Max Pratt Interview: Looking to Make a Difference in Cyclocross Through Nice Bikes
Learn more about the new Nice Bikes team and how it grew out of Pratt Frameworks
One of the questions heading into the new domestic cyclocross season was who would kind of step in and try to fill part of the gap left by the end of the Cannondale p/b CyclocrossWorld team. A few weeks ago, we got a bit of an answer to that question when we learned there would be two American UCI cyclocross teams this season, Nice Bikes and CXHairs Devo.
One of the twists with the Nice Bikes team is it is a non-profit that was born this year when frame builder Max Pratt and his co-founder Kaitlyn Cirielli decided to stop selling bikes to focus on supporting a women’s cyclocross race team. Last season, Pratt was the new cyclocross bike on the block and the company helped support Austin Killips, Rachel Rubino, Samantha Fox, and Dani Morshead, so I was already interested in chatting with Pratt to learn more about Pratt Bikes.
The announcement of the UCI team served as a perfect excuse to catch up with him before the season starts. Learn more about the history of Pratt Bikes, the future of Nice Bikes, why cyclocross and why women’s cyclocross in the interview below, all the while suffering through my crass Chicagocentricism.
Interview: Max Pratt of Nice Bikes
Zach Schuster: I showed up to Charm City last year and talked to Brannon [Fix] and saw Austin [Killips] and was like, there's this new bike on the cyclocross scene. Pratt, Pratt Bikes. And I thought, I know nothing about this. Can you give me the quick rundown of your background and Pratt's history?
Max Pratt: I started building frames when I was in college at Rhode Island School of Design that was in 2018. Then in 2019 I started a women's fixed gear and track team with a couple of friends who were athletes. We had a lot of success there racing around the U.S. and a little bit in Switzerland. That grew through athlete interest and more people wanted to get involved in different disciplines and types of racing. It grew into an off-road program where we raced a bit of 'cross and a bit of gravel.
In 2020, we actually registered as a UCI cyclocross team under Pratt Racing, but obviously, there was no racing in 2020. The team kind of existed on paper and didn't exist in the real world. When racing started up again, we sort of did a dry run where Austin [Killips], Rachel [Rubino], Sam [Fox], and Dani [Morshead] were racing. Austin raced a full UCI calendar. Rachel raced most of the UCI calendar. It was a good way for us to dip our toes into that level of racing without going all the way in.
When I stopped selling bikes to customers and re-branded as Nice Bikes, we're sort of shifting into a non-profit focus specifically focused on supporting athletes instead of building bikes for profit for customers.
Zach Schuster: I like doing things chronologically. I don't why, I like thinking that way. So we’ll get to Nice Bikes. How did you get into steel? It kind of has that alt vibe, which I guess is quite at home in cyclocross. We've got Ritchey, we've got Richard Sachs, we've got Nice Bikes now. It's not an anachronism to be in cyclocross, but I think it's still pretty cool.
Max Pratt: Because the team came into racing through the fixed-gear scene, it has other companies like MASH and Cinelli building steel track bikes, so it was sort of an easy discipline to race on steel bikes. But it was also where I found the most enjoyment working with the material and being able to iterate prototypes quickly versus having to make a new mold every time you want to tweak the geometry.
The other thing that is nice about steel is when I was starting out, I didn't have the space for a large oven to temper aluminum bikes. I didn't have a lot of the facilities one would need to work in say, aluminum or carbon fiber. Working with steel, personally, I like the way it rides. I don't like the way titanium bikes ride, especially for cyclocross. But that's a whole different conversation; everyone has their favorite material. For us and the way we worked, steel is the best material.
Zach Schuster: How did you decide you wanted to have a women's focus? It sounds like that was your approach from the beginning.
Max Pratt: I was approached by a few athletes in the racing scene on the East Coast who wanted to race fixed-gear criteriums and track racing. They wanted to put together a team on the bikes I was building. The avenue for making it a women's team was mostly we saw a gap and a lack of representation in that area. When we expanded into cyclocross it made sense to keep that going moving forward. We have friends of the team who are male athletes we support. Brannan [Fix] is obviously one of them.
