Hamlet would drop “words, words, words” also describing motorcycle marketing. Kudos to the genius and the cult-like fashion that gets many to drink the Koolaid and buy hope.
Serendipitously, making it a coup de maître, the real push and worldwide dominance of Adventure bikes came after Covid, making them appeal to most people on the planet. Just buy the bike, click your heels together three times and say “there’s no way I wanna stay home!”
In pre-pandemic times, ADV bikes appealed mostly to pencil-pushing, middle-aged, triste, married men, seeking to escape their cubicles like trapped animals, fancying themselves ObiWan, riding The Long Way Around with their Boorman-equivalent BFF. Aside from the odd group day-ride, they were buying their way into a social group, without actually getting free coffee and cookies at their weekly meetings. In fact, dealers (depending on the country) called them ‘ice cream riders’ or ‘terrace riders’ – not considering them ‘real riders’ despite the money they brought to the industry.
Authentic adventurers were a different breed. They’d grab any bike they could afford, and leave on an odyssey, a crusade of sorts, of indefinite length of time and distance, passing through cathartic rebirths, experiencing indescribable occurrences, melding with foreign cultures and lands. These giants didn’t need Mosko bags, Instagram selfies attending ABR, or Touratech-vomitted-upon bikes that manufacturers ordained as ‘Adventure’. Maps, grit, will power, and the desire to absorb life off the beaten path was the engine driving them. This was the dream.
Hearing legends of these moto-voyageurs awakes a desire at the core of every human – a call for independence, curiosity, and perseverance – which was exacerbated by the two year confinement, and motorcycle brands saw this golden opportunity and jumped on it. However (with a capital ‘h’, and faux-pas-ing by beginning the sentence with this conjunctive adverb), all the desire in the world without change is as efficient as getting a January gym membership, hoping to lose Christmas weight. The infestation of ice-creamers or terrace-hoppers spread, without increasing adventures lived.
The want was there and they bought the bike, but with it came the reality. The wife still wouldn’t let them leave. They really couldn’t afford to sally forth into the world. They didn’t have time. They had no clue how to organize anything – and their ‘fly by the seat of their pants’ approach worked for the first 24 hours, until their adrenaline tapered a little. They’d wasted most of their money over-equipping the bike as if it were a bastard-orgy-child of a nuclear submarine, an aircraft carrier, and a cruise ship, making it so heavy, they questioned the resolve of their sphincter when needing to lift it off its kickstand.
Not many could admit making a mistake in purchasing something, but if a good alibi could be concocted, there was some redemption. The three go-tos were:
1. Forcing their significant other to disinterestedly look at the back of their helmet and suffer on the back of their monstrosity, while also tormenting her by failing to convince her she’s ‘having fun’.
2. Doubling-down and using the behemoth to further justify buying more toys, pretending it’s a station wagon and deciding to go moto-camping. After all, performing one’s morning toilette in communal bathrooms qualifies as adventure, right?
(If you’re camping, you’re just half-riding at best. It’s one or the other. Nobody has the energy to fully commit to both. Unless, of course, you rode hard all day trying to make distance, but night caught you, due to an extreme unexpected weather fluctuation on the upland steppes or deserts in Mongolia and you needed to pitch a tent, deprived of an invitation to sleep in a yurt with nomads. But seriously, there’s no need for a tent on a motorbike in most of North America or Europe. None.)
3. Joining the hoards of morning-erection-looking bikers riding around on their adventure bikes, determined not to ride a single metre off asphalt, essentially turning their adventure bikes into nothing more than an uglier touring bike.
As Covid mutated instead of dying, so too did the Adventure bike scene. Noticing that some more astute motorcyclists got wise to the phenomena of large and expensive ADV bikes, the market shifted gears (wink) and pushed the boundaries of nomenclature, rebirthing mid-sized Adventure bikes as ‘Trail’ bikes, supposedly to appeal to the more hardcore off-roader, encouraging off-road touring. Sadly, they didn’t stop there. Terms of endearment like ‘Dual-Sport’ resurged, aimed at gently converting the shy, whereas for the hardcore, no word gives wood like ‘Rally’ (piggybacking Dakar). A couple recent favourites are Husqvarna branding a model ‘Expedition’, yet still outdone by KTM’s shotgun-like redundantly named ‘Adventure R (for racing) Rally’ – a little like appetizer meal dessert – doling out qualificatives left, right, and centre. Surely Mattighofen has a closet with a thesaurus-wielding, lab coat wearing petit comité, coming up with names.
Bikes are being labeled so fiercely, people don’t even know what they want anymore. Are Rally bikes Adventure bikes? Are Trail bikes Rally bikes? Can a Dual-Sport show up at an Adventure bike gathering? What are the surreptitious rules of riding? Can you be seen riding a rally with an Adventure bike or going on an adventure with a Rally bike? Do Adventure bikes belong on a trail or can your Dual-Sport compete in a rally?
With this neo-marketing comes discrimination of bikes and riders. Before all this, when riders spent their energy riding instead of upgrading, cleaning, opining, camping, dreaming, etc. It’s a fact that any bike can be ridden in any fashion on any terrain and for any purpose (given the proper skill), however, in the present climate, judgement is cast when others don’t abide by marketing standards. Ever seen the look on people’s faces when an R-GS shows up to do laps at the race track?
A friend described me as a ‘purist’, hinting perhaps that I too judge others. I’d like to distinguish my pretensions as being solely directed at riders who don’t actually ride, but merely commute from one social event to another (see also moto-campers), only giving half their attention to the ride. I don’t refer to the innumerable people who need to use motorcycles for work. I refer to those for whom bikes are nothing more than an addendum to their ‘real’ hobbies. I believe our sport/art/pastime deserves the appropriate respect, attention, work, and clarity. Pointing at the ‘type’ of bike they own or throwing money at a label and hoping it turns into a self fulfilling prophecy doesn’t achieve this. After all, would you step on a plane with a pilot who did nothing more than buy a pair of Rayban Aviators? That’s the feeling I get riding in a group with faux-riders. Be there all-in to ride, regardless of what you show up on. We’re not in high-school anymore, so let’s forget labels.
Let’s apply an old school way of choosing our own path, paying less of a herd-mentality attention to the words marketing feed us. Motorcycling is synonymous with freedom and passion.
It’s not that hard. We decide what we’re actually going to do, buy the most appropriate bike (we can afford) based on its strengths, then (and this is important) learn the skills for our proposed intentions, and go at it heart and soul.
Writer:
Peter ‘Safety Bear’ Bokor