The gap
The Corimas never made it into a wheel bag.
Most of my wheelsets live zipped away until I need them. These don’t. Since they arrived, they’ve been leaning against the wall in my apartment. Every now and then I build them into a bike, ride them for a few hours, then put them back. Somewhere along the way they stopped being another wheelset and became part of the room. Sometimes I catch myself looking at them while making tea. They still make me smile. That surprised me more than the ride itself.
I looked at them for three days before buying them. I didn’t need another wheelset. I was thirteen when one of my closest friends showed up with a pair of Corimas. In Germany we weren’t allowed to race them because youth regulations required more spokes. In Denmark we could. That only made them more mythical. They belonged to the same conversations as Mavic and Zipp, names that felt impossibly far away. One memory has stayed with me ever since. He crashed in a corner, slid across the road and instinctively threw himself onto his back, holding the bike above him so the wheels wouldn’t scrape along the asphalt. Looking back, it’s almost absurd. At thirteen, it made perfect sense.
When the box arrived, I reached straight for the carbon. My hand followed the weave before I looked at the hub or the spokes. The surface felt different. Every manufacturer seemed to have its own answer back then. Different ways of building carbon. Different ideas about what a wheel could become. Nobody knew yet which ones would survive. I stood there for a while.
Welcome home.
Ten years ago I probably wouldn’t have bought these wheels. Back then every purchase had to justify itself. Faster. Lighter. Stiffer. Every decision needed an outcome. Somewhere along the way that changed.
My cycling doesn’t have to prove anything anymore.
I still care deeply about performance. I always will. But now I sometimes buy things simply because I want to understand them. That’s why I bought the Corimas.
The first ride wasn’t dramatic. Seven bar. Twenty-eight millimetre Vittorias. Every few minutes I caught myself looking down, watching the wheels turn beneath me. I kept waiting for something extraordinary to happen. It never did. They felt calm. Direct. Entirely believable.
Weeks later I realised what had happened.
The Corimas closed a gap I didn’t know was still open.
