Gary Fisher on the Past, Present, and Future of Mountain Biking [Podcast #205]

photo: Sterling Lorence / Trek Bikes

On this Episode

No other man is as well positioned to talk about where mountain biking has been, and where it’s going in the future, than Gary Fisher. From organizing the first mountain bike races at Repack, to building an eponymous mountain bike brand and his current role at Trek, Gary is an outspoken and enthusiastic advocate for biking. Listen in as Gary recounts the early days of mountain biking and weighs in on where our sport is headed today.

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Automated transcript

Jeff Barber 0:00
My name is Jeff, and today our guest is Mr. Gary Fisher. Gary is one of the founding fathers of mountain biking, selling some of the first bikes through a company called What else mountain bikes. He was a part of the repack race scene in the 1970s and he’s introduced countless innovations to the sport over the years. Thanks so much for joining us, Gary, sure. My pleasure. So I want to start off talking about how mountain biking got started in your early involvement. So you started racing bikes on the road and the track at age 12. How did you get into racing bikes at such an early age?

Gary Fisher 0:51
I guess it was a local bike shop, and I’d hang out there a little bit. And the older guys, I mean, the 14 or 15 year olds, you know, they were all like into it, and I went on a ride with them, and they are saying, You’re too little, you can’t come with us. And I just didn’t pay attention. I just came and they couldn’t get rid of me. And at first they said, well, we’ll make you a mascot. And I started crying. They said, Okay, we’ll make you a full on member. And we’re just that whole thing of getting away from everything and having your freedom, yeah. And then, you know, some older kids, some other kids to have a good time with, yeah. And that whole thing,

Jeff Barber 1:32
I find it interesting, because right now, everybody’s, you know, really excited about NICA, which is getting, you know, younger people into mountain biking, competing in mountain biking, yeah, and we kind of talk about it like it’s a new thing, but, yeah, that’s why I was really interested in here, that you did that.

Gary Fisher 1:49
When I was 12. I mean, it was not cool at all. I mean, seventh grade, and this girl sees me on in my bike outfit, you know, little girl, socks, little wool shorts, you know, the little jersey and everything. And she just said, what a farmer. She told all the other kids. And I just had to take it for about six months. It was not cool at all to be doing that. And that was in the 60s, you know, and it was tiny, but the sport almost died. You know, there were very few people riding bikes, unless you were a little kid or something like that. But that was then, I mean, this whole notional off road. I mean, goodness, now, come on, off road that’s over 120 years old. I mean, people first rode bicycles. It was all off road. But ours was a notion of going fast off road and having a lot of fun with it, because that was the scene in Marin County when I was like a teenager, when I was like into high school. Was a larkspur Canyon gang was that was out of redwood High School, and it was the people that invented the drum circle, believe it or not, in the 60s, early 60s. And it was like going out on Mount Tam and having all this outdoors to ourselves. It was amazing, you know, yeah, and the bikes. I mean, I was a bike racer, serious and but these bikes we were using were just like, balloon tire Come on, something big and fat that you could like, rip, you know, have fun with. And the downside of it was, is that the brakes were horrible, and they didn’t last very long. So you go out with six people and you come back with three of them dragon parts, but the whole idea was party in the woods. Party in the woods, party in the woods, you know, yeah, and my involvement was, I named the sport, called it mountain bikes. I did a lot of publicity behind it, because my family comes out of Hollywood, and my mother taught me publicity, first for the bike race team, fellow club, Tamil pious, and then later on, you know, for the company named mountains, and with Charlie Kelly, and we put out a very simple format, race, downhill, Time Trial, still using it today. Yeah. I mean, hope Toledo, it’s a pretty cool format. You know, there are other formats that have come up that are incredible, too. And what’s happened, you know, my involvement, I mean, I just love this from the very beginning, saying, Man, this is like limitless and like what people can do, yeah, and the whole roller coaster thing and going crazy on a bike, you know, that hadn’t been done before, yeah. I mean, people in a off road were sedate and all that we were not sedate. You’re having fun. I mean, large spookanion gang, we do, uh, Derby night. Derby night would be like a big, wide place, you know, out there in the woods that we knew about, nobody else did, and it’d be full moon night. And you start the first area, you’d have cock. Tail hour, and we bring a lot of beer, and everybody drink a lot of beer for about the first hour. And you’d like, ride around in this big clearing and one hand on a beer, you know, one hand on the bars, and try to say hello, and try to, like, have your drinks and everything, and not spill the beer, because that wasn’t cool. Then the second area gets a serious derby. And, you know, the bikes were such where if you fell down, other people would run right over you, you know, and ride over you and everything. Anyway, there’s a big old party. And that wasn’t the nighttime activity that and and parties in the city and things that these guys, a Casey son in a band, put together was a musician and everything, and then the off road shenanigans, yeah, you know those guys, that’s where I sort of figured out this was a lot of fun. And that was like when I was in high school. And that was like in the I was class of 68 at Redwood, okay, and I was doing a lot of other things at the same time. I got thrown out of racing because my hair was too long. It was just over my ears. You couldn’t believe it. And about the same time, I met this band called The Grateful Dead, and they had played a gig down in Pescadero, California, along with the Quicksilver messenger service. I’m sure you remember them if you’re a 60 San Francisco sound person anyway, they played three nights in a row. Less than 100 people showed up. I mean, my God, these bands are popular, and you listen to like, that old stuff of the dead. I mean, oh man, it was like they use altic Lansing horns. They were ridiculous, you know, aluminum horn that was the PA system, wow. And everything else just ran through. The drums were on their own. The bass was on its own, you know, it was, it was ridiculous. And I, you know, but it was a, really, I was already doing a lot of hanging out with, like the whole Ken Kesey, the Mary pranksters, Ed and then the Hell’s Angels. Oh, wow, we’d see them. We’d see them, you know, in in LA Honda, California, we’d be riding our bikes, and they’d be at keaseys place there, and we’d all stop and check it out. And then later on, we’ve down in Pescadero and in San gagario, and they come on their motorcycles, and they check us out, you know, on our bikes, little, skinny kids, yeah, you know, like, yeah, 18 year olds, you know, like, 1518, and the ringleader of our gang was this Larry Walpole. And he was an old Englishman out of East London, had that heavy cockney accent, worked for Pan Am as a mechanic, and was just like, great and hilarious. And we go over to his house and read all the old bike magazines, you know, like, like, cycling, British Cycling weekly, the UK, and then also Milo de psychlies. It was like a French magazine. It was like, we never saw, I never saw anybody ride a bike in Europe until I was in my 20s, because there were no video at the time, right? And it was like you had to, there was, it wasn’t on TV ever, you know. So you’d never see people doing it. And anybody you’d see out riding at the time in the 60s, you’d stop and say, who are you? Change phone numbers, you know, unless together and all that.

