In bike racing, the streets of France and Italy aren’t just the sport’s arenas. They also serve as its catwalks. While fashion houses hit Paris and Milan to show off new collections, bicycle brands do the same with yet unreleased models, with the best riders in the world sitting atop them to, yes, win races but also to sell the bike to the masses.
This strategy means that we get to see the latest and the greatest well before they are available for purchase, by which point the cycling media has done its job of whipping the public into a frenzy ahead of the official launch date. Or something like that.
