VAIL — It was hard to escape the sensation that you were witnessing the beginning of something at . If not necessarily something big, certainly something fat.
Vail, after all, has served as host to two UCI mountain bike world championships and has seen professional road cycling stages come, go and come back again on multiple occasions in its 50-year history. As the Winter Mountain Games added the inaugural (if unaccredited) to the four-event lineup of on-snow cycling contests in its second iteration last weekend, it’s evident that the pedal-pushing market is widening right along with the wheels.
The “fat bike” phenomenon is blowing up.
“We’re seeing exponential growth,” said Scott Sunderman, a rep for Anchorage-based . “It’s really booming right now.”
With extra-wide forks and hubs capable of accommodating floaty, 4-inch-wide tires, so-called “fat bikes” that began gaining traction with a debut at the 2012 Winter Mountain Games are attracting new disciples daily. Some 40 svelte riders ditched the tires formerly known as fat and broke out the balloons for Friday’s on-snow cross country race at the Vail Nordic Center, with a comparable number lining up to compete in the on-snow criterium Saturday.
“My mentality before I actually took one out for a ride was, ‘That’s kind of silly,’ ” said Jake Wells, a pro mountain bike and cyclocross racer from Avon who joined Boulder’s Judy Freeman atop both the 20K cross country and crit podiums at the Winter Mountain Games. “But once you do it, it’s pretty addicting. You can go out and ride a lot of the stuff you would go out and ride in the summer.”
As frustrated winter cyclists discover the benefits of wider wheels in the snow, boutique bike builders like , which built Wells’ winning ride, are adding fat bikes to their line. Last winter’s front-runner, , has since teamed up with and industry conglomerate to widely expand its reach. And determined independent frame builders like 9:Zero:7 are suddenly seeing demand outpace supply, primarily in wintry Midwestern states like Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, where pedalers seeking an alternative to snowmobiling are falling for fat bikes.
“It’s getting bigger and bigger,” Sunderman said. “We’ve gone from approximately 15 dealers last June to 120 dealers as of right now. So in about eight months, we have about 1,000 percent more dealers. It’s pretty crazy.”
The allure, fat bike aficionados say, is essentially everything that traditional bikes in winter are not. With the obese tires run at a mushy 8 pounds per square inch (PSI) or less, traction is available on everything from packed powder (think ski slopes and snowmobile tracks) to desert sand and beaches where a standard 2-inch tire would quickly bog down. Aftermarket suspension isn’t required for plush descents, given the sag in the tires. And there’s never a reason to ride in traffic, unless you really want.
“It’s just a really different kind of biking. The drifting and float on snow are sensations that you just don’t get on dirt,” said Jay Henry, a pro mountain biker from Avon who rode a Twenty 2 Cycle to third place in Saturday’s crit. “Winters are long here. If you’re into riding bikes, this is a good way to deal with it, because it’s pretty miserable trying to ride outside any other way. You might as well embrace the snow and get a bike to ride on it.”
The sport’s first national champion agreed.
“I’ve tried (on-snow racing) on a regular mountain bike, and it’s just not fun,” Wells said. “But the way these things float is crazy. It’s just another thing to have in the toolbox of fun things to do when it’s snowing.”
Scott Willoughby: 303-954-1993, swilloughby@denverpost.com
