“IT’S NOT A NEW BICYCLE, IT’S A WHOLE NEW SPORT”

The Specialized Stumpjumper, the world’s first production mountain bike and self-proclaimed creator of a “whole new sport”, turns 40!

Specialized didn’t invent mountain biking, the Nobel prize for that should go to the

Repack races in Marin

County in the 1970s… or controversially, the French freeriders of the 1950s we’ve just been reading about in the mbr archives (full feature to come soon online). What Mike Sinyard’s brand does lay claim to is the first production mountain bike, in the Stumpjumper. Released in 1981, you could now actually walk into a shop and buy a machine purpose-built for mountain biking rather than cobbling one together from sub-standard parts. Naturally this made things more affordable for more people than getting a bespoke bike, although at around $800 for the Stumpjumper, it wasn’t a cheap hardtail – allowing for inflation, an $800 bike would cost $2,500 at today’s prices.

“So this was the disrupter, if you like,” explains Richard Salaman from Specialized. “There’s an advert we used at the time that says ‘It’s not just a new bicycle, it’s a whole new sport,’ and it really was. It was that sort of level of bike, this isn’t a road bike with funny handlebars, this is a totally different concept.”

So in honour of 40 years of the Stumpjumper, and to tie in with our own 25th year anniversary, we borrowed a bike from the second production run in 1982 (originals are rare) from Specialized UK to find out why the Stumpjumper was such a ground-breaker.