THE BRIGADE

TRAVIS ENGEL

Travis Engel’s biography usually just gets cut-and-pasted from one year to the next, although the order always gets shuffled around a bit. Some years it opens with something about his frequent and inconveniently timed injuries. Others it’s a not-so-subtly boastful story about all the time he spends building his perfectly sculpted dirt jumps (the kind of jumps you ride on a BMX bike, not a mountain bike). And somewhere in there it’ll mention that he gets more excited about a decent affordable bike than an exotic expensive one, and that it worries him when there’s more of the latter and less of the former. But it’s missing one important line item this year: He recently put an end to his nearly 20-year string of bike shop jobs to man a cubicle as the gear editor here at Bike. Still, next year, the rest of his bio will likely