjoy the party.

THE GOOD

Even before Worlds week officially started, the group rides were running at 100%. Pick a day, pick a time, pick a type of ride, and you’d probably find one. People from all over were in town and everyone brought their bikes. Some rides were chaotic (it’s hard to organize 400 people on a Thursday night to ride 2x2 safely when the sun sets early and we gotta ride fast to grab a beer at the end of it) but they were still quite fun. I mean, bike racing in general is chaotic so why not add that to group rides. It’s fitting for the event. This was probably my favourite part of the week. I got to meet some dope ass people and nerd out about bikes and kit while riding. In my 6ish years of “serious” riding in this city, I have never witnessed such organization from individuals to link up and ride. It was dope.

The racing lived up to the hype as well. It might have been some of the best Worlds races, men’s and women’s, in recent memory (ever, in my opinion). It’s worth watching the highlights if you haven’t caught up yet. Smaller nations were animating breaks and “threatening” results. It felt Olympic, in a sense, ‘cause the crowds were rooting for every rider and booing the broom wagon. The crowds were electric. I have never seen so many people on the streets for a cycling event. The women’s race might have even been better than the men’s. It was magic. The last 10 k’s had so much drama that I don’t think anybody could have written a better script. Demi vs Kasia vs Longo Borghini? Straight in my veins, please. I’d love to see Montreal be awarded its own standalone UCI date on the calendar just for the Femmes. They deserve it. WE deserve it.

I watched the men’s race from Chemin de la Polytechnique, one of three climbs on the circuit. The atmosphere was electric. Who was bbq’ing. Who was dj’ing. It was a wild scene. I lost my voice completely cheering on Wout and Ciccone. The gap at the front shrunk from close to a minute down to under fifteen seconds in what felt like no time at all, and every fan on the side of the circuit was losing its mind. It’s so crazy to watch the best riders in the world repeat climbs and descents I do every week. Seeing them struggle made me feel kinda good in a way, because I knew exactly what they were going through. It made me realize that they are also human, and not “alien”, like we would like to believe.

(I would love to credit this pic but I don’t know who took it)

Another amazing part of this week was the human ingredient of it all. Meeting people. Connecting. I think this is what it’s all about at the end of the day. I had the chance to meet so many people I’ve been interacting with online for the last few months and ended up feeling like I’d known them forever, which is incredible and hardly spoken about enough. Some would say that’s just business, or networking, but it didn’t feel that way at all. It really felt like we were all together for the love of cycling.

THE BAD

Everything off the bike didn’t live up to my expectations. The city was packed with brand events all week, which usually sounds like a good thing, but I was left a little disappointed by all of it. It felt like these brand activations were all designed the same way. Bike brand selling bikes in a space where a local artist is painting. Clothing brand selling clothes in a space with a DJ. Lather, rinse, repeat. It felt more like marketing than community. Which I guess it is, at the end of the day, but it shouldn’t be.

What I saw online that week and what I saw walking around the city were two different events entirely. These brands are good at marketing themselves online. The reels looked incredible. But you should never believe what you see online, brands are great at making stuff look better than it is. Nowhere was that gap clearer than the fan village. Tens of thousands of people passed through that space every single day of the week, and almost no cycling brand thought to be there. PNS and Rapha did pop-ups at some stores in the city, and Castelli had a showcase at a very small café that I’d actually never heard of before (they didn’t even sell anything but they did showcase some vintage Italy kit, and that was dope) but none of them thought to sell where the masses actually were. During F1, the fan village is incredible. There’s games, there’s merch, there’s food, there’s drinks. The fan village for Worlds had one Santini-licensed store selling UCI gear, and a few spots to grab beers and a bite. That’s it. There might have also been a Shimano booth, I can’t recall. For such a food-centric city, there should have been food trucks everywhere, all week. I don’t want to be that negative though. The fan sector might not have been designed to sell gear or be a promotional area. It felt like you were at a festival. Large screens to watch the race, speakers to hear the commentators. It was well done in that sense, I just feel like it could have been more. It should have been more.

