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a bike product question? We have the guy with the answers:
Ask our good buddy and resident bike guru JF@Gords.com
by clicking here.
If you have a query, he's got your answer.
Gord's Ski & Bike
2 Locations to serve you better!
[L1]
2 Donald St
Winnipeg, Manitoba
CANADA | 204.284.2952
Cat and Jenn1 during a break on last years Gord's to Gord's ride : Photo JF Ravenelle .
MID WEEK SALE ON NOW!
Drop on by, check out the cool new bikes and allow us to suggest some sweet '06 and '07's at tremendous discounts. This week only! Sale ends Friday. For more details, check out the deals here:
PERSONAL GEAR CONSULTANT Gord's "Personal Gear Consult" is something we thought up after our first of many busy weekends here at Gord's. We were wondering how to give those who take buying something like a bike seriously ... What to do for those of you requiring a bit more attention. Sure we do all we can (and then some) for those of you just walking into any of our stores... But sometimes it's frustrating for us, we get so busy, somewhat a victim of our success... and like it or not we sometimes miss details. So here we were, wondering how we could do things better, how we could give you 150% of the Gord's experience. So we thought of this.
WHAT DO YOU GET? It's always nice to get a little something for nothing and when you buy your bike at Gord's you get just that. It all starts with the way we build our bikes. We take great pride in taking our time to do it right. So much so that all our bikes are signed by the techs that built them. We follow that up with our unique way of looking at buying a bike: First off, we're NOT on comission ... That allows us to put the correct emphasis on style, comfort, performance and super important stuff like fun! We then follow it up with bike tune clinics and a few deals here and there on the coolest of accessories... But the kicker is Gord's exclusive New Bike Service Plan... Where we promise to care for your bike for not one but SIX years! It's a promise we take very seriously. For more details click the following link:
BIKES WE SELL In order to get the nuts and bolts out of the way so we can relax and enjoy the process of finding you a cool new bike, we first take very seriously the job of selecting the gear we put forth for your consideration. We take great care in selecting the right products, we test, we re-test, we do our homework, we research, we obsess, even... So go ahead, ask us why we do the bike brands we do... We'll tell you straight up it has little to do with hype and all to do with commitment to quality, value, comfort, performance and above all enjoyment.
Like the guy said; Nothing but the bestest. From the sweet line-up of Rocky Mountain bikes to the hyper edgy Commencal (it's pronounced Com-en-sahl). Every new bike we sell is covered by our unique Gord's Service Plan and
we don't just sell you a bike, we make sure you have every opportunity to enjoy said bike by doing a few things no-one else in the city dares do... Drop on by, check out the Gord's way of doing things. It's different. In a good way.
HOW WE DO STUFF How we do things with bike gear (or anything else for that matter) is simple, really. We try to remove the BS from the sales experience. We're very interested in getting to know you so we can simply find the perfect bike/camelback/helmet for you. There's no easy way to do it without first getting to know you so be prepared [#1]: We're going to ask you a bunch of questions".
Some people take buying a bike way to seriously and that's too bad. Let us not forget that it's about riding a BIKE! It's supposed to be FUN! Relax, bring a cup of coffee, wear comfortable clothes and shoes, come by and meet one of our friendly staff and enjoy the process. We're all about the karma of it all and we like making new friends and be prepared [#2]: We might just invite you to join our Bike Club so you can come riding with us. Our apologies, it's just the way we do business.
JUST THE GOOD STUFF
It's part of the job, selecting what we'll be stocking our shelves with for next summer. Sorting through the gazillion products available out there and coming up with just the good stuff. Gear we can proudly stand behind, gear we'd use ourselves, gear that reflects our commitment to quality and excellence.
For Gord's buying team September marked the beginning of the exhaustive search for the very best gear out there. Never content with simply buying what's presented to us from our suppliers, we spend an inordinate amount of time, effort and expense to dig, sift and research in order to weed out the poo.
It's quite the process because we take this extremely seriously. Our adventure all started with BTAC's Expo Cycle in Montreal followed by the big bad Interbike show in Las Vegas where this year Vlad, Robbie, Catherine and JF headed to the desert in Boulder Canyon Nevada (right before the Vegas show) and likely tested more bikes that they should have.
Read more about the brands we've selected and why we selected them by chacking out our apropriately-named "why" page here:
RIDE VIDEOS
We do these every week... A simply great ride through the great trails that we love to ride, right in Winnipeg. Great rides with great folks... And we take pictures... And we take Video... and we make little movies that you can check out just below this filler text. Join Gord's Bike Club and come ride with us! the season doesn't end until it's much colder that right now.
Gotta love YouTube!
JF, pondering life with his Ellsworth Moment at McGillvary Falls : Photo Gavin Morrison
THE LOVE OF A GOOD BIKE A good bike. Some of us are lucky enough that we have one, some of us are still looking, a very few of us have several. What makes a good bike? Could it be the way it just 'fits'? Could it be the way it anticipates your every move, your every pedal stroke, your every directional desire?
A good bike is hard to find... and once you find it... Trust us, a good bike is a conduit for good things. Once you've experienced true bike love, things change, your priorities change, all of a sudden work doesn't matter so much anymore, all of a sudden rides become more fun, climbs a bit easier, km's go by faster, terrain flows that much smoother... and suddenly falling in love with aluminum and rubber doesn't seem so far-fetched.
If you aren't feeling the love from your current steed then check out the budget and consult the spousal unit (or better yet: don't). Get a bike you love. No one should have to settle for a so-so bike. Life's too short.
Drop by either of our two locations, let us know what you're looking for in a bike... We'll introduce you to a few, hopefully you'll like each other enough to go for a test ride or two... and who knows, maybe you'll find this love that we speak of. Go ahead, what have you got to lose? After all, it's for a good cause: You're health, your life, your sanity.
Gavin pulling our gear-laden Chariot followed by Cat and Andrew : Photo JF Ravenelle
WHAT DID YOU DO THIS WEEKEND?
Every adventure we embark on is another opportunity to test gear. This past July we concocted a plan to head up east of the Whiteshell in order to find more cool places to ride... That meant camping overnight, that meant gear... that meant transporting said gear... One of us had the great idea of loading up a Chariot Cabriolet with said gear and pulling it through some pretty challenging terrain... Loaded up to it's maximum payload.
What we found out is that Chariots are surprisingly easy to pull in tricky terrain... terrain we probably wouldn't have negotiated with a human on board... yet the trailer performed flawlessly... Like the old Timex advert went: "It takes a licking and keeps on ticking"
(minus the ticking). What we also discovered was that you can sure put lot of gear in a Cabriolet. For more info on Chariot Trailers (and more conventional uses for them) do yourself a favor and check out their site here:
COMMENCAL BIKES Attention bike connoisseurs! Gord's Ski and Bike is very proud to announce that we'll be offering Commençal Bikes starting in 2008!
First things first: The name... Commençal It's pronounced "com-men-sahl''
simple... kinda. That little squiggly, it's called a cédille... The cédille ¸ (cedilla) is found only on the letter C. It changes a hard C sound (like K) into a soft C sound (like S), e.g., garçon. The cedilla is never placed in front of E or I, because C always sounds like an S in front of these vowels. There, now that we have French 101 out of the way, back to bikes.
Commençal Bikes is an extremely unique bike company, formed by Max Commencal in 1999, they have worked in conjunction with Frederic Bernard and Olivier Bossard (Formula 1 suspension designers BOS Engineering) to create some of the most efficient bikes on the market with the help of 11 time Downhill World Champion Anne Caroline Chausson and 5 time Cross Country World Champion and Olympic Gold Medallist Miguel Martinez. This combination of a high performance cycling legend, engineering geniuses and elite athletic skill give Commençal a vision for top performance coupled with simplicity and affordability
..
PICKING THE RIGHT BIKE GEAR From selecting the right pumps to computers to bike lights to 6 inch all-mountain bikes, Gord's long journey in seeking out the best stuff all starts with our annual trip to INTERBIKE in Vegas, gotta love the place... or hate it. Vegas has been where the bike industry gets together for the last dozen years or so. Love it or hate it it's where we go to check out the cool new stuff and the not-so-cool-new stuff. We spend 2 days in the desert at Bootleg Canyon testing out bikes followed by a winter of sorting out the best from the rest and follow up with a half dozen days of Industry trade Shows in Nevada and Montreal...
GORD'S KIDS OF MUD IS A GO! Here we are, proudly entering our second season in the Kid's of Mud. This year we plan on taking another step forward with our little club within a club. (all Kid's of Mud members are also associate members of Gord's Bike Club) We have big plans, growing and improving on our first season... With new coaches, lots of returning coaches, a new coordinator (Thanks Lisa!) and lots of great ideas, we're all very excited about 2008.
