The Paceline Forum - It was 40 Years Ago Today

[I wrote this for the political website DailyKos, but it is also relevant here.]

It was just 40 years ago, late summer of 1979. For a couple of months Gary Fisher had been riding a custom balloon tire bike he had built on a frame made by Tom Ritchey. I had a bike built by Joe Breeze a year earlier. Gary and I had been roommates for about four years, but Gary had recently rented a small cottage where he lived alone. During the time we had shared a house, we had evolved a hybrid off-road bike built on an old Schwinn frame. Then we had taken the next step, bicycles built for the purpose using modern materials and the big tires.

When Tom built Gary’s bike, in addition to Gary’s input he took advantage of what Joe had learned by building ten bikes like mine. The idea of building such bikes and selling them was far from our minds. The world’s supply of such bikes was thirteen, ten built by Joe Breeze, and three built on Tom Ritchey’s frames.

Almost unique among American frame builders of the ‘70s, Tom worked “lugless,” using bronze welding to join tubes instead of the cast sleeves commonly used on steel road frames. That meant he was not limited in the diameter of the tubing he used, or the angles he chose to join them. He immediately used larger diameter tubing than he used on road bikes, and geometry nothing like that of a road bike.

When Tom built a bike for Gary, one for Gary’s friend James and one for himself, he had a revelation. First, he didn’t need to use an expensive double-butted tube set. He could buy straight-gauge chrome-moly tubing in 20-foot lengths straight from the foundry, in the larger diameters he preferred. Second, he didn’t have to build each bike as a unique one-off, like all the custom road frames he was building. He could make two sizes, and even paint them all the same color. By standardizing the frame design, he could cut a dozen tube sets in an afternoon and build bikes the next day.

Building off-road bikes was simple compared to building custom road bikes, and the materials cost far less. For the time and money invested in building one custom road frame, he could build five or size balloon-tire frames. They were so easy to build that he built nine more than Gary had asked him for, in hopes of selling them to his own friends. Tom rode regularly with a group who hit the trails south of San Francisco on what would now be called “gravel bikes,” drop bar, skinny tire bikes built to take abuse.

But because their passion was exploring, they didn’t care for bikes with heavy wheels and big tires, built to take a downhill pounding. They didn’t race downhill. Tom couldn’t unload any of his nine new frames.

Finally Tom called Gary, who had bought one of Tom’s frames and sold one to a friend. Maybe Gary could find a few more buyers. Gary drove the fifty miles to Tom’s place in Palo Alto and picked up the frames. Later that day he tracked me down in Fairfax. He opened the trunk of his battered BMW, and showed me nine beautiful bicycle frames. He explained where they had come from.

“Hey man, you want to sell bikes?”

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had said no, but I didn’t, and it set me off on the greatest bicycle adventure of the 20th Century.

We pooled the money we had in our pockets at that moment, about $200, and rode a few blocks to the bank where we opened a commercial account to handle the profits soon to come flooding in. The bank executive filled out the form and asked what we would call the company. Gary and I agreed that “MountainBikes” was a catchy title, for both the name of our company and the product we intended to sell.

Later on several big bicycle companies bought some of our hand made bikes and mass produced them. Within six years, mountain bikes dominated the bicycle market and in 1996 mountain biking became an Olympic sport