The Ritchey Swiss Cross (V2)

Seven years ago, I was in the market for a new cyclocross bike. I’d been racing and riding on a Surly Cross-Check for a couple of years, and that’s something you do more out of necessity than desire. I had also turned my left clavicle from your conventional bone shape into something more like a piece of nature-based jewlery that you might find at a head shop or arts and crafts festival the last time I’d raced on it, so I was ready for a different vibe. My team’s sponsoring shop was a Specialized joint, so I figured I would probably end up with CruX. There were only two problems. First, the only CruX available at my very modest price point was ugly as sin. Second, it was sold out. I was at a bit of a loss, clicking around through the QBP online catalog, when I saw it.

The Ritchey Swiss Cross. It wasn’t aluminum or carbon fiber. It was kind of weird and quirky. It was definitely not fashion-forward. But it was beautiful, the geometry checked out, and it was available in my size. So a few days later, short a couple more C-bills than I really should’ve been spending on anything, I was carrying it home on the Green line, trying to seem chill.

I’m going to skip over my detailed thoughts on my OG Swiss Cross and cut to the chase - it was a great cyclocross bike, with one or two fairly significant flaws. I loved and raced the hell out of it. For now, let’s smash-cut to 2020. I’d noticed in 2019 that Ritchey had a modernized Swiss Cross built from the ground-up for disc brakes. But I couldn’t really spare the cash, and even if I could, the sweet limited edition anniversary colorway, with a sick fade from red to white, was already sold out in my size. Black with white lettering wasn’t going to do it for me. And yes, I really am that vain. You can’t guarantee that you’ll be fast, but you can at least look your best. But in 2020 - good news! There was a new white with red lettering colorway that looked very slick, and my size was in stock.

The V2 Swiss Cross. Note: the seatstay design on the production bikes, at least from 2020, is slightly different than this.

A year later, here’s a review of that bike. I’m writing it partly as a service to others who might be interested in one of these machines but is having a hard time, as I did, finding a detailed review. In particular, it’s hard to find a review from anyone who is actually using the Swiss Cross for its nominal purpose of racing cyclocross. On which, more later. But here I want to answer three main questions: how does the bike ride and handle? How do features such as disc brakes and thru-axles play into that, as well as the (somewhat quirky!) geometry choices Ritchey made in the design of this bike? And, most importantly (maybe), does it race good?

I’ll lead off with a quick disclaimer: I’m a massive bike nerd but I’m not a professional bike reviewer and I don’t buy new bikes all that often, so I haven’t ridden a vast array of cyclocross bikes over the years and my prior experience with disc brakes in the segment is zero. So to some extent it can be a bit tricky to tell how much of what I’m experiencing is due to specific features of the frame versus just the new technology. I’ll try to call that out when I can, but you shouldn’t consider this review as a comparison to other current thru-axle cyclocross bikes on the market and I definitely won’t be telling you whether this bike is better or worse than anything else for sale. What should be pretty apparent is that I like this bike a lot, for both general riding and for racing cyclocross, and I’m going to try and explain why.

Ride and Handling

Let’s start with the obvious: the Swiss Cross is a steel bike. with a carbon fork, yes, but the frame is good old-fashioned steel in the form of good old-fashioned skinny, round tubes. For some of you, this is already enough to get you excited: steel has a passionate following, due to history, romance, imputed ride qualities and just plain aesthetics. It may surprise you to read that I don’t really count myself as a particular fan of steel as a frame material. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-steel, either, but I’m not a partisan in such matters and steel faces some pretty indisputable disadvantages when it comes to building a performance bike. The foremost of these is that steel is quite dense and therefore makes somewhat heavier frames than you can construct from, well, pretty much anything else, and the Swiss Cross is no exception. Compared to an identically-equipped aluminum cross bike, the Ritchey will probably be about a pound heavier, possibly a bit more. Against a lightweight carbon fiber rocket ship, it will be 1.5, maybe close to 2 pounds heavier. If this troubles you, you should probably buy a carbon bike.

The good news is that the Swiss Cross doesn’t feel heavy as you ride along, despite the fact that my bike, as built with SRAM Force components and alloy tubeless wheels, is a hair over 20 pounds. I am a bit weight-sensitive, so I try not to think about this too much. In actual practice, it doesn’t matter a lot to how fast you can lap a cyclocross track, and the bike doesn’t feel heavy at all, but smooth and fast. Steel has a reputation for a smooth ride, but that’s not a given. Budget frame sellers will wax romantic in their marketing copy about the comfortable ride of steel, but the reality is harsher than that: no frame mass-produced from stock 4130 chromoly to hit a $500 price point is going to ride well. The Swiss Cross is different.

The cantilever Swiss Cross was the first steel frame to really “wow” me. I already had a custom steel road bike, but that bike was built to be stiff and light and while the ride was light and lively, I think some of the character may have been flattened out of it. The canti Swiss Cross, though, was a revelation - it was soft and whippy and buttery smooth. It felt unlike anything else I’ve ridden. There was a downside, though: it was soft and whippy and buttery smooth. Even the carbon fork was super compliant. All that flex had consequences. When you built up a head of steam on a descent, you might become aware that the directional control was a bit more vague than you would experience on something with a stiffer front end. Braking hard wasn’t exactly confidence-inspiring as the frame would practically accordion itself on an already short wheel base. It’s not that it felt like it was out of control or anything, but it just didn’t have the on-rails feeling of a really fast bike downhill. Worst of all, that soft fork made it extremely vulnerable to brake shudder, to the point that I found it almost unridable with standard cantilevers. I rode it almost exclusively with a mini-v front brake, through even that could get shaky if you really needed to use maximum braking. At the back end, all that flex could rob traction under power and further degrade handling precision.

The V2 disc brake Swiss Cross strikes a much better balance between ride compliance, directional stability and drivetrain stiffness. It doesn’t have the almost ethereal, floaty ride quality of the older bike, but it’s still quite smooth and comfortable while also actually going where you point it. It feels surefooted and stable on descents, where it is probably also aided by a longer wheelbase. There’s still some pleasant compliance in the front end, but it seems to possibly enhance control over bumpy stuff rather than degrade it. The only sign that you’re braking is that you’re slowing down, and it feels a bit more responsive to the pedals when you’re jumping out of corners. And the ability of this bike to hook up and find traction on loose surfaces - dead leaves, loose rocks, sticks and logs - is both impressive and very surprising. Bottom line: it’s a great-riding bike that also feels stiff enough to stay out of its own way.

On the handling front, Ritchey is holding the line on sharp front-end geometry at a time when more and more cyclocross bikes are seeing head angles slide south of 70 degrees. I love them for this, even as I recognize that being a small-volume producer probably affords them a bit more freedom than a major manufacturer. Cyclocross is rapidly sliding back into niche status as gravel continues to eat the entire bike world for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and it could be that more progressive geometries make it easier to keep selling cyclocross bikes. For me, though, a cross bike doesn’t need to slay on technical downhills. It needs to have enough precision to rail that corner or slip into that rut and just enough stability to keep you alive on those big chutes. The Swiss Cross delivers. It isn’t twitchy, but it readily changes its line when you tell it to. This happy medium front end is assisted by a happy medium bottom bracket drop of 65 mm. It doesn’t feel tippy, as cross bikes can when the BB drop starts to climb to 60 mm or more, but you can still pedal through most off-cambers and you get a little more clearance if, like me, you’re a bit awkward on the hops. For me, this is the sweet spot.

Geometry and Frame Features

Let’s start this section off with a list of frame braze-ons and attachment points:

Right, jokes aside, Ritchey is serious enough when they say the Swiss Cross is a race machine to back that up by giving you exactly as many accoutrements as you would expect from a focused race bike. You get attachment points for two bottle cages, and that’s all. That makes sense, but the V2 Swiss Cross does have one deviation from more typical cyclocross racing geometry that’s so surprising, so shocking even, that it made me wonder if they really believed their own copy about this bike. A geometry decision so outside the bounds of conventional wisdom that it made me question whether this Swiss Cross really could be a good cyclocross race bike. It’s such a quirk that I can’t ignore it. I have to tackle it head-on. And it’s this: the chainstays on this bike are long. Really long.

It’s actually a little difficult to find a point of comparison on this front. Typical cyclocross bikes have chainstays from 425 to 430 mm long. The only outlier from this range that I’m aware of is the Giant TCX, which has 433 mm chainstays, 8 mm longer than the most common length of 425. And then there’s the Swiss Cross, which is hanging out at 437 mm, a good 12 mm longer than normal. This is especially wild in a time when shrinking rear-center distances are all the rage for off-road bikes. Teeny little chainstays have taken over the mountain biking world, and some gravel bikes are starting to head in that direction, too. The idea is simple enough, especially with the increasing adoption of long front-center distances and slack head angles: keeping the rear wheel tucked under the rider supposedly increases agility, drive traction and allows for snappy acceleration. Short chainstays also make it easier to lift the front wheel off the ground, which in theory should make it easier to jump over obstacles.

Quite simply, the long rear end on this bike made me nervous. Ritchey was saying, as they have for every version of this bike, that it’s flat-out race bike. It’s for lapping cyclocross tracks as fast as possible. Sounds good, but that long, lazy rear end looks almost… touring bike-esque. So I had to wonder if they were telling the truth. I was concerned, for all the reasons I listed above as benefits of short chainstays, that the bike would feel boat-like in corners, that it wouldn’t accelerate well or that it would lose traction on steep climbs or accelerating out of corners. Most irrationally of all, but also most keenly, I feared that it would be more difficult to jump over logs or planks. After all, Ritchey can say it’s a cyclocross bike until the cows come home, but peruse any bike forum and basically anyone who’s posting about buying a Swiss Cross, either this one or the previous version, is buying it to ride gravel. Who could blame Ritchey if they’re trying to make the bike more appealing to the majority of actual buyers?

To keep this story from getting any longer, my fears were unfounded. The handling is sharp, the bike feels fast, traction is outstanding, and there’s no noticeable effect on the ease of getting the bike off the ground. In fact it’s better than the old bike and it’s 425 mm chainstays in every respect. I’m sure it doesn’t feel as agile and explosive as a carbon fiber cross bike with short chainstays. And it feels more smooth out of corners or on climbs than snappy - I mean, the bike is stiff, it feels responsive, but it’s more of a hold speed and cruise bike than a smash out of the saddle bike. But the point is, it feels like as much or more like a cyclocross racing bike as any cyclocross bike I’ve had.

The whole episode makes me question what I thought I knew about bike geometry. I listed the virtues of short chainstays above, but is any of that really true? Or is it just bike nerd boilerplate, a set of bare assertions that we’ve been passing around and reheating for the last few decades? I don’t know. There’s probably still something to it, but the experience is turning me into a bit of a Chainstay Truther. Maybe it just doesn’t matter that much! Maybe Tom Ritchey is on to something, here - maybe stretching out the rear-center on a bike is less about softening and slowing it down and more about balancing it out. It might be that you can preserve the sharp front end handling that makes a bike fun both up and down hills but still stretch the wheelbase and get some stability at speed. And the added stiffness of beefier tubing, but especially of thru-axles, lets you get away with it.

On that note, of course the new Swiss Cross is a thru-axle disc bike. I know I’m about five years behind the rest of the world, but I’m here to tell you the hype is real. I did have a hell of a time getting the brakes on this bike set up properly. I had contaminated pads, then leaking seals leading to more contaminated pads, then an improperly tightened banjo bolt leading to loss of brake pressure and more contaminated pads and a fresh brake bleed. When hydraulic discs are troublesome they really are a much more difficult and frustrating problem than cables. I think we should admit that. But once they’re working right, boy do they work right.

This is a hyperbole-free zone so I won’t say people don’t fully appreciate the magnitude of the improvement that thru-axles represent over quick releases. But they sure don’t talk about it very much, and after a year on this bike, I’m surprised. I’ve already noted the improved stiffness of the new Swiss Cross. A lot of it is due to the noticeably beefed-up seatstays and chainstays. But I believe the thru-axles are a major part of it as well. Closing up the two open ends of the frame and making them a rigid structure has to dramatically increase their resistance to twisting and other undesirable movements. On a mountain bike, I wouldn’t say it isn’t noticeable, but with all those suspension components already bouncing and boinging around, it’s mostly pretty subtle. On a rigid drop bar bike, the difference is dramatic and my confidence on the trail is much greater as a result.

A lot has happened in cyclocross and gravel technology in the last 5-6 years. Between thru-axles and hydraulic disc brakes and tubeless tires that you can pretty much take for granted will mount and stay mounted on any rim, the bikes have multiplied their capabilities off-road. I can ride lines, uphill and down, that were impassable on my old cantilever bikes and especially on that floppy old canti Swiss Cross. On my local trail loops, the combination of hydraulic disc brakes and rock-solid reliable tubeless tires makes this bike faster than my old ones and not by a little bit. What’s interesting about this is that cyclocross tracks haven’t really increased in technical challenge to match what’s possible on current bikes. I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily. After all it’s cyclocross, not cross-country mountain biking. It does mean that I think the benefits are probably more marginal in an actual cross race. Not exactly a revelation, since I’ve been competing against riders on modern bikes and doing well or poorly on my own merits for several seasons. But I wonder if that’s gradually going to change. For now, it’s nice to be on more of a level footing with my competitors, because when the going does get technical the ability to select and then hold lines, fly fearlessly down singletrack and boost over bumps and holes is very impressive for a bike with drop bars and 35 mm tires.

Will It Race?

Which brings us to the final and mercifully briefest section of this review: can you race cyclocross on the Ritchey Swiss Cross? Is it any good? The lack of ability to answer this question is why it’s taken me a year and change to sit down and type this monstrosity of a bike review. There wasn’t any cross racing in 2020, so I just didn’t know the answer and I didn’t want to speculate. After all, I was petrified that my long chainstays were going to make the bike slow and awkward on the race course. How sad would that have been?

I’m happy to report that I’ve entered two races and a handful of practices on the Swiss Cross, and doubts were unjustified. I mean, look - I’m not going to say it’s best and fastest cross bike in the world. There’s just no way that’s true. It’s steel, it’s kind of heavy, it’s a peculiar spot of form in a world obsessed with watts and high modulus and performance function. It’s also not slow. It goes fast when you pedal hard, it turns fast when you point it around a corner, it rides smoothly over bumpy fields. It’s a cyclocross bike, and a very good one. You can absolutely race this bike and if you are fast, it will be fast. If you are slow, it will be slow. But if you are slow, there’s nothing to worry about. Because you will look fantastic doing it.

The Honest Bicycle Program joins the Wide Angle Podium Network!

Exciting news! We're pleased to announce that HBP is joining The Slow Ride Podcast, Crosshairs Radio and Kids Don't Follow on the shiny new Wide Angle Podium Network of fine podcasts! No doubt the ranks will soon swell with more excellent podcasts for you to enjoy. In the meantime, head on over to wideanglepodium.com and check it out!

Why join a podcast network? In short, it's a big, wide, scary world out there, and it's full of podcasts. It makes sense for shows that share a common center and common ethos to band together. If you like HBP, you'll really like the other shows at Wide Angle Podium - and, we hope, vice versa. With a common network and shared infrastructure, we can promote one another and work together to raise funds to cover some of the cost of bringing these shows to you, the listener.

Did you say fundraise?? Why yes, I did! There will be more on this later. For now - rest assured, The Honest Bicycle Program will always be free to download and listen, if you so choose. It is a labor of love, after all. But HBP, like every other podcast in the known universe, is not free to produce! And a little love sure makes it easier to devote the time that goes into recording and producing the show (I know, it's hard to believe any actual effort goes into HBP, but it's true!). So if you want to kick in a little cash to HBP or any of the other shows on Wide Angle Podium Network to show your love and appreciation, there's a way to do that - check it out, if you are so inclined.

Finally, how will this move affect the show? Not much! The major change will be that all of our shows will live primarily over on Wide Angle Podium - find our page here. But don't worry - everything will always be linked from right here at standarddouble.com/whbp so there's no need to change a thing. If you get the show via RSS (iTunes or podcast apps), that feed should automatically update. If not, try unsubscribing and resubscribing and that should fix it. And if it doesn't, let us know!

That's it for now. Thanks for listening and don't forget to check out our latest episode!

Changes at The Workingman's Honest Bicycle Program

Hello dear visitors. It's been a while since the front page of Standard Double received any attention, so it seems like a good spot to share news about Our Fine Podcast.

First of all, if you've downloaded and listened to our latest episode, you probably noticed the presence of a new voice on the show. That voice belongs to the inimitable Frances Morrison, who we previously had on as a guest for episodes 13 and 14. If you heard her on those episodes (and if you haven't, for Peugeot's sake, go listen to them!), you already know how smart and funny she is, so we're really excited to have Frances on board.

Second, you probably also noticed that we introduced the show as The Honest Bicycle Program. That's right, we have a new name! After consideration, we decided that we couldn't keep overlooking the gendered message of the original name. We chose "The Workingman's Honest Bicycle Program," as the name of our podcast because we wanted to convey that our show is by and for the working person cyclist and not just another pro racing recap show (though we do some of that, too, of course). We've always considered our audience to include anyone who loves bicycles, male or female, and we want to feel more confident that our chosen name reflects that. We don't want anyone to see the name of the show and think it isn't intended for them. Besides, while "The Workingman's Honest Bicycle Program" had a certain old-timey charm to it, it turned out to be surprisingly awkward to say and remember. And don't get me started on email and social media accounts. We think "The Honest Bicycle Program" has 99% of the old-timeyness and 1% of the aggravation.

We'll be effecting the transition to our new identity over time. We're starting with just the website, Twitter and Facebook accounts and will work on transitioning the iTunes feed in the near future. This shouldn't have any effect on subscribers, so just keep on doing what you're doing and everything will be fine.

We also hope/expect to have more news about the future of the show at some point over the coming months, but that will have to wait! In the meantime, please keep tuning in every other week for heady bike talk for the 99% cyclist.

If you have thoughts or questions to share with us, please don't hesitate to get in touch! You can email the show at honestbikeprogram@gmail.com. You can also find us on Twitter, @honestbicycle.

And if you like the show and want to help us out, the best way to do that is by leaving us a review on iTunes. It really makes a difference! You can rate the show and leave a review here: The Workingman's Honest Bicycle Program.

Thanks for listening!

Consumer-Grade Bike Tools of the 1970's

I've been doing some bike work lately, and remembered this small collection of 40-ish year-old bike tools that I have kicking around in my toolbox along with my newer stuff. I snagged these from my dad when I first got into tinkering with bikes about a decade ago, as I had no budget for new tools and was working on old bikes anyway. There's a tire lever (I had two, only found one), a crude multi-tool made from stamped steel, a Sugino JIS crank puller, a SunTour freewheel removal tool and a chain tool. The multi-tool mostly has various sizes of wrench flats for headsets, cones and the like, along with a bottom bracket lockring removal tool (all basically useless, unless you love hand injuries and hate sanity).

These tools are uniformly pretty awful, with the exception of the crank puller - that one isn't so bad, really. They're made from poor materials with little regard for usability or strength. Today's cheap tools have nothing on these bastards. The stamped steel multi-tool is my particular favorite, as it appears to have been designed by a psychopath. The purpose of this tool seems to have been to lure the carrier into a false sense of preparedness, only to leave the user's hands too injured to hitchhike or hail a cab - as they will inevitably will need to do when they realize that this tool is unable to transmit any torque to a bolt or nut.

Today these tools are perhaps most useful for puncturing the nostalgic notion that everything is in decline, that craftsmanship is dead and nothing is made to last anymore. Some things have gotten worse. But you can look at these tools and maybe feel a least a little bit of hope. Some things used to be really awful! It hasn't all been downhill in the last 40 years.