I think the UCI team being a women's team is really because we see that as a space where there isn't enough support. It's easy to find a place to race when you're a high-performing male in the cyclocross circuit, but it's not as easy when you're a high-performing woman.
Zach Schuster: I just moved to Chicago, and before we get any further, I need to give you some shit because Jeremy [Bloyd-Peshkin] and Austin were two of the people I knew here, and when I went for a ride with Jeremy back in June, he was like, "Heyyyyy, I'm moving to Rhode Island," and I was like, "Damn you Max, taking away my potential friends."
Max Pratt: There is definitely the Peter Sagan thing happening with Austin where she kind of brought her entourage from Chicago out here.
Zach Schuster: So it's Austin's fault?
Max Pratt: I would say so. But you know, when you're starting a team, you want to tap into your resources and people who you know, and then through them, you gain more connections. We brought Jeremy on as our technical lead. He's helping design bikes and doing a lot of preparation for the season. He's going to going to racing some of the UCI races, so we also have Lauren Wiscomb, who's also a Chicago person, to come be the head mechanic for the program.
Zach Schuster: Before I got distracted, I was trying to segue to say that I think one of the coolest stories in 'cross last year was Austin Killips. I remember seeing her in 2019 racing Chicago races, she did well, upgraded from the Cat 3s, and then was racing against people I knew in the Elite race. Then in 2021 she was racing in World Cups. How did you discover her and decide you wanted her to be a part of your program?
Max Pratt: She reached out to us. I think because we were a fixed gear team she had been kind of following us on social media, and then we had mutual friends, and when she heard we were racing 'cross, she was like, "Hey, I want to race 'cross for you." It was very direct, like, I would like to race on your team. And we said, "Okay, sure," because we didn't have a lot of athletes at that time, and we didn't have a name for ourselves in cyclocross. She's really been an integral part of building this new program and figuring out who we want to be a part of this team and bringing her friends and work acquaintances to come work for the team, which has been great.
Zach Schuster: She's a trans athlete, and it's part of your mission statement to support women and non-binary athletes. How has the experience been for you being supportive of a broader community like that?
Max Pratt: The cycling community and by and large the bike industry have both been incredibly supportive of what we're doing. I think there is a lot of misinformation about what being a UCI athlete looks like and entails. Especially if you're a trans athlete racing UCI races. It's really no different than being a cis-gendered UCI athlete. You have to follow all the same regulations and rules, but you just have to do more blood work and do more testing to submit to the UCI than a cis-gendered athlete would have to do.
Most of the problems we have come from outside the bike industry or from specific anti-trans organizations. But yeah, we get plenty of hate mail. You were at Nationals last year; there are plenty of people who want to come to 'cross races and harass you for supporting trans athletes. We are not really here for them.
Zach Schuster: I wouldn't say it was plenty. I think the support Austin had far outweighed them. I thought they were kind of sad.
Max Pratt: There is definitely a lot more support than there is negativity, but there's no one at Nationals holding up anti-Clara Honsinger signs or something like that. I think any amount of negative signage at a 'cross race targeting a specific athlete is a notable thing that is not happening anywhere else in the bike industry right now.
Zach Schuster: Talking about Austin and then hearing about Nice Bikes made total sense to me because you kind of established that it's kind of your mission to support athletes like her. Walk me through how this transition happened for you, going from being a for-profit bike maker to wanting to support women in racing through Nice Bikes.
Max Pratt: I was building frames, but we also had this other project going on with my co-founder Kaitlyn Cirielli and some other folks in the industry. We had two things going on simultaneously. One was making bikes and selling them to customers, and the other was running a UCI team. It just seemed like there was one part of the job we really liked doing, and there was one part we didn't like doing. It made a lot more sense to approach this as a non-profit. It was actually Kaitlyn's idea to transfer what we were doing into the non-profit format.