Jeff Barber 8:18
You’re connecting a lot of dots here for me, anyway, the larkspur Canyon gang, first of all, that predates repack. And you’re saying this is, this was like a high school group essentially.

Gary Fisher 8:29
Well, yeah, I got out of high school and I moved in with the debt over in the hate and then I worked for them. I worked for the airplane. And then came a thing called Altamont that was in December of 1969 and we hosted the hell Well, it was, it was the Rolling Stones. So Sam Cutler, The Rolling Stones. Ron racco from the Grateful Dead, Bill Thompson from the Jefferson Airplane, and Sonny Barger, they were all in a meeting on this house in Ron Rocco’s house on Sacramento Street. I was there. And, you know, I was a kid. I worked, you know, I was 1718, I did light shows, and I worked for a company called Grand ultimate steward company, or Gus. We used to take care of the dead. We used to take care of the airplane to see all this shit go down. You couldn’t believe it, man. And that was a mess, you know, and four people died at that concert. Oh, wow. Everybody left town, so I moved out of town, moved back to Marin County, to Kent field with a band called new riders of the purple sage. They were an offshoot of the Grateful Dead. They were psychedelic country western. And we all lived in Kent field. I took care of the house, man. I had free rent, and I started riding my bike a whole bunch again, and I ran into Charlie Kelly. Everybody was telling me, Oh, you got to see this guy, Charlie. He’s just like, you man, and like, we both had orange colnagos. We both had long hair, and he was a roadie for a band called the Sons of Champlin. I met him, and it’s like, hey, let’s move in together. Let’s have a pad, let’s do a thing. So we moved in together. And. Um, I introduced Charlie to the Fat Tire thing, and we went out all the first ride we did, we did on single speeds. And the next week, I’m saying, Hey, I got to put gears on this thing, and I got to put, you know, brakes on this thing. So within about a month’s time, I put together my original clunker. Then I, the next month, I put one together for Charlie. This was in September of 1974 and later on, in December, was a cycle cross race I rode, I rode my cross bike, and I met the guys from Cupertino, and they had their fat tire bikes. I said, that’s cool. I did not get any ideas from those guys. They didn’t get any ideas from me, yeah, did it spontaneously on their own? Yeah, that’s interesting. There’s other people too. You know, Victor vincenti, who was Michael hiltner. I knew of Michael hiltner in 1964 65 he won the National Road Championships in 1965 in LA that was the first Road Championships they’d had in over 25 years. Everything else was on the track all that time. So it was in Northern California. Southern California was a resurgence of road racing in the 60s, in the mid to late 60s, and then came the 70s. 73 was a gas war, and things went nuts. I mean, it was like bikes went from 4.7 million circular sales in one year to 15 million. Whoa, 74 it was crazy, you know, and everybody had to have a bike. And was the bike craze. And so we started Vela club, Temel PIAs at that time, it was a, you know, that was with Charlie. We’d been doing, but we’d already been doing, we started doing the repack races, and it was just because it was fun, you know, yeah, it was crazy, yeah.

Jeff Barber 11:48
So much of that story too just seems to connect with mountain biking today. I mean, the biker gang sort of mentality, you know, mountain biking is definitely got, like, more of an edge to it than than road biking and and the, you know, to the beer drinking, you know? I mean, that’s a big part of our culture now, and, right? It’s just really fascinating that that has endured and that that’s what separates us. I mean, people like you mentioned people had been riding bikes off road for, yeah, a long time, but this was something new.

Gary Fisher 12:18
There’s, there’s a number of things, but you take the history was funny, you know? It’s like, okay, I may, you know, the original bikes he rode in repack, they were pretty laid back. I mean, his 68 degree head, they’re really heavy wheels. I mean, steel rims, you know. So they were really heavy duty. And the tires are super heavy duty. They didn’t flat. And you can run them down to, like, 20 psi. We do that all the time. Oh, wow. And that was sort of our expense suspension. And it’s really funny. I mean, then we went the other way. I mean, we went, we made light frames. And, you know, it’s really funny. You take Joe breeze, his first bike that he made, very first one that was like, 36 pounds, 38 pounds, right? It had, it had steel rims on it. It had caliper brakes. I mean, cantilever brakes, those brakes are sort of worthless in the wet, you know. So, like, it’s an evolution, you know. But where we went, I mean, we went like the bike I had in for winning repack that thing, the drum brakes on that thing were ridiculously powerful, you know? They were like, they were wonderful. They were like, one finger brakes. They were amazing, you know. And there was a tandem candle tandem drum brake, so it had a lot of top of power and really big cables. Then we went to cantilever brakes. And when you had steel rooms, they were sort of ridiculous. Then the BMX guys came along with the alloy rims, because they had the cruiser class, and the alloy rims were, like, so much lighter. There were 19 ounces each, where the old steel rims were 55 ounces each.

Jeff Barber 13:54
Wow. You know, that’s, that’s more than three pounds.

Gary Fisher 13:57
They were amazing. You know, as far as gyroscopic stability. And then they were, like, really rounded on the edges of the rim. So, like, you couldn’t rim pinch very easy on them. They were amazing. They were actually, they worked pretty well for the intended use downward climbing. It was horrible, you know. So all of a sudden, you know, 1979 we start this company, mountain bikes, and we can put together a bike that’s like 27 pounds. That bike does not go downhill like the old bikes do believe, you know, but it sure does climb. And then the races start, you know, and all the racing and everything, and we get into this lighter and lighter and lighter thing, you know, super light. The race is won and lost on the climb. So and then comes John Tomac, and he is riding a 73 degree head angle, and he dropped bars. And, you know, and Charlie Cunningham had dropped bars, but his bars started from a pretty high position. So they didn’t go down that far. And the same with like Scott Nichols has run and dropped bars, but it was all about climbing. And, you know, make it to the top fast, and making all your time there and everything. Yeah, bikes just started to reflect that. And, you know, thank God, it’s come full circle.

Jeff Barber 15:17
Yeah, well, but even, I mean, it’s only come full circle in my mind just within the last few years. I mean, we’re still seeing that evolution back toward the original, you know, was talking to Joe Brees about that, those early bikes that he made, and, you know, talking about a 68 degree head tube angle. I mean, that’s what. So everybody’s going to now for like, a trail bike, you know? And it’s kind of like we’re going back to that in the the tires too, that you’re saying how the old tires could run them really low pressures. And it’s like, last few years people are saying, Yeah, geez, you know, it’s actually kind of nice running them at 20 psi. Let’s see what we can do to make that happen.

Gary Fisher 15:56
And you look at what they’re doing with all the inserts on the town DH tires and everything. They’re finally getting to a place where they you can have your cake and eat it too. There was a period of time where, like, people were running like, 40 PSI, 45 all the time, because they were just worried about rim pinch, you know, that was a big and they were getting to be horrible bikes to ride, yeah. And, and it was before, you know, we got into really good suspension, you know. And the first suspension was, you know, really squirrely and awful.

Jeff Barber 16:26
Yeah. I mean, you were one of the first to add suspension to a mountain bike. What did people think about it at that time? Did they think it was a good thing? Did they think it was weird? Did they think it was cheating?

Gary Fisher 16:38
I had to argue with my sales guys, tooth and nail, they were like, nobody’s gonna buy that. And this was the mount tam in 1991 and it was basically a suspension ready design that I did with Paul Turner, you know. And we were the first ones to have a bike that came with a shock for and my sales guys are saying, Look, man, it adds 400 bucks to the cost to the sales point of the bike. It adds a couple of pounds. And everybody was in a weight war, yeah, you know. And he’s just like, No, no, no. And then we came outfit. Six months later, they were super happy, yeah, you know. And then the next year, we did the bike with, with Mert, Lyle, RS one, and that bike was like crazy. It was, like, too far ahead of its time, you know? It’s like, man, we had a disc brake, you know, and it didn’t work.

Jeff Barber 17:33
Were people confused about the bike? Were they? Were they thinking like, is this a motorbike, or is this because suspension had been around on motorcycles, but Was it weird to people to see it on a mountain bike?

Gary Fisher 17:44
Oh, completely. Well, there was that big divide, because you had guys, you know, well, like Joe and like Tom Ritchie that are all like, hardcore roadies, you know, from the, you know, and they were looking at that and saying, oh, no, can’t we do something else instead of that, you know, making it look like a motorcycle. They say, Oh, that looks like a motorcycle. And at the same time, I mean, like, I’ve always been into embracing people from other places, you know, that’s what Mert Lowell represented to me. I mean, I love working with Mert. He just had a big, wild, open imagination, you know. And that bike was a huge lesson to us. You know, it was. We learned so much through that thing. And we made 750 of them. We sold them all. People that bought them were early adopters, total pioneers. And I don’t care about the naysayers, you know. I mean, you know, it’s like cross country mountain biking now has technicalities in it, and so do the bikes. And that’s because I, your friend right here, went to the UCI, and you want to in the act of getting them to accept the 29 ER, because 20 Niners were illegal until I had them change the rule. Oh, wow, yeah, because I they said to me, Hey, we don’t want to have, you know, 29 inch be allowed 700 C, you know, we don’t want people bringing cross bikes. I said, Look, stop making mountain bike courses that are ‘cross courses.

Jeff Barber 19:11
That’s a good, good solution, make them mountain bike courses.

Gary Fisher 19:15
And so they did. And so they are, you know, and it’s be, and it’s because that’s what people want to ride. You know, they want to ride stuff like this because it’s a lot of fun. Yeah, the technical thing of, like, wow, I clean that. You know, there’s always been a lot of fun on a mountain bike. I mean, you know. And just think, yeah, you can make a course faster and faster, and then what do you got? You got a road course, you know, you got a dirt crit or something like that, you know, yeah, it’s not mountain biking, so I’m totally happy, which was with what’s been going on, you know, we’ve got choice, you know, all kinds of crazy stuff out there, right? And we’ve been perfecting it and make it work. I mean, you know, it’s like, we’ve got the ability to make these huge tires that are relatively light, incredibly tough. And then we take the suspension and tune it to that setup, because that’s a different setup, you know, and go through all the stuff and do it thoroughly, yeah, and do it correctly, you know, I love having the resource to be able to do these things now. So, you know, you’re going to be able to get a bike that really suits what your needs are, you know, what you as a rider likes groks. I mean, you know, come on and, and that’s the funny thing. I mean, we’re not all about just time, time, time. I mean, we still get the the downhill is always fascinating, because it’s judged by time, you know that? But, man, we got all these other events now that it’s just not always just flat out time, you know?

Jeff Barber 20:40
Yeah, well, you were involved in a lot of the competition stuff in the 90s, right? Working with race teams.

Gary Fisher 20:48
I worked with NORBA for a long time, almost 20 years, which is like, been, sort of like, gone through not the best of times. I mean, we made the biggest mistake at the Olympics in Atlanta. We hired a really cheap production crew, and at the same time it costs, like crazy, where 46 cameras, wow, you know, for that event, it was crazy, you know, like the costs, and then the event was horrible, you know, it was just, and it came down to the course, more than anything.

Jeff Barber 21:17
I’ve seen videos of that. I’m based here in Atlanta. So we do ride those trails now, and they’re completely different. If you look at the videos, there’s like, a real grainy video on YouTube. People can look up, but the trail I’m using air quotes here is like, it’s like a highway. I mean, it just was, like flat and wide open, and I suppose that was to make it more exciting, because they thought people would be passing and things like that.

Gary Fisher 21:43
Well the most, the most incredible thing. Now, I mean, we didn’t spend any money. That was a problem. You know, now it’s like, the their purpose built trails, those are the most incredible things. That’s like, people ask me about, technically, what’s the most incredible thing that happened in the last 10 years? The trails Come on. You mean, you think about how many trails have been built for mountain bikers, by mountain bikers, that’s what makes it, yeah. I mean, you know, that’s what really makes the whole thing, and makes the whole sport go.

Jeff Barber 22:13
Well, I mean, what would you say drives mountain bike design more? What has historically? I mean, is it the competition side, or is it the like, let’s just keep making bikes more fun and making them so people can enjoy trails.

Gary Fisher 22:29
Well, it’s, it’s both, you know, come on. I mean, the competition guys just, they’re racking their brains every weekend, you know, to come up with something better and and that’s more a thing of refinement. And then just the people of like, Hey, man, I got a big, bigger joke than you do. Watch this, right? You know? And what are we doing? We’re pulling each other’s chain, trying to have a good time. And, man, when you got something that’s undeniably just like, we’re having huge fun and everything, it’s just like, unstoppable, right? So that’s what we’re always trying to, like, identify and to try and serve. And we do, you know, we’ve done maybe almost too good of job of it, and that we make all these different permutations of bikes, a million permutations of bikes, and not enough people to tell you just ride this. You can’t stand it, you know what I’m saying? We get too hung up in the decision. But hey, we’re working on that too. I mean, that’s a huge part of, like, what we’re doing right now as a company, is working on the way that we present our bikes and that we we show people, and it’s more about, you know, hey, you could do this, or this is possible, or this is a lot of fun, instead of, like, the nut and bolt part of it, you know, just like, this is a this type of tire and that type of thing, you know, because really, it’s like 90% of people in the business to get excited about all that technical stuff, and only 30% of humans get excited about that. The rest of them are going, like, come on.

Jeff Barber 24:01
I mean, you’re selling an experience. You know, if people don’t want to get weighed down in the technical details, they they just want to, most of us just want to go out and have fun.

Gary Fisher 24:10
At the same time, you don’t want to be a fool. You don’t want to be a chump. You want to know your stuff, right, right? You know. You don’t want to get rolled on the thing, you know, because you can get, everybody knows. I mean, you get into something that’s being sold off, because this isn’t going anywhere, you know, this is, like, the supply and this is going away, and, like, there’s a dead end, yeah, you know, that’s what we experience all the time with a lot of electronica. You know, it’s like, you get into something and you get, I mean, everybody’s got stuff, old media, electronica, media is like, oh, man, I don’t even think I can play that anymore.

Jeff Barber 24:41
Yeah, a friend just handed me a CD ROM with some photos from a ride. And I was like, I don’t know what to do with this. I’m sorry.

So you were one of the first to experiment with carbon fiber mountain bike frames. So what, what were some of the challenges involved in that in the early days?

