You bought one in May 2020.
Or your sister did. Or a colleague at work, who could not believe what a difference it was making, and who then spent the rest of that summer telling everyone in the meeting that they had finally found "the answer." The four-month wait. The two-thousand-pound price tag. The thirty-nine quid a month for the live classes. The leaderboard hashtag in their bio.
Five years on, the bike is in the spare room. The screen is still on the wall but it has not been turned on since the autumn before last. The instructor whose face used to be on the screen has had two career pivots since. The company that was worth more than Ford and Adidas combined in January 2021 has lost 94 percent of its value.
Anthony's breakdown of the rise and fall of Peloton is one of those episodes where the cycling lesson sits underneath a much bigger business story. The headline is the fifty billion dollars. The story underneath is what cycling actually is, what it actually requires of you, and why no piece of connected fitness was ever going to replace it.
Listen to the full breakdown on the Roadman Cycling Podcast →
The Rocket That Was Not A Rocket
The Peloton story does not start with a bike. It starts with John Foley sitting drenched in sweat in a Manhattan spin studio in 2012, frustrated by the logistics — the booking weeks in advance, the commute across the city, the fight for a spot in the back row beside someone else's puddle from the previous class. The thought that became Peloton was not really a fitness product. It was a logistics product.
What if you could bring the studio home. Not just the bike. The energy. The competition. The community. Beamed into the living room through a giant HD screen.
The 2014 launch was met with the standard reaction the original Peloton bull case still has to defend. Two thousand dollars for a stationary bike. Thirty-nine dollars a month on top. For that money you could buy a serviceable carbon road bike. You could pay for two years of gym membership. You could fund a season of racing.
Foley saw it differently. He was not building a bike company. He was building an identity product. By 2017 there were 250,000 subscribers. By 2019 there were over a million. People were not just buying bikes — they were posting hashtags, getting tattoos, naming their bikes, treating the instructors as celebrities. The product had become an identity.
Then March 2020 happened. The world shut down. Gyms closed. Races were cancelled. Group rides became suspect. For millions of cyclists and fitness enthusiasts there was, for a window, almost nowhere else to go.
Peloton's orders surged 172 percent. The waiting list hit four months. The stock went from $20 to $170. The company chartered its own ships to speed up delivery. By January 2021 the market capitalisation hit $50 billion — bigger than Ford, Adidas, and Under Armour combined. John Foley was on every magazine cover. The pandemic essential. The future of fitness.
This is where most people thought the story ended.
It is not even close to where the story ended.
The Three Mistakes That Killed The Company
Anthony interviews former employees, industry analysts, and Peloton subscribers in the breakdown. Three patterns come up over and over.
One. They mistook a moment for a movement. Peloton treated pandemic demand as permanent. They built factories. They hired thousands. They ordered inventory based on growth assumptions that anyone outside the company could see were not going to hold once gyms reopened. One former employee's quoted line is the cleanest version: "We were told to plan for 20 percent growth every quarter, even when anyone with eyes could see gyms reopening. It was delusional."
This is the lesson the cycling industry should have absorbed alongside everyone else. Emergency demand is not real demand. It is captive demand created by an external constraint. When the constraint disappears, so does the demand. Selling generators during a blackout is a real business — but it is a different business from selling generators when the lights are on.
Two. The product never evolved. Look at a Peloton from 2014. Look at a Peloton from 2025. There is essentially no meaningful difference. Bigger screen. Same bike. Same proposition. Meanwhile, Zwift was adding new virtual worlds every month. Apple was building Fitness Plus. Mirror was working on AI form correction. The connected fitness market was iterating around Peloton while Peloton sat still.
This is a structural failure that any cyclist can recognise from the rest of the industry. Brands that win in cycling — Wahoo, Garmin, the trainer manufacturers, Zwift itself — are the ones whose product cycle never stops. The ones that coast on a single moment in time tend to disappear quietly within a decade.
Three. The price stayed stupidly high. A Peloton bike was over $2,000 the first year after monthly subscription costs. As people started using it less post-pandemic, the maths stopped working. We all run the gym-mat calculation when we sign up — twice a week is fine, once a fortnight starts feeling expensive. As subscriptions softened, Peloton refused to drop prices meaningfully. Internal emails revealed executives worried that lowering prices would damage brand prestige. Meanwhile used Peloton bikes were trading on Facebook Marketplace for under $400. The prestige had already gone.
The discounting decision is one most cycling businesses understand intimately. The moment a brand becomes available at half price on the second-hand market, the new-price proposition is broken. Peloton chose to defend its price ladder rather than its volume. The market chose otherwise.
What Actually Won The Connected Fitness Era
The headline number that matters more to a cycling audience than any of Peloton's collapse data is the comparison underneath. While indoor bike sales crashed 65 percent post-pandemic, outdoor bike sales kept growing. Bike shop revenues in 2024 were 15 percent higher than 2019. Gravel, road, and e-bikes all expanded their lines.
The cycling industry did not boom and bust around Peloton. It absorbed the pandemic curiosity, retained the riders who actually wanted to be cyclists, and continued growing on its own structural drivers. The riders who took up cycling during lockdown and stuck with it did not, on the whole, end up on stationary bikes in the spare room. They ended up on actual bikes with friends on Saturdays.
The connected fitness technology that survived is the technology that supports outdoor cycling rather than replacing it.