With the cycling atmosphere being relatively small in terms of global sales (most brands are currently struggling, see Rapha), you’d think every brand, or most brands, would gather and organize themselves properly in one space and do something cool. But nope, not the case. And really that’s OK. At the end of it all, everything was still awesome. I just feel like there was a missed opportunity. It felt like the “cool” brands focused on throwing events with their influencers and forgot how everyone else who enjoys this sport is also important. The fan village was that one opportunity to market to the masses.

Some companies did figure it out. Le Club, Montreal’s self-proclaimed cycling café, hosted a vintage market with Distilled Statements, a vintage tee dealer out of Montreal, selling vintage cycling tees. The curation was perfect and that event felt different, which was refreshing. Etape22 came down from Toronto and set up a similar pop-up with over two hundred vintage tees. But other than that, nothing really stood out to me.

Images are from Le Clubs Instagram, showcasing Distilled Statement tees.

THE SURREAL

The best thing I did all week (I’m biased but hey it’s my newsletter) was the gathering of minds I helped curate alongside CAC. Commercial Athletics Club is a small brand out of Vancouver I met through Instagram. They initially started out as a group ride (self-proclaimed hardest group ride in Canada) and slowly evolved to making cool ass kits (go buy their stuff!). They wanted to throw a party for Worlds and I helped them pull it together. We called it A BLOC (the art of going all in), and we threw it at my friend’s café in the heart of Mile End, Café Fame. A lo-fi spot with great furniture, good coffee and an even better sound system. We had two DJs (Francis Le Disko & Francis Zella) going back-to-back like they were working together in the peloton. The music was very GRAVITYHILL (some form of house music, obviously). Honestly, I thought maybe fifty people would show up but it ended up being close to 200. It got wild. Vancouver showed up.

It was less a cycling event and more just a reason to get people in a room together, and somehow that worked better than anything else I saw all week and I’m not just saying that ‘cause I was a part of it. I’m saying it because it was about the people. And it seems like the mainstream brands forget that part. It’s people first, product second, not the other way around.

I’ve been doing this GRAVITYHILL thing in the shadows for a while now. A BLOC was the first time that changed. I put myself out there. We had actual people who read the newsletter, follow the account or just heard about the event from a friend of a friend, standing in an actual room talking about the same things I’ve been writing about. I felt the support for not only my vision, but also a super small brand I respect.

I also had the opportunity to meet real people in the industry this week, people I’d only known from a screen up to that point. Hopefully some of that turns into something cool. Putting yourself out there, IRL, still matters more than anything you can do from behind a phone or a computer. And it’s important to remember that.

Long live Worlds.

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

I gotta be really honest here. I really don’t like Instagram. I use it because I’m kinda forced to. You know how it is, you’re trying to get something off the ground so you need a social media presence. Make a few posts, try to get it popping (never works). But also, it’s where cycling culture lives right now and if you are not on it, you are not in the conversation (I don’t think im part of the conversation btw). So, I am on it. Scrolling more than I would like to admit.

A few days after Unbound Gravel I opened the app and my feed was wall to wall Kansas mud. Riders I follow, brands I follow, accounts I had never seen before, all of it gravel. Even the podcasters were talking about it. The algo was spitting gravel in my face like I just raced the damn thing. Way more content than the Giro got. One of the biggest races in the world, one of the most beautiful races in the world, three weeks through Italy, and Unbound had way more presence on my feed. It seems like you can’t be a cycling influencer if you didn’t do Unbound…

I do not have a problem with gravel. I want to be clear about that.

