Are you up for a ride?
September is not an obvious time for the bicycle industry to trot out its latest, greatest offerings. Casual cyclists have usually hung up their bikes in preparation for the turn to colder weather. But Interbike is not for casual cyclists.
As the largest trade show of its kind in the western hemisphere, this year’s edition of Interbike saw some 15,000 bicycle professionals flock to the Reno-Sparks Convention Center in Reno, Nevada. This was a big change, as the show had been hosted in Las Vegas for the previous 16 years, but attendees seemed undeterred. The sundry crowd included shop owners, gear manufacturers, and bike devotees of all stripes. Packed into 650,000 square feet of convention floor, Interbike once again granted attendees the opportunity to see what their fellow cycling nuts are up to in different corners of the industry.
We attended three days of the week-long show and got to know the convention floor rather well. Here are the coolest gadgets and cycling gear we saw at Interbike 2018.
CBD sports supplements were a major theme of the show.
“CBD” is shorthand for cannabidiol, the non-psychoactive ingredient in marijuana linked to pain relief and post-workout recovery. One of the more popular companies in the space is Floyd's of Leadville, which sells powders that are meant to be added to water as an easy means to get CBD in your system.
The company is backed by Floyd Landis, the former professional cyclist at the center of the 2006 doping scandal that cost him a Tour de France victory. Now Landis is selling “drugs” to cyclists and other athletes in search of legal, natural pain relief.
The other dominant theme of the show was electric bicycles, and German company Riese & Muller makes some of the sharpest-looking models out there.
Their components come from all over the world, but everything is assembled in Germany to the company’s exacting standards.
They offer a number of different form factors for different cycling needs. This pedal-assisted electric cargo bike could carry two small children as easily as it could a load of groceries.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider