Mountain biking origins: from clunkers to world championships.

Where did it begin?

The sources are open about not knowing. California State Parks says the riders around Mount Tamalpais in Marin County led the way to the first commercially successful mountain bikes, but notes that opinions differ on where and when mountain biking began. A 2014 Collectors Weekly history by Ben Marks, republished by Local News Matters on 10 September 2020, says the Repack races in Marin popularised the sport but were not literally where it was born.

Riders before Marin

Several earlier off-road riders appear in the record:

• 1953. The SFO Museum's 2012 to 2013 exhibition "From Repack to Rwanda" records that John Finley Scott, a professor at UC Davis, built a "woodsie" bike with knobby tyres and several gears.
• 1955 onward, England. Collectors Weekly says the Rough-Stuff Fellowship rode off-road from 1955.
• 1960s, Marin. Collectors Weekly says riders were using the fire roads of Mount Tamalpais from the mid-1960s.
• 1970s, elsewhere in the United States. Collectors Weekly adds Santa Barbara, Cupertino and Crested Butte, Colorado, and the SFO Museum names Cupertino's Morrow Dirt Club among the experimenters of the decade.

Marin County: the clunkers (from 1973)

The SFO Museum says that in 1973 Joe Breeze and Otis Guy, both young road racers from Marin County, began riding stripped-down single-speed Schwinn "clunkers" on Mount Tamalpais. California State Parks describes the early Marin bikes as older machines with heavy frames, wide tyres, a single gear and coaster brakes.

Repack (1976 to 1979)

Repack was a downhill race against the clock. Collectors Weekly says the first was held on 21 October 1976 on Cascade Canyon Road, running down from Carson Ridge near Fairfax, and was won by Alan Bonds in 5 minutes 12 seconds. The SFO Museum and Collectors Weekly both explain the name: the rear coaster-brake hubs overheated on the descent and had to be repacked with grease after each run.

Collectors Weekly counts 22 Repack races from 1976 to 1979, plus two more in the early 1980s; the SFO Museum also gives 22 races for 1976 to 1979. A search summary of BikeBiz credits Charlie Kelly as the race's originator, which we could not confirm.

Who "won" Repack?

Two answers circulate, and both are true of different things. Collectors Weekly names Alan Bonds as the winner of the first race, while other accounts present Gary Fisher as the fastest Repack rider. Collectors Weekly gives the course records:

The first purpose-built mountain bikes

The next step was a frame made for off-road riding, and here too the sources differ on who was first:

• Joe Breeze, 1977. The SFO Museum says Breeze produced the first modern mountain bike in Mill Valley in 1977. Collectors Weekly says he began building purpose-built off-road frames, called Breezers, in autumn 1977 and made ten between then and spring 1978.
• Earlier or parallel claims. Collectors Weekly notes that John Finley Scott's 1953 woodsie, and the frames Tom Ritchey built for Gary Fisher, are cited by others as rival firsts or near-contemporaries.

Collectors Weekly says Fisher had a custom off-road bike built by Tom Ritchey, a frame builder in Palo Alto. In 1979 Fisher and Charlie Kelly founded a company called MountainBikes in Fairfax, which Collectors Weekly says gave the bikes their generic name; the partnership ended in 1983. California State Parks names Fisher, Ritchey and Breeze as the riders who began selling these bikes as "mountain bikes". The SFO Museum's exhibition showed a Ritchey frame and a Cunningham prototype from 1979 and a Specialized Stumpjumper from 1981 among the early production and prototype bikes.

Crested Butte and the Hall of Fame

Colorado has its own early event. Collectors Weekly says the Pearl Pass Tour from Crested Butte started about a month before the first Repack race. The Mountain Bike Hall of Fame was founded in Crested Butte in 1988 and later moved to Marin, where the Marin Museum of Bicycling and Mountain Bike Hall of Fame opened in Fairfax in 2015.

From hillside to world championships

The UCI added mountain bike as a discipline in 1990, according to its 125th-anniversary history. Its account of the world championships gives the milestones that followed:

How mountain bike racing is organised today is on mountain biking, and recent championships on the mountain bike world championships. The dates above are in the timeline.