WHEN IN VEGAS... It's something we attend every September. The Annual INTERBIKE show in sunny Las Vegas. Although Vegas is curiously interesting we go there not by choice (I could think of a hundred and twenty eight or so places I'd rather go test mountain bikes than at Bootleg Canyon in the desert of Nevada)... We go there because for 5 days every year it's where the entire bike industry converges to show their wares for the upcoming season. It's where everyone who's serious about bikes goes to fill-up on bike knowledge and where we go to talk to those who have a say in what the bike industry pumps out. This year there are four of us going. All members of Gord's Bike Club. There's Catherine, Robbie, Vlad and JF and their impressions of the bikes we test and the product we sample will have a lot to do with what we offer you in 2008. For more on our little bike-test foray to INTERBIKE in the Nevada desert, check out our Vegas 2007 page by clicking HERE.
THERE'S ALWAYS HOPE Oh my... did we ever fall hard for these purveyors of fine bike brakes! Hope has been fabricating high quality brakes in England for quite some time now... But we had yet sampled some of their wares... Until a few weeks before our Panorama trip this summer. And now it's love. Absolute, unmitigated, horny love. JF is currently running the absolutely overkill Mono 6 (six piston) brake set with the utterly gorgeous accompanying 8 inch rotors... oh my. Braking power with a bold exclamation point. Not cheap, but nothing this sensational ever is.
PANORAMAAAAAH!
We do this every year. Load up a bus, drive through Saskatchewan and Alberta and hit Panorama for 6 days of tremendous gravity-assisted mountain-biking with a pit-stop in Calgary at C.O.P. for a warm-up along the way. We take 30 or so of our best riding buddies and let it ride... It's the highlight of the season for many of us. Click HERE for more including sweet videos of our adventure.
GORDS DOES COMMENCAL Attention all bike lovers! Gord's is very proud to announce that we'll be offering Commencal Bikes starting in the summer of 2008! Commencal is a very cool, forward thinking niche bike company from Andorra. (they also hppen to sponsor the ubiquitous Cedric Gracia)... Needless to say we're very excited about this news!
Here's how this came about: Robbie and I were in Vegas, testing our allotted complement of bikes... and since day two was simply overrun with testers, bike companies were struggling to keep up with demand for test bikes. During one lull in testing (while waiting for the Jamis Dakar XAM to become available) I glanced over to the Commencal booth only to see someone about to return a "Meta 5.5" in my size... And since Commencal bikes had always piqued my interest I decided to pounce on the poor guy who was holding said bike. When I rolled up to Catherine and Rob on the Commencal both looked at me puzzled, "but that's
not on our list..." I shrugged, made up some story involving the French and off we went onto our favorite loop or Bootleg Canyon.
Once in a while a bike rides so well that you HAVE to reconsider stuff... This was one of those bikes. Not unlike Intense bikes in 2006. These Commencal bikes were NICE. So nice, in fact, that both Robbie and I felt it necessary to include it onto our respective TOP 5 BIKES lists.
The next step is the percolation, the mulling over of, the scheming, the math, the strategizing... Trying to find a way to get these sexy bikes on our floor for 2008. Gladly, with the help of the very nice and helpful Peter Appleton from Commencal Canada, we found a way... And man, are we stoked!
210 ON AN INTENSE M6
Whoa!
LOWEST
PRICE POLICY
Of course you don't want to pay more
for the same stuff! Who would? We understand that when it comes to saving a dollar some of us can go a little overboard... spend more on gas than the actual difference in price... To help you out, we have this little thing called Gord's lowest price policy...
TEST IT
THEN
SELL IT
It's a simple principle by which we live and die: "Only sell what you yourself would buy". After all, life's too short to sell crap, life's too short to buy crap. To make sure we're crapless we go through much time and effort to ensure that everything we sell is up
to our lofty standards.
GORD'S PICKS UP SCOTT It just made way too much sense. The emergence of Scott Bikes as a clear front-runner in the bike market as Europe's largest bike brand and simply because its bikes are so chock-full of tangible technologies ... and the fact that they simply ride like stink... Like we said, it just made sense.
Scott has been in the bike business since day one. Building fun, sexy, technically superior bikes that convey a passion for excellence in design in a way very few bike companies can match. Sure, there are those companies that eat, sleep, and drink engineering, pushing concepts on folks that no-one ever asked for to begin with (lefty, anyone?)... Scott is different. In a good way. Starting with the people who look after Scott in Canada led by bike guru Andrew, you get a sense these people deeply care about doing it right.
Drop in, check out theses great mountain bikes... you'll surprised by just how affordable these bikes are and just how sweet they ride.