I would ride it if I could. But right now, that means putting my bike in a car and driving 45 minutes out of Montreal. The terrain around here is road terrain. Gravel riding for me is a logistical decision before it is a riding decision and most days, I dont have the time or the patience for the logistics of it all. Traffic in this city has gotten so bad that I can’t imagine waking up to put my bike on the rack and take a drive to ride some gravel (although one can make a serious case for buying a gravel bike for road riding since we’ve got potholes the size of swimming pools). That said, something interesting has been happening in Quebec over the last couple of years. Gravel events are popping up everywhere. Good ones. Gravelooza. Big Red. Events that are drawing real numbers and building real community. Road rides? Almost nothing (I do understand that logistically its easier to close gravel roads than it is to close regular roads, but still). The organized ride infrastructure in this province is being built entirely around gravel right now and road is barely in the conversation

Gravel used to feel like something. Something that was new. Not too long ago. There was an energy around it that road cycling was missing. Looser. More open. Come as you are, bring whatever bike you have, nobody is going to look sideways at your kit. Wear a bib, throw on a tee, tie a scarf around your neck. That was kinda the whole point. Ride some dirt and drink some recovery ales. It positioned itself as the antidote to everything road cycling had become and people showed up in massive numbers because they believed it.

I even almost bought a gravel bike instead of a new road one two years ago cause the vibe around gravel seemed spot on.

This year though I wanted to pay attention to gravel racing. There seemed to be a lot of hype around these races so I figured I should watch some. Traka. Badlands. Unbound. There was a circus around it. Specialized dropped the Crux 5 two days before Unbound 2026. Tarmac SL8 tube shaping, Tarmac SL8 seatpost, full aero overhaul. Their own marketing called it ‘going full Tarmac mode.’ 48 hours later that bike swept the podium. Five of the six pro podium spots across the men’s and women’s races. The timing was not accidental. Nothing about it was accidental.

But the bike launch is really only part of it. The bigger thing is who was riding it and how. Specialized Off-Road is being called a super team, and that framing is accurate. Keegan Swenson, three-time Lifetime Grand Prix champion. Sofia Gomez Villafane, also three-time Lifetime Grand Prix champion. They are married to each other. Mads Würtz Schmidt, European Gravel Champion, won Unbound outright. Matt Beers, three-time Cape Epic champion. Annika Langvad, five-time mountain bike world champion. This is not a brand sponsoring a couple of athletes. This is an operation, resourced and coordinated the way a road team operates, racing with team tactics that the sport has never seen at this level.

Right now there are maybe 15 to 20 riders making six-figure salaries in gravel. The drop beneath them is steep. Some riders finishing inside the top ten of the Life Time Grand Prix are not making a cent. The Life Time Grand Prix prize pool is 590,000 dollars in 2026, up 55 percent from last year. The series winner takes home 50,000. The opportunity is real but so is the gap.

The money is real and growing. The gravel bike market is projected to hit 5.8 billion dollars by 2028. Unbound pulled over 500,000 views on the YouTube livestream this year. The sport is not niche anymore and the brands know it. Where the money goes, the products always follow.

So now, what happens to kit design when gravel is where the money is?

Gravel kit has always been more functional than road kit. More pockets. More storage. Room for a rain jacket, a tool, nutrition for ten hours in the dirt. The aesthetic built around that utility was part of gravel’s identity. Earth tones, looser fits, the visual language of someone who is going far and needs to carry things to get there. Kit brands have been running parallel lines for a few years now, a road collection and a gravel collection, different aesthetics, different briefs. But if the money keeps moving the way it is moving, that hierarchy could flip. Gravel becomes the primary design brief. Road becomes secondary.

You can already feel it in the new summer collections from the top brands. Look at Pas Normal Studios. Their Mechanism gravel line and their road line are converging fast. Same type of fabrics, same aero logic, same very very tight silhouette. Same-ish colors. Yes, the kits are looking great, but its getting harder to tell what separates the road collection from the gravel one other than the marketing language. Why release two collections when the only things that change are the number of pockets and the colors?

The UCI just made this more interesting. From July 1 2026, internal front jersey pockets are banned in road racing. The rule was triggered by riders stuffing hydration bladders and nutrition into front pockets for aerodynamic gain, a practice that became very visible at Unbound. The UCI cited aerodynamic advantage, sporting fairness, and rider safety, the argument being those aero gains lead to higher speeds and more severe crashes. The UCI rules on clothing apply to road, track, cyclocross and mountain bike. Gravel is not on that list. Gravel riders can still run whatever pocket configuration they want. Road kit is getting more restricted at the exact moment gravel kit has the most design freedom it has ever had. A kit brand paying attention to that gap has a very interesting few seasons ahead of them.

