Gary Fisher
Ahead-of-his-time tech pioneer
Gary Fisher is a tech geek and early mountain biker who pioneered many of the technological advances we benefit from today. After his first business MountainBikes was wound up in 1983, Gary Fisher Mountain Bikes was created. Here GF spent his time innovating, creating the first production full-suspension mountain bike, the Gary Fisher RS-1, in 1992, which featured the first four-bar linkage in mountain biking.
The company was sold to Trek in 1993 but Fisher continued as company president and kept on innovating. His Genesis geometry experimented with different chainstay lengths, head angles and fork offsets, showing a great awareness of the importance of geometric changes to all riders, not just the pros. GF was constantly looking to give racers an edge and improve the ride experience for all. This geometry was the basis of the shortoffset fork crown (increasing with wheel size) and also the origin of the long cockpit/ short chainstay format still favoured by some manufacturers today.
In a visionary move, Fisher was one of the first to put 29in wheels on a mountain bike, in 2001, when everyone else was running 26in, coming up with the now common term ‘twenty-niner’. The bikes were undeniably fast and encouraged other brands to create models around the larger wheel size. A true pioneer, he continually pushed the boundaries of available technology forward, questioning the status quo and sculpting the look of modern mountain bikes.
Forward-thinking geometry pioneer
Fabien Barel is one of the most famous DH racers of all time, known for his ballsy riding, calculated race head and top fitness, but also his technical knowledge, which saw him engineer solutions to problems with his bikes and kit. The Kona Stab he rode to victory in 2004 had outlandish geometry that baffled other teams, but looks less out of place next to the ‘longer, lower, slacker’ bikes of today. The Frenchman then moved to the Mondraker team and worked with fellow racer Cesar Rojo on the Summum – arguably the most extreme DH bike of its time, in terms of both geometry and adjustability. Fabien kept taking things further, eventually experimenting with a 59-degree head angle!
The partnership with Mondraker was fruitful, with Rojo pushing the design side and Barel proving it worked on the race track, topping the podium at the Maribor World Cup in 2009. Embodying the motorsport philosophy of ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’, these frame-shape and suspension changes were then passed on to the brand’s production bikes – most notably, their Forward Geometry concept, which took length out of the stem and added it to the top tube, and led to the adoption of longer reaches and slacker head angles across the industry.
When a broken femur in 2010 shortened one of his legs, Barel created a custom-shaped chainring to even out his power delivery. As testament to his tenacity and engineering, he took fourth at the following year’s opening World Cup round. After being crowned world champ three times and numerous World Cup wins, Fabien turned to enduro with new sponsors Canyon, winning the first Enduro World Series event in May 2013. He went on to spearhead the EWS and develop Canyon’s range of allmountain bikes, and now runs the Canyon team.