WHAT IS THE NEXT GROUNDBREAKING BIKE?

TIM RUTLEDGE, THE CREATOR OF THE REDLINE Conquest and a legend of American cyclocross racing, died of cancer earlier this year.

- TARA SEPLAVY

Reading news of his passing made me recall the early days of my career in bicycle product development and reflect on today's bikes.

Redline's Conquest was groundbreaking. Released in 1994, it was the first widely available cyclocross bike in the United States. With the Conquest, racers didn't need to chase down a cyclocross-specific frame from Europe or modify a road or touring bike to fit wider tires and cantilever brakes. Redline's bike fueled a cyclocross boom and got thousands of racers into the sport.

Within a few years, cyclocross became "the next big thing," and every major bike brand began manufacturing 'cross bikes and marketing them with sponsored athletes. Most of these cyclocross bikes never got raced between the tape, but many were ridden on gravel and farm roads. And this helped gravel emerge as a bike category and cycling discipline.

While I designed bikes for downhill mountain biking (bicycles at the opposite end of the cycling use-case spectrum from cyclocross), I often studied and referenced the Conquest when developing and marketing bikes like the Iron Horse Sunday. Rutledge and Redline distilled a unique, disciplinespecific bike into a product and price that more riders could access-and then backed it up by racing and winning on the product.