New brands should be emerging that skip road entirely. Gravel-first from day one. It hasn’t really happened yet, not at scale, but the conditions are definitely there. The audience is built. The money is moving. The design space is wide open. And if there is one thing happening in the clothingscape right now it is that specialists are winning. The brands that do one thing obsessively are pulling ahead of the ones trying to cover everything. A gravel-only brand with a clear point of view and the right community behind it has a real opening right now. Someone is going to walk through it.

We can even see it with the bikes. Road bikes have always been the main attraction in the sport. Magazines revolve around them. The cyclosphere loses its mind over a new road bike release. But in 2026, gravel bikes are getting as aero as road bikes. The geometry just as aggressive. So why not just buy a gravel bike and run two sets of wheels? It is starting to feel like the right move.

Joe Laverick (you should give him a follow on Substack) made an observation in his post-Unbound piece that stopped me mid-read. He noted that ultra racing in 2026 looks a lot like gravel did pre-2020. Niche, growing, sponsors starting to circle. Then he caught himself and wrote: ‘Wait, isn’t that what we said about gravel.’ Someone who’s inside the sport is noticing the same cycle start again. That line has been sitting with me since.

None of this makes gravel bad. Some of what is happening is genuinely good. More prize money means more riders can make a living doing something they love. More investment means better equipment and more events and more entry points into the sport. That matters.

What I keep sitting with is something smaller than an argument and harder to shake. Gravel felt like something specific for a while. The energy was different. It wasn’t about speed. It was about freedom. And I am watching that energy change in real time, post by post, product launch by product launch, super team signing by super team signing. The feed after Unbound felt less like a community sharing something they loved and more like an industry that had found its moment.

Maybe that is just what growth looks like. Maybe every scene that finds a real audience goes through this and comes out the other side with something worth keeping. I want to believe that.

I do not know where this goes. But I am watching the design space of it all closely. If gravel keeps pulling the money and the talent and the attention, something will shift in how kit gets made and who it gets made for. It will be interesting to see who moves first.

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

BEFORE WE START

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and always will be. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

MOODY BOARDS // 005 — GIRO D’ITALIA No explanation. No context. Just the feeling.

BREAKAWAY // 005 — Cycling Has a Visibility Problem Ben Healy has 105,000 followers. Lewis Hamilton has over 40 million. That gap is not about talent. How fashion became the entry point for every sport that cracked the culture problem — and why cycling has not run that playbook yet.

LEFT TURNS // 003 — What If Cycling Had a Creative Director? Crystal Palace did it. Como 1907 did it. The Cleveland Cavaliers did it. Every sport with cultural ambitions figured this out already. What happens when cycling finally makes the call.

If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, you know what to do.

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WHO MADE THAT KIT?

Nobody talks about who made the kit. They talk about the riders. The results. The bikes. But the brands stitching together what the best cyclists in the world wear every single day? Mostly invisible.

Open Instagram. Scroll for sixty seconds. You will see Rapha. PAS Normal. MAAP. The same names in a loop. Cycling influencers have a chokehold on what gets pushed. Now look at what the WorldTour peloton is actually racing in. Gobik. Castelli. Bioracer. Pissei. Vermarc. Kalas. Brands nobody is building a mood board around. Brands that are on the bodies of the best riders in the world, six and seven hours a day, across every kind of road and weather a European spring can throw at them.

There is a gap between what gets pushed and what gets worn. Between the brands that figured out content and the brands that figured out kit. We picked up a pair of Q36.5 bibs recently and it reframed the whole conversation. Some brands are building for the gram. Some are building for the ride.

On a design level, most of the brands the pros are racing in are not particularly interesting to look at. They kinda suck. Their best work is the team kit they produce under contract, and you know how we feel about those. The consumer collections are mostly functional and not much else. Which probably explains why nobody is talking about them. The influencer brands figured out that the kit you race in and the kit you want to own are two different products. Most of these brands never made that distinction.

