In our Tech Q&A series, we tackle your cycling questions – big or small – with help from the BikeRadar team and trusted industry experts. In this instalment, a reader wants to know why dropper posts aren't popular in road riding despite at least one high-profile win using them.
If dropper posts are so effective off-road, and Matej Mohorič famously used one to win Milan-San Remo, why don’t more professional road cyclists use them?
Anonymous via email
Dropper seatposts are a must-have accessory for mountain bikers, because they enable riders to get their saddle lower and out of the way, which can help with tackling steep or technical descents.
Outside of a few high-profile instances (such as Matej Mohorič’s high-speed descent of the Poggio on his way to victory in the 2022 Milan-San Remo), though, dropper posts have seen little use in professional road cycling.
Although the UCI has a penchant for banning technical innovations it doesn’t like, cycling’s international governing body has confirmed dropper posts can be used in mass-start road races.
Indeed, we often see them used on neutral service bikes – like the one Tadej Pogačar hopped onto during this year’s Paris-Roubaix – as a means of adjusting the saddle height of a bike on the fly.
Adoption beyond these rare instances has been more muted, though, because – first and foremost – most modern road bikes now feature proprietary D- or aerofoil-shaped seatposts, meaning road frames typically aren’t compatible with round droppers.
That road bike brands generally don’t consider dropper compatibility also reflects the fact that technical descents typically aren’t decisive in road races (Milan-San Remo being an obvious exception), and that pro road racers remain a generally conservative, weight-focused bunch.
Anything that adds extra weight to a pro bike had better make it tangibly faster, or else riders will be questioning its existence.
Given their legality has been confirmed, it’s possible we’ll see a dropper-post revival on the road at some point – if, for example, we start seeing more technical descents added close to race finish lines – but the dominance of aero-optimised frames and components remains an obvious limiting factor.
