In the spring of 2020, two industries stumbled into the same extraordinary moment. People were scared, locked inside, starved for air and movement and something to do with their bodies. Golf courses reopened before almost everything else. Bike shops were declared essential. For a brief season, the fairway and the bike lane were the two most valuable pieces of real estate in American leisure.

What happened next looked identical from a distance. Equipment flew off shelves. Waitlists formed. Manufacturers scrambled to fill demand they'd never seen before. The numbers were historic on both sides. It was the kind of surge that makes an industry feel, briefly, like it's finally having its moment.

Five years later, the two industries look almost nothing alike. Golf is still growing — rounds played, participation numbers, diversity of players, even the number of new course openings. The bike industry is working through what analysts have described as its worst sustained downturn in two decades. Warehouses full. Margins compressed. Shops closing.

The divergence is worth looking at closely. Not to wallow in it. To understand it.

In 2020, the golf industry did something it hadn't managed in fifteen years: it grew. And it grew fast. After a prolonged period of declining participation — more than 1,200 courses had closed over the prior decade and a half — rounds played jumped nearly 14% over 2019. The sport got lucky with timing. Golf courses were outdoors, socially distanced by design, and deemed safe. Once quarantine restrictions eased, the courses filled up.

Cycling had a similar story. Bike shops — many of which had been grinding through thin margin years and intense online competition — suddenly had lines out the door. People wanted bikes. Kids' bikes. Cruisers. Anything with wheels. Imports surged toward 18 million units. Lead times stretched to months, then longer. Shop owners who had been quietly worried about their futures were, briefly, running out of inventory to sell.

Both industries had their pandemic bump. The question is what each one did with it.

Golf didn't just survive the post-pandemic correction — it absorbed new players at a rate the sport hadn't seen since Tiger Woods was in his prime. By 2023, 26.6 million Americans had played on a golf course, a net gain of roughly a million players in a single year, the biggest single-year jump since 2001. Total participation, counting off-course formats like driving ranges and simulators, reached 45 million — a 50% increase over the prior decade.

The industry's own analysts were braced for the collapse that never came. "Many in the industry expected a decline in 2022," wrote one trade publication. Instead, rounds kept rising. Course closures dropped to their lowest level since before the 2008 financial crisis. Private clubs, many with long-dormant waiting lists, filled back up. Green fees rose 15% cumulatively since 2021 and mostly held.

Cycling's trajectory went the other direction. By 2023, consumer bike sales had fallen to a 20-year low for 20 of the preceding 24 months. The 18 million units imported during the boom had become a liability. Manufacturers were holding inventory at 3 to 5 times normal levels. Retailers slashed prices — some by 50% on 2021 and 2022 models — to clear floor space. Major brands posted revenue declines of 20 to 40% year over year. Giant, the largest bike manufacturer in the world, reported a 12.4% revenue drop over nine months in 2023. Shimano's bicycle division fell 25%.

What happened? Industry analysts describe it plainly: the pandemic pulled several years of future sales into an 18-month window. Everyone who wanted a bike bought one. When that cohort was equipped, the pipeline went dry. "In 2023, industry revenue plummeted because everyone who wanted a bike had already bought one," wrote one analyst. "The pandemic had simply caused several years of sales to be pulled forward."

Golf held for several reasons, and the most important ones had almost nothing to do with luck. They had to do with decisions the industry made — some consciously, some inadvertently — about how to relate to new participants.

The first was infrastructure for the low-commitment entry. Topgolf didn't just exist — it expanded, and Callaway made a $2.57 billion bet on it in October 2020, at the exact moment the pandemic was reshaping leisure. The strategic logic was clear: bring people into the ecosystem in a way that feels fun, social, and low-stakes, then let the sport itself convert them. Half of Topgolf guests who identified as non-golfers said the experience made them want to try real golf. The off-course world became a feeder system — simulators, entertainment venues, tech-enabled ranges. People who had never picked up a club were building comfort, then curiosity, then commitment.

The second reason is related: golf deliberately went after demographics it had historically ignored. Women now represent more than a quarter of all on-course golfers, with 2.5 million net new female golfers since 2019 alone. Young adults aged 18 to 34 grew to a near-decade high in 2023 and continued growing in 2024. Junior participation among girls has gone from 15% to 35% since 2000. The sport widened its door and people walked through it.

