[Closed] It was 40 years ago today...

Who'd have thought that a small idea for some fun would eventually become your life and eventually influence so many people all around the world.

👍

Wow, nice pics. That stem on that orange bike is pretty awesome.

Love it.

You guys rock 🤘

Riding bikes rocks 🤘🤘🤘

Can I go to Colororado?

Thanks for sharing.

Always worth seeing the pics.

40? You sure...

https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/it-was-40-years-ago-last-month/

https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/the-sport-is-now-40-years-old/

Nice pics though.

Read the post again Ads.

40? You sure…

Ahem...

... That we went to Crested Butte...

The 'Klunkerz' film is on Amazon prime now too if you want to watch it.

Oh sorry, he usually just pops to blow his own trumpet so I assumed it was the same old shit.

he usually just pops to blow his own trumpet

Unlike everyone else on here.

Without sounding harsh, that's mighty impressive at your age 🙂

What's this bike all about then?

[url= https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1887/43905926194_48fd295df9_k.jp g" target="_blank">https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1887/43905926194_48fd295df9_k.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/29TPmcu ]P1040949[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/101501346@N06/ ]Charles Kelly[/url], on Flickr

ads678

Oh sorry, he usually just pops to blow his own trumpet so I assumed it was the same old shit.

Well I'd say it's a trumpet well worth listening to.

Thanks to him and his friends we have bikes suitable for mountains.

An opportunity the UK cycle industry was resolutely ignoring despite there being a long tradition here of riding in the mountains.

The industry was full of the types who turn their lips up in a superior sneer at anything new or different. (We have them here - just go back a few years on the forum and read comments about 29ers, fatbikes, 650b, or more recently gravel bikes. 🙂 )

And where is that once mighty UK cycle industry now?

Thumbs up from me!

Can't help but notice what looks to be a Charlie The Bikemonger long sleeved t-shirt in some of those pics!

As a child of the 70s we all had a racer or a tracker.

The tracker was a normal bike that we adapted by fitting knobblies,cow horns and a lower gear. No one ever ran a rear mech as we all knew it would break and certainly no toe clips. We were riding these long before The Grifter came out in 76.

My dad could weld so he was on call to weld a bar across our handlebars for that full motocross look.

Mostly we just bombed about the woods and did a few jumps. Graham Bull was a lunatic who also had a motocross bike and if enough people were around he would do one particular jump on his tracker that would certainly break the bike. Rich parents so a new bike was never far away.

Steve Douce was also on the scene but I don’t recall him having a tracker just being good on a racer. I think he even had a bunch of bananas crash helmet ,so was extra fast.

Me and Russel Clark were more into going places off road than doing jumps. One ride was to see how far we could go down the local stream in the village where I used to live. Riding for a whole day in wellington boots and jeans was not an issue back in those days.

As much as we enjoyed tracking it was just filling the time until we got our mopeds. If we had continued riding our trackers the birthplace of MTB would have been wherever boys,woods ,bikes intersected and got older.

This forum needs a like button.... 🙂

Seriously Ads? Wow.

Great photos repack rider, thanks for sharing.

My first two bikes were " Gary Fisher's " ..

Respect repack ..thanks too !

LOL @ ads.

Props to the OP for developing the bikes, he does milk it tho!

As usual Repack love hearing from you on here.

@Ads - what was it you were doing 40 years ago this month, last month, next month, that spawned an industry/ethos/way of life? - take your attitude off to bikeradar.com it will be more welcome there.

Props to the OP for developing the bikes, he does milk it tho!

Often when there's a book to sell! Still cool to see the photos though.

Loads of us rode 'trackers' round in the woods at that time, and we could all claim to have been at the forefront of MTBing and had the chance to 'invent' the genre.

But we didn't.

Charlie and his mates did. And that's why their names are in the MTB Hall of Fame and adorn the downtubes of some of our bikes today. If you have your name on your frame, it's because you bought a sticker!

"An opportunity the UK cycle industry was resolutely ignoring despite there being a long tradition here of riding in the mountains.

The industry was full of the types who turn their lips up in a superior sneer at anything new or different. (We have them here – just go back a few years on the forum and read comments about 29ers, fatbikes, 650b, or more recently gravel bikes."
)

Takes me back to the mid 80's

Some visiting yank professor turned up to the touring meet at our Cambridge cycling club with a Fisher MountainBike (made by ritchey I think). He was pretty much told by the club 'elders' that we didn't want his type around these parts and that it was a damn cheek turning up to ride on a childrens toy.....

