Side note - loving the downvote! I can only guess a local Cat 5 legend got upset they didn't win their Tuesday night worlds even after spending $4k on Zipp 454s. That or didn't bother to read my whole post where I'm poking fun at myself for doing precisely this :p
As somebody that's now literally a middle aged man in lyrca sometimes - I find the whole phenomenon really amusing, but then again, I've also been riding since I was a lot younger, and poorer, and the best I could afford was an all-aluminum specialized allez with 9-speed 105 stuff on it.
Back in the day, I probably rode 4-5x more cumulative km per year than I do now. And at that time, I found middle aged men in lyrca with more money than common sense to be equally funny.
Have you taken a look at prices of a used Allez lately? Put a few IG/TikTok faces to it and it doubled the cost. Once upon a time it was a cost efficient way to race crits and not worry too much about cost of crashes. Now it is apparently a high end highly desired bike …
Edit: I’m also a ma… hang on, when does middle age start? I may still have a year to go technically! (But not in reality)
In 2005 I paid $1500 (USD) for an aluminum allez elite with the 9 speed 105 on it... Cheapest things on it were the FSA crankset and the fairly cheap 20 front/24 rear generic specialized house brand wheelset. Equivalent thing today would probably be a lot more. 10 speed tiagra is probably superior in every way to the groupset I had then, but a comparable bike now might be $2600? Or more.
