Long gravel bikes and short stems

alan_sherman

I've seen lots of words in gravel biek reviews about how they are designed to be run with short stems. Now I'm getting old and inflexible so have just moved down to a 90mm stem on my road bike (partly due to the change form the old fishing wire STIs being about 1cm shorter in reach to the more modern hidden gear cable design ones).

So I'm idly wondering if these 'long' gravel bikes will be rubbish for people who normally run shorter stems, of if they will work with itty bitty stems.

The simple answer is to buy a different geometry bike of course....


So if you have a short stem gravel bike - did you get a short MTB stem?

alanyu

How much longer?
I have ridden on a long drop bar touring bike, but the bar is much higher than the road bike I'm riding now. Although the total reach from BB to hoods of the touring bike is ~10mm longer than that of my road bike, I feel more relaxed due to the higher bar.

bristolpete

alan sherman wrote:

I've seen lots of words in gravel biek reviews about how they are designed to be run with short stems. Now I'm getting old and inflexible so have just moved down to a 90mm stem on my road bike (partly due to the change form the old fishing wire STIs being about 1cm shorter in reach to the more modern hidden gear cable design ones).

So I'm idly wondering if these 'long' gravel bikes will be rubbish for people who normally run shorter stems, of if they will work with itty bitty stems.

The simple answer is to buy a different geometry bike of course....


So if you have a short stem gravel bike - did you get a short MTB stem?

I went from a 100mm stem to an 80mm stem on my gravel bike and feel it transformed it. Much better handling, held a line better, reduced the load on the neck and was simply a more agile bike.

trek_dan

For the equivalent size frames a lot of gravel bikes have very high headtubes compared to road bikes, which raises your position anyway so until your sitting on it and using it difficult to say.