I was thinking - well I know what I'll be doing for the rest of my life and bought a 1st generation Hoo Koo E Koo a year later.

Great pics. What a gorgeous place that looks.

(Then I saw eBike and shed a tear 😥 ) 😉

Found the archive photos on Charlie's Flickr. Some marvellous stuff on there.I guess this is some of the stuff that was going to be in the archive he tried to get funding for?

As a child of the 70s we all had a racer or a tracker.

Exactly.  We used the frames that were available in the UK whereas the US guys used the cruiser frames available there.  An small race frame with some cycle speedway knobbly tyres and wide bars was just a skinnier version of the clunker bikes more suited to UK woods and forests.  Of course we didn't call it mountain biking because it didn't involve mountains...

just go back a few years on the forum and read comments about 29ers, fatbikes, 650b, or more recently gravel bikes

I think you mean "go back a few days".

The industry was full of the types who turn their lips up in a superior sneer at anything new or different. (We have them here – just go back a few years on the forum and read comments about 29ers, fatbikes, 650b, or more recently gravel bikes.”

[Holds up hand] Guilty...

But in fairness the introduction of 650b to MTB's a couple of years ago was purely a cynical exercise in "Standards Adjustment" to bump sales figures, not a true "Innovation"...

Most of the rest of it I'm into and I see 29ers, 1x drives, Gravel bikes, plus tyres, etc, etc as incremental little bit of functional development to make a bike better...

One of those bikes belonged to my late friend Larry - also a friend to Repack Rider and it was ridden over the Pearl Pass as a tribute.  Means a lot to me.

Love the photos, and the reminder of where it all started!

cool photos, I'm sitting at my desk but  transported back to my childhood and riding jumps in the woods on my Raleigh arena racer!

Looks like you will be able to read the story in Singletrack World.  Chipps bought it for the next issue.

That is a Charlie Hobbs shirt.  I try to get him a photo of me in it everywhere I go.

What’s this bike all about then?

[url=<span class="skimlinks-unlinked"> https://flic.kr/p/29TPmcu</span> ]P1040949[/url] by Charles Kelly, on Flickr

That is a 1935 Schwinn, which is I believe the first year that company offered a balloon tyre.  It was ridden by Tommy Breeze, son of Joe.  Probably the most dangerous bike on the trail, not even remotely suited for the terrain.

The kid's father is a renowned bicycle designer, and this is what he rode.

One of the riders celebrated with a little LSD. He sat near the fire at the camp, shirtless and barefoot, wearing a towel over his head and grooving to whoever was playing the guitar at the moment. He was friendly, but conversations with him were not always…linear. The dude didn’t have a tent or a sleeping bag, all he had was a blanket. He heated a big rock in the fire, wrapped his blanket around it and curled up around his rock for the night.

It rained that night.

The next time I saw him, it was at the top of Pearl pass.  He had put on shoes and a shirt... and a full face helmet, and he was riding the most expensive carbon FS bike in the entire collection.

Looks like you will be able to read the story in Singletrack World.  Chipps bought it for the next issue

Cool. Be good to have a paper version. On nice, thick, sweet smelling, printer paper. 🙂

Does anyone have pictures of their tracker?

Thanks Repack Rider, and all your mates as well 😀 There was a poster given away with either Dirt or MBUK or something in the 90s, it might have been this one-

which I took from house to house with me as I moved around when I was younger. Awesome stuff, ta.

The sad thing about the UK bike industry missing out on the birth of mtb was that they were already making suitable bikes (by the standards of the time, obviously) and had been since at least the 1930s.

Take this 1960 Rudge for the export market. It had 2" tyres and was built for rough usage.

[url= https://farm1.staticflickr.com/834/27654194578_112a5254e3_o.pn g" target="_blank">https://farm1.staticflickr.com/834/27654194578_112a5254e3_o.pn g"/> [/img][/url]

I have a similar but local model which has the 26x1⅜" tyres, and have ridden it extensively offroad. Its handling is quite competent for everything short of technical singletrack, ie good gravel bike. It even has a reinforced steerer.

[url= https://farm1.staticflickr.com/915/42479480174_dc1b378f6a_o.jp g" target="_blank">https://farm1.staticflickr.com/915/42479480174_dc1b378f6a_o.jp g"/> [/img][/url]

Humber, Elswick, Raleigh were among the other companies that made similar bikes for the colonies.

Just imagine if they had sold them in the UK.

Young lads would have stripped off all the extraneous stuff like mudguards and chainguards and been out bombing around the hills. We even had decent canti brakes back then - Resilions.

The mtb could have been born here in the 1930s.

But it wasn't.