Not everyone can afford to ride in MAAP or Rapha. Some of the brands on this list are genuinely (somewhat) affordable. And if the best riders in the world are racing in them every weekend, they are worth knowing about. This list exists because we kept asking ourselves who makes the kits and figured we might as well type it out for you. A reference. Something to come back to. A full deep dive on design language, identity, and verdicts is probably coming but this is where it starts.

We are covering WorldTour teams and the ProTeams you see racing regularly at the sport’s biggest races. The Continental teams are a conversation for another day.

We have not ridden in everything on this list and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we can tell you is who made it and which team is wearing it.

Here you go:

MEN’S WORLDTOUR 2026

UAE Team Emirates XRG — Pissei

Visma-Lease a Bike — Nimbl

Lidl-Trek — Santini

Ineos Grenadiers — Gobik

Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe — Specialized

Soudal-Quick Step — Castelli

Movistar — Gobik

EF Education-EasyPost — Assos

Groupama-FDJ United — Bioracer

Bahrain Victorious — Alé

Jayco-AlUla — MAAP

Decathlon-CMA CGM — Van Rysel

Alpecin-Premier Tech — Kalas

XDS Astana — Ekoï

Human Powered Health — Verge Sport

Lotto-Intermarché — Vermarc

NSN Cycling — Ekoï

Uno-X Mobility — Fusion

MEN’S PROTEAMS 2026

Pinarello-Q36.5 — Q36.5

Tudor Pro Cycling — Sportful

Unibet Rose Rockets — Santini

Polti VisitMalta — ToFit

WOMEN’S WORLDTOUR 2026

SD Worx-Protime — Specialized

Canyon-SRAM Zondacrypto — Canyon

Visma-Lease a Bike — Nimbl

Lidl-Trek — Santini

AG Insurance-Soudal — Castelli

FDJ United-Suez — Gobik

Liv AlUla Jayco — MAAP

EF Education-Oatly — Assos

Fenix-Premier Tech — Alé

Movistar — Gobik

Picnic PostNL — Nalini

UAE Team ADQ — Pissei

Human Powered Health — Verge Sport

Decathlon-CMA CGM — Van Rysel

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Before we get into it

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and always will be. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

BREAKAWAY // 003 — Café Raids

Tour riders stopping mid-race to drink wine, eat at cafés, and disappear into the peloton with a glass of something cold. The history of la chasse à la canette and what cycling gave up when it decided to grow up.

THE DROP // VOL. 002

A playlist that is a little all over the place and completely selfish. Songs we have been living with for years. For the last few indoor training sessions before the roads open up.

BREAKAWAY // 002 — A Sharpie, a Hack, and 150 Years of Castelli

A Norwegian rider blacked out a logo with a marker in 2009. Castelli turned it into a product. Then half the peloton showed up at Milan-San Remo in one. How the most important cycling garment of the last twenty years started as a fix and became infrastructure.

No affiliate links. No paid placements. No sponsored content. Everything we write about and put in front of you is either something we genuinely believe in or something we believe the culture needs to be talking about. That has always been the deal.

If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, you know what to do.

Subscribe now

Think about the New York Yankees cap. Most people wearing it have never watched a game. They have no attachment to the Bronx. Couldn’t even name the starting lineup. They wear it because it represents something. A city. An attitude. A cultural shorthand that travels everywhere a baseball cap can go. The object escaped the sport a long time ago and became something else entirely.

That does not happen by accident. It happens because somewhere along the line someone understood that a sports team can be a cultural object, not just a sports team. And they built everything accordingly.

Cycling has never had that person.

Kenny Annan-Jonathan, Creative Director of Crystal Palace

Every other sport with cultural ambitions has figured this out. Kenny Annan-Jonathan became the first creative director in the Premier League when Crystal Palace hired him in 2023. He said something that has stuck with us: we want to be able to design stuff that can exist outside of football. That sentence. That is the whole job description. Not making merch. Not designing a limited edition jersey for a cup run. Building things that people want to own regardless of whether they follow the team. Objects that carry the culture of the team into rooms the team itself cannot reach.

