It has less to do with mounting/remounting than one would think. Watch that second vid... no remounts on that course at all, and that's not uncommon these days.
CX positioning takes its cues from both road riding and Mtb riding, and the dominance of the hoods position reflects the higher/shorter rider positioning that is essentially omnipresent in the Mtb world. The more "gnarly" the terrain you are going to ride down, the more you find yourself wanting a taller front end. When you're down in the drops, you simply can't control your weight bias and front wheel the same way you can on the hoods. Don't believe me? Try doing a manual or a J-hop in the drops, then do the same in the hoods.
We're already seeing gravel riding get more and more technically demanding, and the rider positioning will adapt to follow. Plus folks are eventually going to realize that a lot of the flats they're getting are because the position they ride in means they slam into stuff rather than (lift) and roll over it.
As mentioned in the last post, I still have my old Ibis Mtb, complete with dirt drops and gooseneck stem
that puts the drops in the vertical and
horizontal plane of the traditional hoods position. How long before we see those stems make their gravel reemergence?
Cross went through a phase of everyone and their brother putting "Runkel" levers on their bars so that when things got steep and rough they could ride high and tight on the tops like a Mtb. Some riders even began running flat bars on their cross bikes, culminating with a Worlds silver medal wining performance by Thomas Frishknecht in 97. Shortly after this, the UCI banned flat bars from CX out of a reasonable fear that widespread adoption of flat bars would eventually turn CX into something that looked way too much like MTBing.
Much like the "invisible aerobars" on the road, though, as easy as it is to ban a piece of equipment, it's quite another thing to stop riders from adopting a positional advantage. Eventually it became clear that the answer was to shorten the front end, roll the hoods back, and ride the hoods, the Runkel levers went away, and it's now incredibly rare to see a top rider on the drops on a
non paved descent
Shimano just came out with a hydro Runkel lever, and now gravel riders can spend their money (and a couple/few years) figuring this same thing out for themselves.
Tech writer/support on this here site. FIST school instructor and certified bike fitter. Formerly at Diamondback Bikes, LeMond Fitness, FSA, TiCycles, etc.
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