by Robert Penn
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I can clearly remember the first time I rode a mountain bike. Like the first time I listened to a Sony Walkman, it was a defining moment. I was walking down a steep street at university, behind the students’ union, in 1987. Coming up the other way I saw Mark, a design student; we worked on a magazine together. I knew the hill well. Climbing up it on my battered ten-speed racer was an out-of-the-saddle wrench that scraped cigarette tar off the floor of my lungs and made my calf muscles bulge like chicken drumsticks. Despite the gradient, Mark was pedalling freely and keeping pace with his mate, who was on foot. They were having a conversation. I’d read about mountain bikes but I’d never sat on one — they took a while to get from the dirt trails of Marin County to the Georgian streets of Bristol. The first time I did, I wanted one.
The story of the invention of the mountain bike might be the most intriguing chapter in the entire history of the bicycle. It’s certainly the most unlikely. Around 1973, several young Californians began modifying pre-World War II, balloon-tyred, American single-speed ‘cruiser-bikes’ in order to ride them downhill, at full tilt, on footpaths — for fun.
The distinctive feature of this new style of cycling was that it was off-road. The aged bikes, nicknamed ‘clunkers’, were neither designed nor built for the task, but they were cheap and dispensable. Riders hammered them until they broke, then bought another one. One of the most coveted models was the Schwinn ‘Excelsior’: the relaxed frame geometry, long fork rake and high bottom bracket gave this model a small design advantage over others.
Soon, the riders began to modify these clunkers. Non-essential parts were stripped off. New parts, cannibalized from every kind of two-wheeled vehicle, were added. Tyres got fatter and more knobbly, frames were strengthened, brakes were improved, stronger brake levers and quick-release seat posts were affixed, cranks got longer, chainsets got better; in time, derailleur gears and thumb shifters appeared. All these features and components had been invented previously; it was just that no one had put them all together, on one frame, with the specific aim of blitzing downhill, off-road.
The greatest concentration of riders actively modifying clunkers was based around Mill Valley, San Anselmo and Fairfax, small communities in Marin County, north of San Francisco, around the foot of Mount Tamalpais. Here, fortune brought together a young, energetic group. There were no more than half a dozen key players, but it was a critical mass. They were athletic, inquisitive and highly competitive. They included: Charlie Kelly — rock band roadie, writer and general outlaw — who was the charismatic organizer; Joe Breeze — decorous local boy and racing cyclist, who grew up riding over Mount Tam, could build frames and had access to his father’s machine shop; Gary Fisher — a Category 1 competitive road racer and mechanic with a sense of inquiry and plenty of chutzpah; Tom Ritchey — a successful road racer and full-time frame-builder when he graduated from high school. None of them went to college. They shared a passion for bicycles. Otis Guy, Larry Cragg, Wende Cragg and Alan Bonds were part of the same crowd of friends and also influential. In the hands of this small coterie of inquiring cyclists, the clunker evolved into the mountain bike.
Over the years much has been made of the fact that they were a gang of dope-smoking, hippy bike bums. They may have used the early clunkers to ‘tend north country cash crops’ as Gary Fisher wrote, and they were ‘a bunch of people who didn’t have to go to work every stinking day’, as Charlie Kelly said. But the invention of the mountain bike was not like a cartoon from The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. It was dynamic.
At the heart of the story was Repack — a dusty, often precipitous, off-road footpath that drops 400 m in just over 3 km (1,300 feet in 2 miles) with an average gradient of 14 per cent, down the side of Pine Mountain, a foothill of Mount Tamalpais, finishing near Fairfax. The young mountain bikers had been riding it for a couple of years, during which time one question simply wouldn’t go away — who is the goddam fastest? There had to be a race. The gang met on 21 October 1976. It was a time trial. Riders set off from the start at 2-minute intervals. Alan Bonds won. He was the only rider who didn’t crash. His dog, Ariel, came second.
There were only ever twenty-five Repack races: remarkably few for the legend that grew out of them. The last race was in 1984. They were organized and publicized by Charlie Kelly. Joe Breeze won the most races. Gary Fisher holds the course record. No more than 250 people got to race the course, yet Repack was critical.
