TOM RITCHEY
I HAD NO BIKE SO BORROWED WENDE’S RIDE, WHICH WAS A JUNKYARD MONGREL BIKE WITH DERAILLEURS ON IT!
Tom Ritchey was an accomplished road cyclist and framebuilder who’d been riding drop-bar bikes off-road for years, so when he saw Joe Breeze’s ballooner bike, he immediately spotted the potential. “When Joe and Otis Guy came down to place an order for a tandem, Joe whipped out his first prototype,” he recalls. “I noticed the nuances – the 26in wheels, and the weight, which was almost 50lb, even though it was custom-made. It wasn’t a cross-country bike, it was downhillfocused. I told him I was already building a light bike based on 650b wheels, under the influence of John Finley Scott, an older gentleman who lived out in the Central Valley.
As Joe was leaving, I said I thought I’d build something like what he was doing. Joe lived close to all of the guys who were riding what were called ‘klunkers’ and ‘bombers’ at the time. He ran into Gary [Fisher], told him what I’d said and within 24 hours, Gary called me and said: ‘Hey, Ritchey, if you build one for yourself, build one for me.’”
That conversation also earned Tom a slot at the final Repack race. As his own bikes were still in the development phase, he had to borrow a ride. “We got shuttles up to the Pine Mountain drop-off point – pretty much like the whole downhill scene now!” he recalls. “I had no bike to ride, so someone volunteered Wende Cragg’s, because she was shooting pictures. She’s like 5ft 2in so it was like a BMX for me! I’d never ridden the course, or one of their creations, which, for the like of a better term, was a junkyard mongrel bike with derailleurs on it!”
Crashing on the way down only served to give Tom a clearer outline of what he needed to do with his own bikes. “That kind of initiated me into what was ahead of me, which was figuring out how to make these bikes better, lighter and the way I wanted them to be.” The result was the first proper mountain bike, built by Tom and sold to and then built by Gary Fisher and Charlie Kelly under their new MountainBikes brand name.
Tom’s done all sorts since, from component development to touring Rwanda by bike. He’s still very much at the helm of his Ritchey Logic business, and rides most days, often on a tandem with his wife Martha.
Rock’n’roll-band roadie and road cyclist Charlie Kelly could be considered the driving force behind the early klunker movement, which gained momentum when Gary Fisher moved in with him. “In our bicycle club, everyone had a road bike,” he explains. “But when Gary moved into a house I was renting, he brought with him a pile of old balloon-tyre frames, wheels and parts, which we used to assemble a couple of ‘town bikes’. Like every kid, we’d ridden our bikes on trails, so one day we took our funky one-speed town bikes offroad and found it was a lot of fun.”
As their klunker crew expanded, it became clear these bikes were suited to downhilling. “Every ride started by going up something and finished with a life-threatening mass-start race on scrapyard junk, for no stakes whatever, back down whatever hill we’d spent a lot longer climbing. There was a lot of arguing, so I agreed to hold a time-trial downhill race on the two miles of 14 per cent slope that we called ‘Repack’. It was supposed to be just one time, to sort out who was fastest, but didn’t work out that way. It took over our lives – mine more than anyone else.”
Soon, the housemates went into business together, but as pioneers of a niche sport, they hadn’t bargained on their concept being jumped on by the big players. “It went ‘big’ when every major bicycle company cloned our design,” says Charlie. “If we’d had any inkling of what was about to happen, we might have prepared for it, but in fact, we went bankrupt in 1983.”
Claim to fame
Is Charlie the original mountain biker, the true founder of our sport? “As far as I know, I’m the first person to have organised a sport around these bicycles,” he says. “I’ve heard from a few thousand other people telling me they thought of it before I did, but I have the receipts!” As for the mountain bike itself, he credits the initial concept and design to Joe Breeze. “No other bicycle changed the course of the sport in the 20th century more than his first one.” Being a major part of the MTB story is something Charlie has always cherished. “I was on the ‘ground floor’ of a lot of things, so if I’m not rich it’s my own fault, but bicycling has taken me all over the world, and I got to do things other people dream of doing.”
While others got wealthy off the back of the sport he started, Charlie is content to have just played his part. “‘Rich’ is a relative term. I have everything anyone could legitimately want out of life. My house is paid for, and it’s in the exact spot I’d have picked 50 years ago to live in. My family is all I could ask for. I had the greatest bicycle adventure of the 20th century and changed the sport. How many people can go anywhere in the world and see their own personal influence on modern culture?”
Charlie’s still out there, raising hell and riding bikes. Very much involved in the NorCal cycling scene, when he’s not pedalling, he works on the www.fattyre flyer.com website and related projects.
While no stranger to riding bikes off-road, having ventured onto gravel roads regularly as a teenager – “it was always about the adventure!” – Gary Fisher was racing on the road and track when he met Charlie Kelly. “In 1972, I was living with a band named New Riders of the Purple Sage, an offshoot of the Grateful Dead,” he explains. “The steel-guitarist’s wife told me there was a guy who looked just like me, who was a roadie for the Sons of Champlin and rode in orange, just like I did. He was about the same height and had long blonde hair.” The duo met and hit it off, then fate played its hand. “The band had success and the members got their own places. Charlie offered me a room in this beautiful little cottage above a church. I was making good money in the bike shops and life was good.”
Canyon gang
After assembling their first klunkers, the pair started to get more serious about their riding. “The idea of a downhill time trial made sense to all the participants,” Gary says. “The ‘canyon gang’ had a downhill race before Repack, and the rules were that you could make up your own route down, so trail knowledge was absolutely premium.” Even as the scene grew, it was still pure fun for all concerned. “In the glory days of the Repack, I had zero business intentions – I wanted to be a top road racer. However, it was the Repack that made me a local hero!” From the get-go, Gary noticed a clear division in riding styles. “There are two opposite things that attract people to off-road,” he says.
“‘Rip’, ‘tear’, ‘shred’ and adrenaline, and the epic adventure ride.”
When Gary heard that Tom Ritchey was building a dedicated frame, he jumped on the opportunity – “The attention that Repack generated was a clear indicator that mountain bikes could not be stopped!” At the time, Gary was working for Bicycling mag as senior road tester, and his first order was for just three framesets. But demand spiralled, and by the end of the year, 160 frames had rolled off the production line. The rest is fat-tyre history, and mountain biking was born. “MountainBikes is a good name,” he says. “But it wasn’t just the name [that Fisher contributed] – it was the promotion of the name and creating the ability to buy a mountain bike.”
After MountainBikes dissolved in 1983, he founded Gary Fisher Mountain Bikes, where he worked on innovations including full suspension and longer, less road-focused geometry. The company went on to be acquired by Trek, whom Gary worked with for many years before stepping back earlier this year. He’s now involved in new projects to develop urban cycling and trail facilities, still working to bring bicycle access to more people.