Off-road biking has been around virtually as long as the bicycle itself. Riding bikes fast on rough trails, whether for pleasure or competition, is nothing new. However, when it comes to tracing the descent of the modern mountain bike, the main thread of the story begins in California in the 1970s.
Here a group of riders began staging staging informal - but definitely competitive - events, speeding down mountain fire-roads and other trails on whatever bikes seemed most suitable. A key location was 784m (2571ft) Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, close to San Francisco in Northern California.
A number of the participants were elite road racers but road bikes were hopelessly ill-suited to ‘Mt Tam.’ The bikes that seemed to work best were old fat-tyred ‘cruiser’ machines, affectionately referred to as ‘Klunkerz’, often with a single gear and rear hub brakes, and weighing as much as 23kg (50 lbs) - twice as much as some light cross-country race machines of today. High-speed descents caused the grease in the hub to burn off: riders literally finished with smoke issuing from the rear hub. They required regular re-packing, hence the name ‘Repack Races’.
Naturally many participants began modifying their bikes to improve performance, replacing the hub brakes with cantilever brakes and soon adding gears. While trucks (or simply pushing) were initially used to reach the start of the descent, riders quickly realised the potential of bikes that could also be ridden uphill.
It’s thought that the first to add derailleur gears to their Klunkerz were a group from Cupertino, south of San Francisco. When some of them visited the Repack scene, one of its members, Gary Fisher, took note and soon found a rear hub from a tandem which had an extra powerful drum brake and was equipped for a freewheel. The performance improvement was marked and others quickly followed suit.
Initially informal and even clandestine, the Repack Races were briefly reborn in the early 1980s after the formation of the National Off-Road Bicycle Association (NORBA), thus becoming the first officially sanctioned mountain bike races ever held. But by this time things had moved on rapidly and cross-country racing - with its demand for light, agile machines - was already developing strongly.
The first purpose-built ‘mountain’ bikes were custom-built by Joe Breeze in 1978, with hand-made frames but off-the-shelf components from various sources, mostly from road-racing. However massive motorcycle brake levers were used to give extra pulling power to the cantilever brakes. Only ten of these ‘Breezers’ were ever built and they are now immensely collectable.
Charlie Kelly, who had been one of the first customers for Joe Breeze, then joined forces with the aforementioned Gary Fisher and frame-builder Tom Ritchey in a company which was initially called just ‘MountainBikes’. When everyone started using this term generically, it became Kelly-Fisher MountainBikes. Kelly left in 1983 but the Gary Fisher name remains a leading MTB brand. Fisher himself is still a very active figure in the industry and the sport.
The other company to pioneer mass-production of mountain bikes was Specialized, which also remains a leading player. Possibly the first-ever review appeared in The Bicycle Paper in July, 1982, comparing the Ritchey Mountain Bike and the Specialized Stumpjumper.
The 25 years since have seen enormous development in mounatin-biking and in the machinery used, with technology borrowed from road-racing, BMX and motor-cycling to name but a few sources - and increasingly, as mountain biking has developed into a global industry, original R & D too. But names like Ritchey, Fisher, Specialized and, of course, Marin all remain at the forefront.
Jon Sparks - I am a professional photographer and writer based in the little town of Garstang in the beautiful English county of Lancashire. I’ve ...