It just means our job is better and we enjoy it more. We get to use our resources to make a bigger impact than just selling bikes to people who can afford custom bikes.
Zach Schuster: So how did you come up with the name Nice Bikes? And more importantly, did you realize that every time one of your athletes does well, we love puns, so it is just begging us to write the obvious headlines and captions.
Max Pratt: The beauty of that name is it's so ubiquitous in the bike industry. "Oh that's a nice bike." Everyone says that all the time, but no one was using it as a name for a racing team, so now we are.
But really we were doing the thing you do when you're rebranding a business--we came up with like a million names and put them on a whiteboard. Then you go through the list and you check trademarks, domain names, Instagram handles on every name, and then you weed down to like three or four that are available. This happened to work out where we were able to get the assets we needed to do an effective job at marketing and branding this name, and so we just ran with it.
Zach Schuster: Two of the awesome signings you made were Caitlin Bernstein and Taylor Kuyk-White. How did you identify them as riders you wanted to sign?
Max Pratt: On our list of returning athletes we had Austin, Sam Fox, and Dani Morshead. Dani lives out in California, and Sam is starting a job as a professor up at the University of Vermont, so her schedule for cyclocross was looking a little sparser. So we thought maybe we could swing some resources and sign a new athlete. We had inquiries from a few people asking about the team, so we put together an invitational application, sent it out to a couple of folks who we were interested in, and Caitlin and Taylor were extremely excited and interested in working with us. It happened where we were in a good position where we were able to support both of them.
Zach Schuster: I would say that you guys are the most interesting team in cyclocross, in a good way. You have the diverse backgrounds, the diverse locations athletes come from and stuff like that. We've already seen it with the response to the Instagram posts about your new team, and it seems like there are a lot of good vibes going into the season for you.
Max Pratt: For sure. We were talking about this a bit yesterday, obviously there are two UCI teams in the U.S. There's us and CXHairs Devo. It seemed shocking to me that more people aren't doing it. I know Cannondale was a UCI team, but with them leaving, it really opens up gap in what the field looks like and what the team field looks like, specifically. If you look at the UCI fee, it's like 1,200 francs or something. And then you just have to have your paperwork in order. It always surprises me there aren't more people just paying the fee to do it so they get that little bit of extra recognition. It surprises me there aren't more people leaning into that designation.
Zach Schuster: I have some sort of journalistic obligation to not be partial to brands, but I give a lot of credit to brands such as Blue and you for investing in 'cross. So why cyclocross? Why aren't you just building gravel bikes? That's what everyone else is doing.
Max Pratt: Gravel is fun. It's cool. It's the biggest stage in the United States. It's definitely the most competitive racing you can do here, but there's also so much money and support in gravel racing for athletes who want to race gravel. Like if I wanted to go race gravel right now, I could call up 10 different people and have a fully supported program in a week. If I wanted to race cyclocross, there's nothing. It's like completely empty, dry, and bare.
There are always going to be athletes who need support. In UCI cyclocross, especially in the women's field, there's a lack of support and a lack of interest. Bringing some freshness to that scene and being able to support athletes who are very passionate about that sport is something different. I mean, I'm not a 'cross racer. I'm just a frame builder, and I like bikes a lot. I never raced a fixed-gear criterium. We started that team because of athlete interest. It was kind of the same thing with UCI cyclocross. We're going where the athletes want us to go, and then growing in that area to support as much as we can.
Zach Schuster: What's your background in, in terms of riding?
Max Pratt: I did a lot of road riding as a commuter, and then I did fixed-gear and track riding in Boston. I was working in a shop that specialized in that kind of thing.
Zach Schuster: What are your thoughts of the cyclocross scene?
Max Pratt: I love 'cross. It's my favorite discipline by far. I love riding 'cross bikes. I love riding cyclocross. I don't know; there's something distinctly exciting about cyclocross versus other disciplines because you're doing everything wrong. A 45-minute effort is a horrible effort for any athlete. No athlete is good at a 45-minute effort. You're riding the wrong bike. There's always a better bike for the terrain you're riding. You're sort of doing your best to combat those things and get a good result. That's just very exciting because it's much more challenging.