On the dirt and gravel, over bare rock and gullies, ruts, roots and boulders, at average speeds of over 25 mph, down slopes of up to 20 per cent and round reverse camber corners, blind turns and switchbacks, the mountain bike evolved, broken bike by broken bike.
‘We were always pushin’ the bike. No question about it,’ Joe Breeze said. In a typical Repack race, half a dozen bikes would fail. Riders went home and immediately started repairing and modifying their machines, in the hope of a better run next time. For some, this tinkering turned into a lifetime’s work. Joe Breeze now runs a company that manufactures ‘transportation’ bicycles; Tom Ritchey and Gary Fisher both established global brands that bear their names.
The name of the race, ‘Repack’, even came from the act of fixing a bike. ‘Back in the day, coaster brakes — you know the kind you operate by pushing backwards on the pedals — were the most popular,’ Charlie Kelly said. ‘You packed the brake hub with grease to keep them smooth. In a race, the grease heated up so much it just boiled out, leaving a contrail of black smoke behind the bike. When you got to the bottom, it howled so hard you had to go home and repack that hub again with grease.’
The three of us were wheeling our bikes up Repack on a balmy, late summer afternoon. The ground was ‘crackle’ dry. Sunlight illuminated the pillows of dust that our boots scuffed up as we climbed. Charlie was pushing a 1941 Schwinn — a quintessential clunker. Joe had one of his original ‘Breezer’ bikes. He designed and hand-built ten in 1977-78. Made from nickel-plated, cromoly aircraft tubing, in a diamond shaped frame and fitted out with Phil Wood hubs, TA cranksets, Dia-Compe cantilever brakes and BMX style unicrown forks, Breezers were the first ever purpose-built mountain bikes. It was a landmark. Joe kept one. The remaining nine are either in private collections or museums. I was riding a bike built by Joe in the late 1980s. Technologically it was sound, but it had little character compared with their bikes.
‘To say it was a quantum leap from this,’ Charlie said, halting to wave a hand the length of his clunker, ‘to that Breezer there kinda understates quantum leaps.’
Both Charlie and Joe were dressed in the clothes they would have ridden in thirty years ago: boots, Levis, denim shirts and caps. Joe did have a pair of leather gloves on — the single concession to protective wear.
‘Heck, no one ever had a helmet. All considered there were few injuries. Lots of accidents, but few injuries. I broke that.’ With the bike hooked against his hip, Charlie held up both hands like he was stopping traffic. ‘Right hand, left hand. Notice the large deformity? Broken thumb. Happened right up there at Hamburger Helper, nasty corner.’
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Hand on the ground?’
‘Nah, that was everything on the ground. And hitting it very, very hard, and laying there for a while because I didn’t want to discover what was broken and then realizing if I don’t move soon, somebody’s going to ride right over me.’
A hallmark of the Repack races was the competitiveness. Laying in the dirt, Charlie might have remembered his own call to arms prior to one of the races: ‘If you crash and break a few bones, wait for the first-aid crew, unless you’re blocking a good line: if so, then try to drag yourself off to one side. If you see somebody down on the course and bleeding, stop and give help — unless you’re on a real good run.’
As we walked, Charlie and Joe frequently stopped to explain, with verve, how you rode different bits of the course fastest. I learnt the best lines through the corners — ‘on the inside here, right on the tangent of the apex’ —
where to un-weight, and places to stamp on the pedals to ‘steal a second before you jump on the brakes again at the next corner.’ Though it had been thirty years since they were riding it regularly, every rock, branch and rut was recalled. In the heyday, Joe made a map of the route and Charlie once took a photograph every 50 feet, as aide-mémoires, so that ‘in the moment, you were totally dialled in’.
We hadn’t quite reached the top of the path where the race began before Charlie suggested we turn and take a crack at the descent: he’s not a man you’d ever say ‘no’ to. Joe, in his fifties and a paragon of good health, could hardly wait to get going down. He was practically scraping the dirt with his boots, like a Spanish fighting bull. With a quick tug on his gloves and one deep breath, he was off.