Zwift. Real cycling, structured workouts, segment racing, used most heavily by people who also ride outside.
Smart trainers. Wahoo, Tacx, Saris. Tools that turn the bike you ride outside into a structured workout platform when the weather makes outside impossible.
Power meters. Quarq, 4iiii, Stages. Outdoor-first technology that has quietly become the foundation of how serious cyclists train.
Strava and segment culture. Indoor and outdoor activity in one ecosystem, with the social layer pointing outward — to local segments, to club rides, to weekend events.
The pattern is consistent. The technology that won is the technology that enhances real cycling. The technology that failed is the technology that tried to replace it.
For the deeper version of how indoor and outdoor work fits together, see our Zwift training guide, the Rouvy versus Zwift comparison, and the indoor cycling tips piece.
The Three Lessons Every Cyclist Should Take
The episode lands on three structural lessons that translate beyond connected fitness, and each one applies directly to how a serious cyclist should think about their training, their kit, and their community.
Convenience is not everything. Peloton sold convenience — no commute, no weather, no judgement. Real, those are valuable. But for many cyclists, inconvenience is the feature. The wind in the face. The hill that destroys you. The sketchy descent. The post-ride coffee in the rough service station. The shared misery of the Saturday club ride that makes the same group come back next week. You cannot simulate that on a stationary bike in your living room. Cycling is not annoying because it is broken. It is good because it is annoying. Anyone who removes the inconvenience tends to remove the meaning along with it.
Emergency demand is not sustainable demand. The lesson is bigger than Peloton. Any business — and any rider — built on a captive moment will eventually meet the day when the captivity ends. The cyclist who only rides because the gym is closed is not actually a cyclist. The cyclist who rides because riding is what they do regardless of conditions has a relationship with the sport that no future emergency or non-emergency can disrupt. The riders who stuck around after lockdown were not the ones with the fanciest setups. They were the ones who had built the habit into the actual fabric of their week.
Community beats algorithm. Peloton tried to manufacture community through leaderboards, hashtags, instructor-as-celebrity culture, and Instagram trends. For some users it worked at the level of motivation. For very few did it produce community in the way cycling already understands the word. Real cycling communities are built around people, not products — your local bike shop ride, your weekend crew, your team mates, the chain café you rotate through every Saturday. Those bonds get forged through shared, often unpleasant, real experiences. They do not survive being moved to a screen. They have to be ridden into.
This is the structural reason the Not Done Yet community was always built around live calls, real interaction, and the kind of accountability that only happens when other humans know your name. The lesson from Peloton's collapse is that community cannot be engineered through a leaderboard. It has to be lived.
The Surviving Niche, And What Comes Next
Peloton survives, barely. Around three million subscribers. The stock trades around $4. They are renting bikes now instead of selling them. They are opening retail stores. They are licensing content to hotels and gyms — the exact places they once told customers they would never need to visit again.
Three scenarios are plausible from here. They could find their true believers and run a smaller, profitable, niche business — three million loyal subscribers at forty quid a month is real money, even if it is not fifty-billion-dollar money. They could be acquired by a bigger fitness or tech player who keeps the content and gets rid of the hardware. Or the entire connected fitness category could continue to contract until only the genuinely useful tools — the ones that enhance outdoor riding — are left standing.
What is unlikely is a return to the 2021 framing. The fifty-billion-dollar valuation was a story everybody believed at the same time. The story turned out to be a moment, not a movement.
For a parallel story about a different cycling brand losing its way, see our coverage of the conversation on how Rapha lost its soul and the TrainingPeaks AI episode — both of which explore how the cycling industry has navigated similar moments without quite collapsing the way connected fitness did. TrainingPeaks remains a partner of the show and a critical structured-training tool for serious cyclists, and is a useful counter-example of technology that complements rather than replaces actual riding.
What This Means For You On Tuesday
If you have a smart trainer in the garage, keep using it. If you have Zwift on the laptop for the wet winter Wednesdays, keep using it. The lesson is not "indoor is bad." The lesson is that indoor training is a tool inside an outdoor sport, and the technology that respects that order survives.
If you have a Peloton in the spare room you have not used in two years, the lesson is not that the company failed you. The lesson is that you are an outdoor cyclist who needed a piece of indoor kit that is structured around outdoor riding — Wahoo Kickr, Tacx, Zwift, Rouvy, a basic dumb trainer plus a free workout app — and the company sold you a different product than that. The mistake was the matchmaking.
If you have a friend who took up Peloton in 2020 and quietly drifted away from it in 2023, this is the moment to mention the local Saturday club ride. The architecture of cycling — see the Owen Vermeulen piece on how the categories provide the feedback loop — has not changed. The version of fitness Peloton was selling was always going to fade. The version of fitness cycling has been selling for 130 years remains exactly where it was.
If you want help structuring your own indoor and outdoor training around what actually moves performance, the Roadman coaching system is built for serious cyclists who use indoor work as a tool, not as a replacement. For a fast answer on a specific question — Zwift, intervals, indoor versus outdoor distribution, structured workouts — ask the AI coach.
Listen To The Full Breakdown
The full episode on Peloton's rise and fall is on the Roadman Cycling Podcast. For the broader business-of-cycling conversations the podcast keeps coming back to, see also Rapha's identity crisis and the AI training tech conversation.
A bike that does not move that cost two thousand dollars built one of the biggest companies in the world until it didn't. The bikes that move are still moving. They were always going to be.
