The Radavist

My friends in Los Angeles have pretty exceptional talents and taste. Speaking of the latter, Mr. Sean Talkington took advantage of Cielo’s industry pricing at Interbike and put down a deposit on one of their snazzy Cross Racer models. Sean’s new to cross bikes but he couldn’t pass up the deal! After a few months of waiting, his bike showed up and the capable hands at Golden Saddle Cyclery built it up for him.

Sean also works at Golden Saddle part time and is hoping that more customers will look to Cielo for an option when it comes to a MTB, road, touring or cross bike. Since he promotes made in the USA products through Team Dream, he felt like it was time to support US frame builders like Cielo.

Back to this build: You can have a completely dialed bike, but even underneath all that Chris King and SRAM components, bad photos will never do a good bike justice. Luckily for Sean, he’s good friends with Jesse Carmody, an exceptional photographer. Man, Sean really is living the Team Dream Team Dream.

As the sun was setting, these two went out into the woods and the result is in the Gallery!

At last weekend’s TXCX State Champs, John’s Seven Mudhoney cross immediately caught my eye as we were lining up for the 3’s. At first, I didn’t notice the wicked green flame-kissed front end, because the rear half of the bike had some sort of weird box-lined chevrons. Mudhoneys are usually pretty standard-issue. At least the ones I’ve seen, but this one’s got enough personality for all of them!

See more in the Gallery!

Things are finally starting to pick back up over here at PiNP. This weekend was the TXCX State Champs and in between shooting the races, I took a few quick photos of Spencer’s bitchin’ purple All City Nature Boy. People say I take a lot of photos of these bikes and it’s true. Why? Because they’re very common and yet, everyone adds their own sense of style to their builds.

Spencer’s has some limited edition PAUL purple touring cantis, a gold Chris King, Mash bar tape and even a Flag Hatchet sticker. I wanted to get some action shots of Spencer thrashing this thing in the 3’s, but missed out! Which explains the short-ish Gallery. At any rate, it’s a clean build (literally – no mud this weekend). See more in the Gallery!

As I sat down to scroll through all of the Beautiful Bicycles I photographed this year, I quickly realized how diverse PiNP has become. Previous year’s lists never had a MTB, much less two and even though the site has begun to embrace dirt riding more and more, there are still three track bikes in the rankings. Most of these bicycles were made in the USA by small frame builders, but two overseas-manufactured bikes made the cut.

This year for the Top 10 list, I looked at site metrics, social media ‘chatter’ and my own favorites (which were remarkably in-line). All of these bikes got at least 100 Facebook likes and over 20,000 visits within the first week of posting. The latter two requisites were necessary to bring it down to ten bikes, from the dozens of my personal favorites. Also, I omitted my own bikes from this list.

I like to think of PiNP as a showcase for Beautiful Bicycles and how they get put to use. See the full Prolly is Not Probably’s Top 10 Beautiful Bicycles of 2013, in no particular order, in the Gallery!

The Mudfoot Cyclocross Racing Team began years back as artist Geoff McFetridge found himself racing cross (solo) in Los Angeles. He started winning races and eventually thought it’d be rad to form a team that wasn’t really like other teams in the area.

People take racing very seriously and Mudfoot was about having fun while still kicking ass. Soon Mudfoot grew to a small group of like-minded individuals in the Los Angeles area. Some raced, some didn’t but they all enjoyed cycling. Go to a cross race in SoCal and see for yourself just how ridiculous these dudes act. I know this seems sort of cheesy to read, hell, it sounds cheesy to type but it’s mostly the truth.

Mudfoot has grown to be one of the most coveted “brands” and each year, the team kits get radder and radder. I can’t tell you how many times these guys get hit up to sell shirts, stickers, kits, whatever. People go nuts over it! This year however, Geoff and the Mudfoot elite did something a little different. They teamed up with Santa Barbara’s Stinner Frameworks to design a small fleet of team bikes.

With Geoff’s hand-drawn graphics, paint by Kelli Samuelson of Ritte Cycles and a list of American-made components (PAUL, Chris King) as well as Vittoria, Giro and ENVE, they’re by far the nicest team bikes I’ve ever seen. In fact, I’d go ahead and say that this is my favorite bike of 2013. Kyle‘s bike in particular has some great details.

Details include: Mini Moto front brake, Touring canti rear, Salsa mis-matched skewers and a blue and orange Chris King bottom bracket. While we didn’t get the sunrise light we wanted that morning, the photos came out pretty rad!

I can’t think of a better way to end a year of Beautiful Bicycles… See more in the Gallery!

I shot photos of this bike back at Crossvegas but first, Ryan wasn’t pumped on the build and I wasn’t that stoked on my photos. So last weekend at SoCalCross, I stole it yet again to shot more photos. This time around, I think we’re both stoked.

Paul Mini Motos, Thomson, Chris King and that bright orange-red frame make this Stoemper one of my favorite SSCX bikes I’ve shot this year! And Ryan is living the (team) dream. That is, until he fell and lost a bar plug during the race.

At any rate, see more of this beauty in the Gallery!

Year after year, one race promises a good time and delivers. The SSCXWC is often riddled with controversy and inclement weather, luckily this year, the latter only applied. After a successful qualifier at the Bilenky Junkyard Cross course, the racers took to the main event at another location. This year’s course was part taped, part off-road through hobo trails and singletrack. To top it off, it started snowing at the onset of the chaos. Out came the kegs, the grills and the party hats. When the dust settled, two champions reigned supreme, Adam Craig and Vicki Barclay. That’s two in a row for Craig…

Chris King’s Dylan VanWeelden is quite handy with his camera. From shooting for the Chris King blog and various products, to covering events, Dylan has his lens tuned into the Buzz. Check out a selection of his photos in the Gallery!

Year after year, Bilenky‘s Junkyard Cross brings in a varying crowd of cyclists from the party-racers to the pros. This year however, Steve and the gang played their cards a little differently, embracing the SSCXWC in Philly and throwing Junkyard Cross as the qualifier for the main event. Things got weird for sure…

Photographer Chris Lee was on the scene with his 35mm SLR and DSLR to catch all the action. Check out some selects in the Gallery!