Zach Schuster: I interviewed Christopher Blevins after he won U23 Nats, what five years ago, and he was doing all these cool things on his cyclocross bike, and I was like, "Dude, you do way crazier stuff on your mountain bike. You're Chris Blevins. But for some reason, the cyclocross stuff just hits harder." He said, "Yeah, I think it's because you're not supposed to do that kind of stuff on a bike that looks like that. That's why it looks cooler."
Max Pratt: 'Cross is really fun. You're always doing it wrong, and you try to make the most of it.
Zach Schuster: The non-profit facet of Nice Bikes is really cool. What are the components of that? You have a UCI team and are going to be supporting folks, are there other parts?
Max Pratt: Being a non-profit feels better for us because we can really focus our efforts on fundraising, sponsorships, getting support for athletes and staff, and we can work on setting a different standard for what support looks like and what hiring staff looks like. Specifically in racing. When we act as a non-profit, we can hire athletes and staff members and they can be an employee of a real organization, instead of someone working for cash from a team or whatever.
The level of support you're able to offer in that context is much greater. And the level support you're able to receive from donors and sponsors is greater as well.
Zach Schuster: One thing that's really neat about your team is you're a team. You had a team camp! We always see the Lions and Sauces having a team camp, and y'all got to do that too. Chatting with you, my understanding is that is the start of big plans for this season for you.
Max Pratt: We'll obviously be going to the UCI races domestically. I know Austin and Caitlin are targeting the World Cups in the U.S. I think everyone of the athletes has a big eye on Nationals. That's something I know Caitlin has been expressly interested in. I think with the shaking up of the support levels the other women in the field are getting, it will be exciting to watch how the season progresses and what Nationals will look like this year.
And it's a home race for us. Just as the Chicago athletes could go train on the course, we can drive from Providence to Hartford and go ride the course 45 times before the racing starts.
Zach Schuster: If 2017 is any guide, you have to make sure to do it in different conditions. That was my first Nationals, and it was like, warm, then snowing, then a blizzard, to a snow-covered course. It was still the most epic Nationals I've attended in five or six years now.
Max Pratt: I am sure Nationals will be cold and miserable and lots of fun because of that, but I think the other nice thing for us is it's not the end of the season. It's kind of the middle of the season because we're going to Europe for a World Cup block after that. Caitlin and Austin are both really excited about Val di Sole. We've got a place for two and half months after Nationals, so we'll be there for as much racing as we can do.
Zach Schuster: I know you have to get to lunch with my guy JBP. End of the season when I talk to you in February, what does a successful first season for Nice Bikes look like?
Max Pratt: Wow, good question. I think a successful first season is nobody gets major injuries and everyone feels happy with how they perform. The goal is to improve the experience that athletes and staff have in racing of cyclocross. If we can accomplish that, it's been a hugely successful season. I'd love to be able to say we grew a lot and gained exposure for the athletes and our sponsors and all that stuff, but at the end of the day, the goal is to make sure everyone has a good time and feels good about where they're at.
Zach Schuster: Are we going to see you at the races? Are you going to be jumping in the big yellow truck with Jeremy?
Max Pratt: I'll be at the races, but I'll probably fly in and out because I teach at RISD in the industrial design department. I'll primarily be doing photo and video and maybe a little bit of pit work on days Jeremy wants to race. But yeah, the yellow truck will be there as well as some nice big tents.
Zach Schuster: Cool man, I've been looking forward to getting to chat with you. I think what you're doing is really cool. I appreciate your time.
Max Pratt: You too. Thanks so much.
Nice piece and will definitely be watching for the yellow truck. What really jumps out is Max’s comment that he could call 10 people and get support for a gravel program but there is nothing for cross. It does feel like the sport is hanging by a thread with hardly any big brands aside from Trek supporting teams or even building cross bikes and major races going away. Weird to me as cross seems like the most spectator friendly genre (along with XCO and XCC mountain bike).