That Cyclocross Suspension Fork and Race Tech Tension

This VeloNews slideshow of Tim Johnson's Lefty suspension-equipped Cannondale Cyclocross bike has been making the rounds on Twitter this afternoon, though I first saw the photo yesterday (September 28, 2014). Standard Double isn't really a tech-focused blog, but goodness knows it updates rarely enough that I'm happy to seize any good opportunity to publish, I do have a few thoughts on this prototype, and I think technology in 'cross in particular touches on issues that the philosophically-inclined bike racer is probably thinking about. So it's worth a little discussion.

I have previously argued that there should be more experimentation with suspension systems in cyclocross. I won't rehash the entire case here, but the executive summary is that cyclocross bikes have very marginal traction thanks to their use skinny, low-volume tires in off-road conditions, and even a little bit of suspension travel could make a big difference in performance. If your tires stay stuck to the ground more often, you can go faster, period. Cyclocross bikes are a special challenge because of tight constraints on weight, geometry and different course design from other off-road disciplines, but that just means the technological tipping point where suspension becomes feasible is further down the line than it was for mountain bikes.

After I wrote that post, Trek came out with the Boone, which has a low-travel rear-suspension system (they call it a "decoupler," but that's the same thing). Other than that, though, there's been very little visible work on the suspension front. I'm not sure why there's been so little visible interest from the manufacturers, but cyclocross and road do a share a technologically conservative culture, especially overseas. The adoption of disc brakes by top professionals in Europe is a case in point - it has been much slower there than in the United States. So in that light, Cannondale getting a top American professional a 'cross bike with a suspension fork is exciting because it's the first indication in a little while that anything might be happening in that direction. Unfortunately, it's not clear if Johnson has actually raced this thing (I'm guessing no), and we don't know how it performs. I really can't wait to hear more.

So that's the tech part. What about the philosophy? Warning: if you just wanted some quick thoughts about the fork, you might want to stop here.

As bicycle technology develops, it inevitably has an effect on the competition and on the racers. Some embrace new developments, and others reject them. Individuals have good reasons to fall into either camp. The case for embracing technology is simple: if it makes you faster, or otherwise makes the experience of riding the bicycle subjectively better, it's good and worth adopting. Arguments against the use of new technologies in racing can be a little murkier, not because they are wrong but because they are about deeper issues than performance: philosophical purity of the sport, and economic accessibility. Can the essence of the sport be preserved under the onslaught of new technologies? Can a new rider with zero or scant financial support hope to be competitive with more basic equipment?

My style is often to be breezily dismissive of skepticism about technology, but I don't think that these questions really deserve that sort of answer. The rules of sport are arbitrary, but not purposeless. The rules are what make one kind of competition distinct from another. Cyclocross is not mountain biking. The fear is that adapting mountain bike technologies for cyclocross will introduce changes in equipment and courses that ultimately blur the lines between them and destroy the distinctiveness of cyclocross. I think that fear is worth taking seriously. As for accessibility, we do want bike racing to remain a competition between athletes, not sponsors, equipment and budgets. And it is in our best interest to ensure that young athletes can still enter the sport without being penalized for being unable to afford the very latest and fastest equipment.

The answer isn't to simply draw a line in the sand. Cycling is a technological sport down to its core. The bicycle is the product of many centuries of technological progress. The athlete's performance can't be separated from the machine - this sport is what it is because of what the machine makes possible! And the clever use of new technologies is part of some of the best stories ever told in cycling. Graeme Obree's Hour Record, Greg Lemond's 1989 Tour de France, all those crazy-looking time trial bikes in the mid to late 1990's. Technology is a crucial element of the story.

So, excitement and worry about technological advancement is a long-standing tension in bike racing. In recent years it has been coming to the fore in a way that we haven't seen since the UCI locked down the rules on bicycle design and rider position in 2000, because of some technological advancements with major implications for the future: electronic shifting. Road disc brakes. Perhaps suspension in cyclocross or on the road will be the next battlefield. So what to do? On balance, I think we should embrace the technological nature of the bicycle a bit more. But we should also keep the distinctiveness of cycling disciplines and access to the sport in the front of our minds.