1) E-Bikes to Begin Their Inevitable Takeover

E-bikes are one fad that is not going anywhere. The sale of e-bikes has grown by approximately 20 percent in 2016 alone and in the next 24 months it’s expected to explode. Some are saying it could be as big as the e-boom in Germany, where 535,000 e-bikes were sold in 2015.

So, by the end of 2017 we’re predicting a few of things to happen. The first is that one in every ten or so mountain bikes you see will become an e-bike. The second is that this will have very little impact on the trails themselves, but will increase the levels of resentment and social tension on the trails for no apparent reason.

But admitting that you like fat bikes to your mountain bike friends would be like admitting to your school mates that your mum cuts your hair and you still watch Spongebob.

Roll on plus bikes in a variety of shapes and sizes. You can now get 26+, 27.5+ and 29+ tyres, which are fatter than your average, but not fat enough to make you feel like the kid at school with a bowl cut.

These let people who like fat bikes benefit from some of the advantages of a fat bike, while still allowing them to pretend they think fat bikes are stupid.

3) 26 Inch Wheels Go Down Fighting

As 26 inch wheels continue to become more and more obsolete, with 27.5 inch wheels becoming “the future” and 29 inch wheels becoming “an acceptable thing to run without people accusing you of overcompensating”, the fervent defenders of 26 inch wheels will take their war to the streets.

Once keyboard warriors, the knights of the 26-inch round table will get out their felt tip pens, placards and crossbows to campaign through town centres and gloomy suburbs alike to try and keep the original wheel size alive.

Of course, being an incredibly bicycle-specific debate, nobody who sees these campaigns will really know what they’re talking about.

5) Missing Posters to Spring Up Across Britain for A Plethora of “Lost Bikepackers”

If you’ve been at a tradeshow recently or walked past a local bike shop, or a non-local bike shop, or the internet, you’ve probably heard all about how 2017 is going to be the year of ‘bikepacking’.

What is bikepacking? It’s pretty much just strapping minimalistic camping gear to your mountain bike and setting off into the wild for a few days. It’s great. We’ve been at it for years, although previously we just referred to it as… camping with a bike.

If bikepacking does indeed take off though, we imagine there will be a lot of people going missing on the British Isles, for two main reasons:

1. People are idiots and should a bunch of people decide to randomly take to the wilderness overnight for the first time, we can almost guarantee at least one of them won’t know how to read a map and will forget to tell anyone where they’ve gone.
2. A bunch of the riders who are capable of map-reading and living in the wild will realise that it’s a much preferable lifestyle to the form-filling Fridays they’ve gotten used to waking up to, and so will never come back, instead deciding to set up a city of vagabond bikepackers deep in the heart of your local hills. Imagine the Cour des Miracles but with more bikes. E-mail [email protected] if you’re keen to come along.

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