Anything but a Status Symbol: An Ode to the Unreleased Specialized Status (And Its Riders)

Specialized has a new Status coming. It will have some suspension travel. The geometry will be expressed in millimeters and degrees. Presumably there will once more be two travel variants, and again, presumably, it’ll be really affordable.

I caught a glimpse of the new bike the other night at the “Status Jump Jam” here in Bellingham, and the word on the street is that there will be 150 and 170 mm versions, and that the 170 mm version can take a dual crown fork. There’s a flip chip on the chainstay, which, if it’s similar to the Stumpjumper , will adjust the head tube angle by .5° and the bottom bracket height by 7 mm. Finally, there are a bunch of rubber grommets on the downtube which, I hope, signify that it will work with external brake routing. Speculation abounds!

Ok. Enough of the “SPOTTED!” tech nerd spy talk. Because, honestly, that sort of breathless anticipation of incremental “improvements” and overwrought explorations of geometry changes is the antithesis of everything the Status stands for.

Specialized gets a fair amount of flack for their refined, mass-marketable flavor. Eliminating the option to run cabled rear derailleurs on your newest carbon trail bike is perfect frustration fodder for the sort of folks that populate internet comments sections, and crusty bike shop workbenches alike, even if your bikes are really damn good.

But the Status is the perfect anecdote to $10,000+ complete builds and proprietary shocks. Buy one for not very much money and then go ride your bike with your friends. At the Status Jam there were plenty of groms going huge who didn’t seem too concerned with what driver body their cassettes mounted to, how long their chainstays were, or what the leverage curve of their rear suspension looked like. Questions like “How far sideways can I throw this whip” and “Am I really following Remy Morton through my local jump line!?” seemed to take precedence.

That’s the Status mentality: focus on the riding, not the ride. Our very own Julia Tellman bought the Status 160 last spring, and promptly went out and won an XC race on it. Because why not? Run what ya brung! The Status is a bike that helps the old saw “it’s the rider, not the bike” ring true, not because the bike is bad, but because the bike is simple, affordable, and not “optimized.”

After the Status Jam, the Specialized team retired to a local shop to premier a film, and give a few standout riders unreleased next-gen bikes. That is not how the bike industry works. That’s how a skate event or a ski or snowboard rail jam works. Impress the judges and go home with a whole new setup. But in mountain biking, it’s usually just some tires, or maybe a fork. Bikes are expensive. We don’t give them away. We raffle them off for charity, we maybe give pro-deals or discounts on them, but we don’t just roll up to the jumps, and give the first kid to do a backflip a whole new bike. Except that with the Status, that’s possible.

The Status is affordable, at “COVID broke everything” prices, or even at MSRP. And Specialized seems to have put some of the budget that would normally be allocated towards taking people like me on a special sneak preview launch media trip, and put it towards giving free bikes to groms. That’s so damn cool. I love it. I want to see more of it! The Status is for kids who sign as each other's legal guardians so they can huck their meat with their shoes half untied, and then ride home in time for dinner, not journalists like me who spill words over the perceived imperfections of rigs that cost more than our cars.

There’s a new Status coming. It’ll probably be a fun bike. It probably won’t be a groundbreaking or “perfect” bike. I probably won’t get one to review, because instead Specialized is using that cash to hook up some groms. But I bet it’ll be plenty of bike for just about any kind of riding. I bet that anytime I ride a new feature on an unreleased superbike for my job, a couple of kids on Statuses will have already gone bigger than I ever will on it. No matter how cool you feel, how expensive your bike is, or how well it’s set up, there’s some crusher somewhere who could probably show you up in cargo shorts and off-brand work boots, on a bike so affordable that it doesn’t even have Specialized branding. That’s the point. The Status is anything but a status symbol, and that’s wonderful.