There was no more ceremony to Charlie’s departure. He dragged a big boot off the ground and was gone. I could hear the roaring of the knobbly tyres, scrabbling to keep a grip on the mountain, as they both plummeted out of sight. I swallowed a lungful of the glitteringly clean air. I looked down the trail, past the huckleberry bushes and the poison oak, across the valley to the slopes of chaparral crowned by the peak of Mount Tamalpais (2,571 feet). I tried to mentally photograph the vista: ‘Top of Repack, August 2009. Ready to burn.’
I’ve owned a mountain bike for over twenty years. The list of hills and mountain ranges I’ve cranked up and hammered down includes the Brecon Beacons (where I started riding and now live), the Mendip Hills, the Grampians, MacGillycuddys Reeks, the Karakorams, the Hindu Kush, the Alps, the Dolomites, Snowdonia, the Cascade Range, the Remarkables, the Great Dividing Range, the Barisan mountains, the Western Ghats, the Kopet Dag, the Tien Shan, the Pamirs, the Zagros mountains, Jebel Liban, the Himalayas, the Dinaric Alps and the hills of North Harris.
I was once sent by a newspaper to write a feature on the Scottish downhill mountain biking course in the shadow of Ben Nevis, before a World Cup event. I was placed in the charge of Stu Thomson, a 22-year-old national champion. In the gondola on the way up, Thomson told me how the last journalist he’d escorted (from a competing publication) had fallen off at the first corner and refused to get back on his bike. Was every journalist, he wondered, this wet? Professional rivalry got the better of me and I listed the mountain ranges I’d known on two wheels.
I, too, fell off at the first corner. One moment, I thought ‘this is magical’. I could see for miles down the glen over the crooked finger of Loch Eil to the Atlantic Ocean. Before I’d finished the thought, my coccyx was bouncing down a boulder.
When I caught up with Thomson, having kissed the granite of Scotland again twice, I was rictus-faced, flushed with adrenalin, battered in body parts I’d forgotten about, numb in the hands, terrified and on the verge of being sick. ‘Yer grabbin’ the breeks,’ he said. ‘Ya cannee grab the breeks. Ya cannee have a doubt.’
Charlie and Joe were long gone. The mountain was silent. I had no doubts. I pointed the bike down the fall line, released the brakes and stood on the pedals. Within seconds, I was dropping like a stone. Coming into the first corner, I dabbed the brakes. The bike jolted like a dying man receiving a bolt of electricity to the heart. No photo or film of the original Repack races comes close to exposing the thrill of riding it. It was very fast. Around the second or third corner, they were waiting for me.
‘Pretty sketchy, huh?’ Charlie said. I wondered if they had found it scary ‘back in the day’.
‘It was always scary,’ Charlie replied, ‘but that was why you did it, right? If it was safe . . . it wouldn’t be fun.’
Joe’s eyes revealed how much fun he was having. He took off again. Charlie and I rumbled along behind. We came round a left-hand corner, with reverse camber and a big drop off the right side of the trail, called ‘Tripple Ripple’. Like a motor racing circuit, many of the course features had names. We’d passed ‘Rubberneckers’ Knoll’, ‘Camera Corner’, ‘Breeze Tree’, where Joe had once taken a wrap, and ‘Vendetti’s Face’, where ‘Mark Vendetti left behind a lot of his face,’ Charlie said.
When we reached the first big switchback, I asked about the speedway style cornering I’d seen on old footage, in the film Klunkerz. Joe explained: ‘With the old brakes, the drum brakes, which were kinda like non-brakes, you’d come into the turn and you’d be using your bike to scrub off some speed. You come into it and you un-weight, kick the rear end out, and you’re comin’ through kinda sideways. The front wheel’s still turning so you’re holding the line. Your inside foot’s down. The other foot is on the pedal. And if you’re really good, there’s no hands on the brakes.’
Most of the Repack races were held between 1976 and 1979. ‘There was never a schedule. It was just something we did when we felt like goin’ out and doin’ it,’ Charlie said. The races stopped when Charlie stopped organizing them. In 1979, a TV crew came to film the race; a rider fell and broke his arm; he sued the TV company and lost; Repack’s cover was blown; the public authority who owned the land now knew about the races; no one wanted to take responsibility for organizing a race where people got sued.