The third reason is maybe the hardest to replicate: golf courses are a fixed, experiential asset. You can't download them. You can't order them from Amazon. When someone wants to play golf, they have to show up somewhere. That creates a durable relationship between participant and venue that the bike industry — oriented around product sales, not recurring experience — never fully cultivated.

The bike industry got the boom and then treated it like inventory to be managed rather than people to be kept. The new riders who flooded in during 2020 and 2021 — many of them lapsed cyclists, many of them completely new — were sold bikes. They were not, in most cases, brought into anything.

There was no Topgolf equivalent. No low-commitment on-ramp that met people where they were, gave them a reason to stay connected, and built a pipeline from casual interest to active participation. The local bike shop, by its nature and its economics, is a transactional environment. You come in for a bike or a repair. The shop doesn't follow up. There's no club. There's no ride. There's no community that makes you feel like cycling is something you belong to rather than something you bought.

The manufacturers compounded this by doing what they always do: treating demand signals as permanent and ordering accordingly. When the factories told them to commit or get in the back of the line, they committed. By 2022 and 2023, warehouses across the supply chain were flooding. Shimano's inventory levels rose more than 30% in 2022 alone. Brands began discounting aggressively to move product, which punished the shops that had waited years for inventory and were now watching manufacturers undercut them at retail.

The ridership itself may have held better than the sales data suggests. PeopleForBikes noted that participation gains from the pandemic period appear to be "sticking" — people are still riding. But they're riding the bikes they already have. The shop got the sale. It didn't get the relationship. And when the rider needed a tune-up or a new helmet or advice on what to do next, there was no infrastructure to bring them back in.

The honest answer is that the bike industry needs to think less like a product category and more like a sport. Golf understood — eventually, painfully, after years of decline — that selling equipment to existing players isn't a growth strategy. Growth comes from expanding who considers themselves a golfer. The bike industry has never fully wrestled with that question.

There are a few places to start.

Build the on-ramp, not just the transaction. The independent bike shop has the closest thing to a community that cycling retail has. Group rides, skills clinics, women's nights, beginner programs — these aren't marketing gimmicks. They're the mechanism by which a person who bought a bike becomes a person who rides bikes. The shops that came through the downturn best were the ones with communities attached to them. That's not a coincidence.

Treat service as a retention tool, not an inconvenience. When someone brings a bike in for service, that's the relationship continuing. It's the closest thing the shop has to a recurring touchpoint. Golf courses understand this — their food and beverage operations grew to nearly match their pro shop revenue during the pandemic years, because they were selling the experience of being there, not just the round of golf. The bike shop's service department is its equivalent. It deserves to be treated that way.

Stop assuming the rider knows what they want next. Golf has a clear progression baked into its culture: you go from driving range to nine holes to eighteen, from rentals to your own clubs to a fitting session. There's a ladder, and the industry understands its job is to help people climb it. Cycling has a ladder too — from a hybrid to a gravel bike to a road bike, from solo rides to group rides to events — but the industry doesn't guide people up it. Most shops don't have a conversation about what riding looks like in a year. They should.

Take women seriously. Golf's gains among women have been a primary driver of its sustained growth. The bike industry has an analogous opportunity and has largely squandered it. Product that fits. Staff that doesn't talk down. Rides that are designed for people who are new, not people who already own carbon. This is not complicated. It is also not happening consistently.

Resist the urge to discount your way to relevance. The golf industry did not respond to its post-pandemic moment by slashing prices. It raised them — carefully, while investing in the experience that justified them. The bike industry's reflexive discounting during the inventory glut trained customers to wait for sales and taught them that full retail price is a fiction. Rebuilding margin integrity requires not just patience on pricing, but investment in the reasons a customer would pay full price: expertise, service, community, and the knowledge that this shop is going to be here when something breaks.

The pandemic was not a strategy. For golf, the good fortune of being an outdoor, socially distanced activity collided with years of off-course innovation and a deliberate push to diversify the game's participant base. The result was a wave that kept moving after the wind stopped.

For the bike industry, the wave broke. The people who rode through 2020 on new bikes are mostly still out there, pedaling. They just don't have a reason to come back to the shop. The industry sold them something. It didn't give them anywhere to belong.

That's fixable. The sport is real. The demand is real. The work is figuring out how to build, one shop at a time, the kind of relationship with the rider that golf — after fifteen years of decline and one extraordinary pandemic — finally figured out how to build with the golfer.

The fairway found a way to hold onto its people. The bike lane still can.