. THE RIDE We've said it before: It's all about the ride. The ride to Seven Eleven, the ride to your buddies house, the ride we call Ingolf, the ride at Panorama, Fernie, The Seine River, the ride through the monkey trails at Assiniboine Park, the ride with your 30 favorite buddies or the ride with your daughter.
Yes the bike is important. But more important than the bike is the smile on your face much like the smile on everyone's face at the last Gord's Bike Club Wednesday Night Ride. What a tremendous ride that was, what a tremendous group of people we have on our rides. If you haven't been on one yet... Now's the time.
So get off your butt, dust off your bike, throw on your helmet and come riding with us! For more information on how we can help get you out, click on the following link:
Gord's "Personal Gear Consult" is something we thought up after our first of many busy weekends here at Gord's. We were wondering how to give those who take buying something like a bike seriously ... What to do for those of you requiring a bit more attention. Sure we do all we can (and then some) for those of you just walking into any of our stores... But sometimes it's frustrating for us, we get so busy, somewhat a victim of our success... and like it or not we sometimes miss details. So here we were, wondering how we could do things better, how we could give you 150% of the Gord's experience. So we thought of this. 
How we do things with bike gear (or anything else for that matter) is simple, really. We try to remove the BS from the sales experience. We're very interested in getting to know you so we can simply find the perfect bike/camelback/helmet for you. There's no easy way to do it without first getting to know you so be prepared [#1]: We're going to ask you a bunch of questions".
For Gord's buying team September marked the beginning of the exhaustive search for the very best gear out there. Never content with simply buying what's presented to us from our suppliers, we spend an inordinate amount of time, effort and expense to dig, sift and research in order to weed out the poo.
A good bike. Some of us are lucky enough that we have one, some of us are still looking, a very few of us have several. What makes a good bike? Could it be the way it just 'fits'? Could it be the way it anticipates your every move, your every pedal stroke, your every directional desire?
A good bike is hard to find... and once you find it... Trust us, a good bike is a conduit for good things. Once you've experienced true bike love, things change, your priorities change, all of a sudden work doesn't matter so much anymore, all of a sudden rides become more fun, climbs a bit easier, km's go by faster, terrain flows that much smoother... and suddenly falling in love with aluminum and rubber doesn't seem so far-fetched.
From selecting the right pumps to computers to bike lights to 6 inch all-mountain bikes, Gord's long journey in seeking out the best stuff all starts with our annual trip to 
It's something we attend every September. The Annual INTERBIKE show in sunny Las Vegas. Although Vegas is curiously interesting we go there not by choice (I could think of a hundred and twenty eight or so places I'd rather go test mountain bikes than at Bootleg Canyon in the desert of Nevada)... We go there because for 5 days every year it's where the entire bike industry converges to show their wares for the upcoming season. It's where everyone who's serious about bikes goes to fill-up on bike knowledge and where we go to talk to those who have a say in what the bike industry pumps out. This year there are four of us going. All members of Gord's Bike Club. There's Catherine, Robbie, Vlad and JF and their impressions of the bikes we test and the product we sample will have a lot to do with what we offer you in 2008. For more on our little bike-test foray to INTERBIKE in the Nevada desert, check out our Vegas 2007 page by clicking 
Oh my... did we ever fall hard for these purveyors of fine bike brakes! Hope has been fabricating high quality brakes in England for quite some time now... But we had yet sampled some of their wares... Until a few weeks before our Panorama trip this summer. And now it's love. Absolute, unmitigated, horny love. JF is currently running the absolutely overkill Mono 6 (six piston) brake set with the utterly gorgeous accompanying 8 inch rotors... oh my. Braking power with a bold exclamation point. Not cheap, but nothing this sensational ever is. 
Attention all bike lovers! Gord's is very proud to announce that we'll be offering 
Once in a while a bike rides so well that you HAVE to reconsider stuff... This was one of those bikes. Not unlike Intense bikes in 2006. These Commencal bikes were NICE. So nice, in fact, that both Robbie and I felt it necessary to include it onto our respective TOP 5 BIKES lists. 
It just made way too much sense. The emergence of Scott Bikes as a clear front-runner in the bike market as Europe's largest bike brand and 
We've said it before: It's all about the ride. The ride to Seven Eleven, the ride to your buddies house, the ride we call Ingolf, the ride at Panorama, Fernie, The Seine River, the ride through the monkey trails at Assiniboine Park, the ride with your 30 favorite buddies or the ride with your daughter.