Like the best rock stars, Repack died young. The job was done. The cross-pollination of ideas among the riders, and the hammering the course inflicted on every bike, had led to the Breezer, the first purpose-built mountain bike. Several other cottage industries in Marin County were also making mountain bikes by 1979. Repack had given the mountain bike publicity, creating a market for the bikes. The fun was over. It was time for business.
We were near the finish now. ‘You’d be flying on your 50-pound iron by here,’ Charlie said.
The coaster brake would’ve overheated. It’d be howling. There’d be rocks sailing out of the trail here and there. You’re just tryin’ to keep that straight line into the last corner and past the boulder that was the finish line. Often enough, that’s where the concentration lapsed. Either that or it was too tempting not to lock up the brake and get all sideways and finish off with a big Franz Klammer slide.
Joe’s eyes flickered with energy again. He hopped on the pedals and tore off. As Charlie and I rounded the last corner and saw the boulder, a great chute of dust flew up, accompanied by the roaring of denim through dirt. Joe had gone in for a Franz Klammer slide and hit the deck. Charlie was laughing before he put his bike down.
‘Sorry I explained that earlier, didn’t I? I did explain that to you,’ he hooted, hitching his jeans up and pointing at Joe who was bent double, staggering about with his arms wrapped across his belly, howling with laughter too.
The spoke pattern of a wheel is determined by how many times each spoke crosses adjacent spokes between the hub and the rim. Radial spokes do not cross at all: they project straight out from the flange — the raised part of the hub where the spoke holes are — to the rim. Crossed or tangential spokes project more or less on a tangent away from the flange: between the hub and the rim, they may cross over or under one, two, three or even four other spokes. Generally speaking, the more times spokes cross, the more they pull on each other, and the stronger the wheel.
So, a loaded touring bike that’s being ridden by a big man on dirt roads across South America would have three- or even four-cross spoke wheels: his only concern is durability. My round-the-world bike had three-cross wheels, front and back, all the way. At the other end of the spectrum, a featherweight racing bike ridden competitively by Nicole Cooke would most likely have a radial-spoked front wheel and a rear wheel with two-cross spokes on the drive (or gear) side and radial spokes on the non-drive side: her concerns are weight and aerodynamics.
The reason the spokes on the drive side of the rear wheel should be crossed is because radial spokes cannot transmit torque — a force applied in the form of a twist rather than a push or pull. The chain applies a rotating force to the hub when you pedal, twisting it relative to the rim: to transmit this to the wheel, and go forward, you need to have (or at least it’s much better to have) crossed spokes on the drive side.
There are more elaborate spoke patterns, such as crow
’s feet (radial and crossed spokes combined), Spanish laced, snowflake and offset radial. Some of them do look beautiful, but they have no practical advantage over standard, cross-spoked patterns. It’s just somebody pimping their ride.
Gravy wanted to build my wheels tangent-spoked and three-cross. To ensure this was possible, he first had to measure the internal diameter of the rim, the thickness of the rim at the nipple hole (you’d imagine that these dimensions are standard but Gravy explained they can vary from one ‘extrusion’ or batch of rims to another), the width of the hub, the distance from the outside of the flanges to the edge of the hub, and the hub flange diameter (the distance from centre to centre of the spoke holes). He typed the figures into a spoke-length calculator on the Sapim website.
Before computers, Gravy did the calculations using tables. Getting the spoke length exactly right is important because the next step is to cut the spokes to that length and re-thread them — using the trusty old Phil Wood spoke cutter, a dense, grey hunk of manually operated machinery in the corner of the workshop. If the spokes are cut to exactly the right length, you get the maximum amount of thread in the nipple, and they’re less prone to breakage. You can’t ask a machine that builds wheels to do all this, I thought.
Ting — up came the spoke length on the computer screen. ‘OK. The ’puter, it says we can build both wheels three-cross. Three cheers for your Mr Starley.’
James Starley is the greatest British inventor you’ve never heard of. He’s a colossus of the self-taught entrepreneurial, manufacturing cadre that ensured the industrialization of Britain was a revolution. Cycling historian Andrew Ritchie described him as ‘probably the most energetic and inventive genius in the history of bicycle technology’.