Let's face it, the UK blew it, and our industry got decimated as a result.

So let's be grateful for what happened 40 years ago.

.

.

BTW if anyone has a colonial model Rudge etc, I'd love to have a close look at it.

Amazing to think Wende Cragg was part of the group that invented mountain biking. Such a wonderfully talented person, really at the height of their talents back then too. Gives you butterflies just thinking about it

The mtb could have been born here in the 1930s.

But it wasn’t.

British people in the 30s were far too reserved to do stuff like that.  Imagine the tutting you'd have received chucking yourself down forest roads at that speed.

The Californians made it cool and exciting.. downhill races VS bimbling about with a pipe and tweed.

They made the bikes, then made the races and brought the cool.  Then the industry cashed in.   All we were missing was the cool.

molgrips

British people in the 30s were far too reserved to do stuff like that.  Imagine the tutting you’d have received chucking yourself down forest roads at that speed...

🙂

Oh they were doing it alright, it's just that the short sighted tutters were in charge of the industry and the cycling bodies.

 It would be hard to pack any more fun into two days than we did.

Oh. So it's safe to assume Charlie and Joe now have Ebikes.

Oh. So it’s safe to assume Charlie and Joe now have Ebikes.

Not safe, we didn't.  There were only two ebikes on the ride, and only one made the top.  The bike I was on is a good part of the story when it runs in STW.

My article about that ride runs in the current issue of STW.

My lecture dates so far are:

7th October Sandiway Ales Brewery Northwich CHESHIRE

11th October Rapha Manchester

13th October Otec, Aylesbury Buckinghamshire

18th October Fort William

20th October Keswick, Lake District

29th October Velo Domestique, Bournemouth

1st November Brixton Bikes & Green Oil, Brixton, London

Chipps killed a previously scheduled article in order to get mine about the recent Crested Butte adventure into the issue that was in print during my recent visit to the UK. It's in the subscriber online version and the subscriber print copy, but not in the one you can buy at the news agent.

I paid a visit to STW HQ in Hebden Bridge, where in one whirlwind day I sat for a video interview with editor Hannah Dobson, went on a night ride with the local MTB crowd, gave a talk in a local pub, and was presented with one of the three bottles of rare whisky auctioned for charity.

I'm told that the bottle gifted to me raised 1070 pounds for charity, and I will toast all who contributed when I crack it with the other members of my band.  I expect that event will be followed by the most awesome jam EVER.

In the absence of a formal presentation, I spoke at a local pub to a standing room audience of about 40, then I sold and signed copies of my book.  After the talk, Bum Butter/Bikemonger Charlie Hobbs, who had arranged the appearance, passed the hat and it came back with 100 quid, fair pay for an hour of lecturing. When the talk was over, we drank and chatted until closing time, then retired to another pub down the street until it closed and we had nowhere else to go except home.

Hannah reported the next day that on her ride home she was felled by a sudden gust of gravity and a pedestrian sign that leapt into her path, but eventually identified the house she lives in and made it home uninjured, because she knew enough about crashing that you should be loose when you strike the road surface.

Cycling was never cool in the UK, it was always a means to an end and mostly associated with working people.

Plus not until the 60's did we really get consumerism in the UK. Even if MTB had been a thing in the 30's for a few people, it could never have translated into the act of consumption it is now with all the brands and people building identities around them, a new model every years, etc.

Sport as a mass leisure activity comes from the US anyway. It needed something like running/jogging to become popular first for MTB to gain traction (pardon the pun!).

Sport as a mass leisure activity comes from the US anyway.

Yes, without them we'd never had taken up football, rugby, cricket etc.

Yes, without them we’d never had taken up football, rugby, cricket etc.

These were spectator sports with participants mostly young at amateur level. Not mass (sports) leisure activities IMHO.

Being sweaty wasn't particularly respectable outside of the sports-ground. It was working people who toiled and rode bikes.

Google Victorian bicycle race, I dare you

I'm not saying people didn't ride or race bikes. I'm saying there wasn't mass participation especially amongst middle classes.

It all started for me in 1979 with “Kickstart” on TV.

I had a Raleigh Jeep which I shortened the mudguards with a hacksaw, fit cowhorn bars, smaller seat, knobby tyres. I learned to bunny hop it over planks of wood, then started jumps etc. Built a small course in some wasteland. Nothing has changed in the last 39 years to be honest. I just go to Revolution and Leogang to hurt my these days.

These were spectator sports with participants mostly young at amateur level. Not mass (sports) leisure activities IMHO.

Football was, literally, a mass participation sport.