Rhuigi Villaseñor of Rhude and Chief Creative Director of Como 1907

Rhuigi Villaseñor did the same thing for Como 1907. After his name sake brand (RHUDE) blew up, he moved to Lake Como. Became Chief Brand Officer and minority owner of the team. Staged his Rhude runway show at Villa d’Este. Designed a fourth kit for their final match against Inter Milan that had LAKE COMO - LOS ANGELES across the back. Opened a members club on the lake. The club and the brand and the city became the same thing. That is not simply a jersey. That is a world.

Daniel Arsham of Arsham Studios and Creative Director of the Cleveland Cavaliers

Daniel Arsham has been creative director of the Cleveland Cavaliers since 2020. Guillermo Andrade of 424 was creative advisor for the MLS Leagues Cup in 2023. These are not stunts. These are structural decisions made by organizations that understood culture is not a side project.

Guillermo Andrade of 424 and Creative Advisor for the MLS Leagues Cup

Now think about what this could look like in cycling. A creative director for a WorldTour team with real authority over the whole thing. The race kit, obviously. But also the off-bike wardrobe. A jacket that references the team’s color history without screaming the sponsor’s name. A cap with the right weight and the right brim. Objects that someone who has never watched a race might still want to own because they are just genuinely well made and considered. Merch that is not “advertising”. Things that carry the team’s identity into a room that the team itself would never enter.

The sport races through Florence, Liege, the Dolomites, the cobbles of Flanders. So many incredible cities. Such beautiful visuals. A creative director who understood what those races mean culturally could build something around a team that no manufacturer’s brief ever would. Not geography. Identity. The team with a point of view on what the sport means. The team whose kit tells you something about who they are and what they believe. Not just who paid for it.

To be quite frank, this would be our dream job. We started GRAVITYHILL because we believe cycling culture deserves to be taken seriously. A creative director role at a WorldTour team (or any team, really) is that same belief at a completely different scale. The jersey, the riders, the world built around them. We would do it without hesitation.

Somebody in this sport needs to make the call. Hire the person. Give them real authority. Let them build something that exists outside of cycling. The proof that this works is already inside the sport. The Rockets built an entire fanbase before they had the results to justify it. Storytelling first. Community first. And what makes them genuinely different from every other team in the peloton is that people actually love the Rockets as a team, not just the riders on it. When a rider leaves, the fans stay. That is what a real identity does. A creative director builds that identity deliberately instead of leaving it to chance. Cycling is a beautiful, complex, visually extraordinary sport that most of the world hasn’t truly discovered yet (especially in North America). Other sports are not waiting. They are building worlds that exist outside the sport itself and pulling new fans in through culture, through objects, through things people want to wear and own and be associated with. Cycling is still sending out press releases. The sport needs to modernize how it thinks about its own culture and a creative director is one real way to start doing that.

To submit a find, a brand, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Here is the thing about aluminium. Nobody talks about it like it matters anymore. Carbon got the magazine covers, the wind tunnel hours, the WorldTour budgets. Aluminium became the word you used when you were explaining to someone why their bike was heavy.

Cannondale never got that memo.

The CAAD line has been running since 1996. That’s not a product cycle. That’s a worldview. CAAD stands for Cannondale Advanced Aluminium Design, and in the late nineties that name meant something specific: it meant you were racing. Cipollini raced a CAAD. McEwen raced a CAAD. Sprint stages at the Tour were being won on aluminium while everyone else was busy eulogising the material. The CAAD didn’t care about the narrative. It just kept winning.

There’s a version of cycling history where aluminium never got dethroned. The CAAD is the evidence.

When the CAAD10 came out in 2010 and the whole conversation restarted. Suddenly people were speccing Dura-Ace onto aluminium framesets without irony. Without apology. The bike was that good. Stiff where it needed to be, alive where it counted, and genuinely fast in a way that made the carbon conversation feel slightly beside the point. The CAAD12 refined it. The CAAD13 dialled it. Each one quieter than the last. Each one still carrying the same argument underneath.

We have to be honest here. We love this bike. Always have. Before GRAVITYHILL was a newsletter, before it was anything with a name, it was an Instagram moodboard. Just us posting things we thought looked right. The CAAD showed up constantly. Not because we planned it. Because every time we went looking for something that captured what cycling actually felt like to us, the CAAD was already there. That’s not a hot take. That’s just the record.

