On April 17, 2024, a ritual that had played out for 34 years was in full swing. The world’s biggest and brightest cycling brands were all setting up booths at the Sea Otter Classic bike festival near Monterey, California. As one of the busiest bike events on the globe, it’s also the most important industry mixer on the North American side of the Atlantic.

So, it was especially puzzling when the folks from Kona Bicycles began tearing their tents down just as quickly as they had put them up, only days after releasing a new bike, and fled the Laguna Seca Raceway in a head-down haze.

“I know a lot of other companies have gone through very similar pain. Maybe not quite as publicly embarrassing as what happened a couple of years ago in Monterey,” Jake Heilbron shyly says about the incident. He and his partner, Dan Gerhard, founded Kona in 1988 and eventually sold it to a then private equity-backed sports conglomerate in 2022.

Almost immediately after, the industry slumped, the conglomerate lost its backing, and it chose precisely the most high-profile moment possible to ditch Kona. Dozens of adored brands were caught up in the same wave. One that began forming sometime in 2019, when the spike proteins of an animal coronavirus mutated and took the exact right shape to bond with the receptors of human respiratory-tract cells.

We all know what happened next. Science became apocryphal, more than 1.2 million Americans died, 185,000 businesses shuttered, everybody watched “Tiger King,” and then we all bought bikes. Caught up in the windfall of cycling shops being declared essential services for transportation, mountain biking found a holeshot through the pandemic lockdowns. Then it got complicated.