During the course of writing about Dropbar MTBs GCN released the Is A Gravel Bike Still Just A Dated Mountain Bike? video. I thought about using it as a literature review to extend my joke of formatting this post as an academic paper, but that seemed a bit much. Instead, here are my (brief) thoughts about the video.
Between product shots of their sponsor’s (Canyon) gravel bike, they do discuss the use cases for the two types of bikes, point out some of the advantages of each bike, the poor suspension performance, and recognise the importance of anodised aluminium and other aesthetic qualities of the bikes. This all sounds familiar. They also tested both bikes on a range of terrain from sealed roads, gravel, to singletrack. Also familiar and reasonable.
…this 2026 Canyon gravel bike owes quite a large debt to the splatter-painted GTs (an other MTBs) from the 1990s.
However, what they absolutely overlooked was that the splatter-paint on this 2026 Canyon gravel bike owes quite a large debt to the splatter-painted GTs (an other MTBs) from the 1990s. This seems like a pretty glaring oversight and would have fit better in the video than the meaningless 7w of aero drag improvement in a wind tunnel at freeway speeds.
Unsurprisingly, they found a lot of nice things to say about their sponsor’s bike and had more than a few (generally justified) criticisms for the “old man bike”, a 1994 GT Zasker LE. In the end, they determined that gravel bikes and ‘dated mountain bikes’ shared little in common and the Canyon is great. None of this is surprising as the question asked in this video is clearly just a vehicle to advertise the Canyon, and it’s not bad when viewed from this perspective.
Does the video answer the question or add much to this discussion? Not really. But, I will suggest here and as I did earlier, the answer to their question is probably “dropbar MTB” (edit: and a second dropbar MTB for good measure).
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