Now there’s a CAAD14. And Cannondale has priced it like a provocation.

We’re not going to pretend the number makes sense on paper. For what you’re paying you could find carbon (really good carbon). People will tell you this… but those people are missing the point. The CAAD14 isn’t priced like a budget frame that got ambitious. It’s priced like Cannondale finally decided to stop apologising for what this bike is. Thirty years of race history. A material that rewards a builder who knows what they’re doing. An object with actual lineage. That costs something.

The red frameset specifically. Look at it. Gloss red, yellow wordmark, blue and black graphic blocking on the chainstays and fork, checkerboard fork tip. It’s loud in the way that only things with real confidence can be loud. Not trying to grab your attention. Just not hiding either. It looks like a factory team bike from 1999 that someone kept in perfect condition, and we mean that with full sincerity.

The move is the frameset. Not the complete bike. Buy the frame, buy the fork, then make every decision yourself. The CAAD has always rewarded that. It’s not a bike that works best as a package. It works best as an intention. Put a group set on it you actually love. Wheels you thought about. Bars you’ve ridden before. The bike will carry all of it.

Is it expensive for aluminium? Obviously. Does that matter? Not even a little. The CAAD14 is what happens when a material gets taken seriously for thirty consecutive years by people who know what they’re building.

Some bikes are fast. The CAAD has a point of view.

To submit a find, a brand, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

Less watts, more drip.

You can follow us on Instagram here and on X here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

LEFT TURNS is where things drift. Ideas or discussions in our heads that didn’t fit anywhere else.

Both MAAP and Pas Normal Studios just dropped new off-bike collections.

Not random merch. Not one hoodie and a tote. Seasonal collections.

They’ve done off-bike before. Every other brand has something to tie into their collections. But this feels more deliberate. Less “we should probably sell sweatshirts” and more “this is part of the brand now.”

Because here’s the truth.

If you want to secure your place as a real brand, not just a cycling brand, you have to design for the hours outside the ride.

Hoodies sell. Tees sell. It’s easier to move a crewneck than a $300 jersey. You can only ride for so long. You can wear a sweatshirt all day.

The ride is two hours. Maybe four.

The rest of the day is everything else.

What’s interesting is how different the approaches are.

MAAP is leaning into street territory. Bigger graphics. More presence. It feels like they’re extending their on-bike dominance into everyday life. Same confidence. Different setting.

Pas Normal feels more considered. Better fabrics. Cleaner shapes. Less noise. Honestly, some of the OFF-RACE pieces look stronger than their current on-bike line. The silhouettes feel thought through. Not merch. Clothes.

And this is where it gets bigger than product.

Running brands figured this out years ago. The cool ones stopped acting like “performance companies” and started acting like cultural ones. They didn’t just make gear that works. They made gear that belongs. In cafés. In galleries. In showrooms. In conversations that have nothing to do with splits or VO2 max.

They became fashion adjacent without screaming about it.

Cycling, on the other hand, has mostly been stuck selling speed. Everything cycling brands have been releasing so far has been very ALO or Lululemon like.

Not that its necessarily a problem. It just seems to be lacking depth.

If cycling brands want to step into culture, they can’t just become gym wear with better photography. They need sharper silhouettes. Riskier collaborations. Pieces that feel intentional outside the context of a bike.

The café always counted.
The selfie always counted.
The airport fit always counted.
The walk home always counted.

Cycling doesn’t stop when the helmet comes off. You still look like a cyclist. You still move like one. It’s in how you stand. It’s in what you reach for.

For a long time there wasn’t a real category for that.

This feels like the beginning of one.

Eventually I want to see one of these brands go further. Not just elevated hoodies. A proper collaboration (Rapha X Palace ring a bell?). Something that feels closer to fashion house energy than performance capsule. Something that makes people slightly uncomfortable.

That’s when you know it’s real.

For now, this is a smart step.

But culture doesn’t reward safe forever.

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.