Gary Fisher 25:42
Well, the early days was trying to get those big companies to, like, really do something that really worked. You know, it was hard. I mean, our their first carbon fiber experience was with Torre, which was a big Japanese company, and they still make a ton of carbon fiber for the industry and for bikes and everything, and that was great. But, man, we only made seven bikes at the end of the day. Oh, wow. It wasn’t reality, you know. And I think about Trek and how they Okay, there was a certain racer that won seven Tour de Frances, and people don’t even say his name, and he brought a lot of goodness to the bike industry, you know, and that a lot of bike sales, a lot of people were excited about bikes, and New York Times to carry bike racing every single day. So would all the other media and everything, and like it or not, bike bikes were big there for a while, and he won his first tour, and he won it on one of our carbon fiber bikes. And traditionally, you’d make 500 bikes and say, there’s a replica, you know, you can buy this for a lot of money, and we’d sell them out. And we decided to make 20,000 bikes because we knew people would like it, although it was a crazy new category, five to $10,000 bicycle, right? It was a totally whole new place. And people got into it because the bike actually worked. It actually felt good, you know? I mean, I had other, you know, early carbon bikes, like I had a calfia by Greg Lamond by calfy really early on. And that bike was a cool, you know, concept, and it rode pretty nice, but, man, it was dead, and it wasn’t that light was amazing. I had aluminum frame that was lighter than that one. It was crazy, you know. I mean, everything has evolved, you know, and it keeps going. And that’s the thing we did, is we built a lot of those bikes, and we sold them all. And instead of a dealer being able to sell one or maybe two, they sold like, 10 or 20.

Jeff Barber 27:57
Wow. So there’s a lot of demand for that. I mean, were people skeptical?

Gary Fisher 28:03
No, because we had a guarantee, and our guarantee is always good, been good. We got a great reputation guarantee, so they weren’t skeptical. You know, they Yeah. I mean, a skepticism is like, Wow, do you trust carbon? Right? Right? That was back then, and we stepped in it in a big way. We said, no, no, no, your lifetime guarantee, just like all of our other bikes. And people said, Okay, you guys, you replaced my last bike really well.

Jeff Barber 28:26
So was there any worry on your end? I mean, having not done that before, did you all do a lot of the research?

Gary Fisher 28:32
No, no, no.. We had no. We had always done it. And we had a few crazy guys in the company that said, we really believe this will make a superior bike. And it didn’t sell for beans for us until that one particular guy won a Tour de France on it. But just like having a downhill bike, you know that there’s a certain downhiller that we had him for a while, specialized had him for a while, and now he sells somebody else’s bike. And, man, it sells really well, right? That all works. I mean, you know, it’s totally irrational and unreasonable, but boy, it works, yeah, it works for them. That’s a good downhiller. That’s a good road rider. You know, what it was, entertainment, whatever it worked, you know, but we stepped up to the plate and we made it a real thing, because it wasn’t a real thing. I mean, before that, it was like, you know, a really nice bike. When I started this, you could buy a full Campagnolo Cinelli for $200 199 bucks, full on, okay? And then it was like in the 70s. When we started mountain bikes, the company our bike the 1979 sold for $1,320 it was a lot. You could buy. You could buy a full on Colnago with full campanello. And because campanello, at the time, there was a lot of gray market going on, because Campanella would sell direct to give groups directly to the teams, the race teams, and then the race teams would sell for whatever they felt like. Ooh. Anyway. You buy that for 450 bucks. You could get a Ben Sirota, a beautiful custom bike, you know, for 995 you know, complete, you know, it was crazy, and our bike was $1,320 it was beautiful. And we’d say to people, well, you don’t want a cheap parachute. And they bought them like crazy, and it was and they were beautiful. We stood behind them, and we took the perception of what a bike cost to a different place. Yeah, and it’s trek. Did the same thing with the carbon bike. And you need to do that every now and again in order to, like, reset the whole industry. Because come on, man, I’m sorry, but bikes, in this great, grand scheme of people’s stuff, a really, really nice bike made in the way of NASA or the way of Formula One. And what can you buy in that category there cost 10 grand, 15 grand, and people will spend that kind of money on a vacation at the drop of a hat. You know, it’s crazy. Kind of money that’s out there these days is crazy, you know, at the same time, you know, I guess our president is going to make the price of bikes go up.

Jeff Barber 31:02
Sounds like that’s a that’s a real possibility. Is it ever that’s going to hurt a little so you alluded to some of the innovations and things that are happening right now. What are you most excited about in terms of the new technology and things that are happening with bikes over the last few years?

Gary Fisher 31:18
I guess you know, there’s just, there’s a lot of progress in every area. I think the thing I am most excited about is making the dreams come true. And the guy who did that before us was Steve Jobs and Apple, you know, because all the computer guys would say, Hey, you can do this, you can do that, you can do this, you can do that. And for the average person, it didn’t come true, yeah, you know, they they weren’t geek enough to be able to pull it off, and Apple pulled it off, and it was a retail interface. And that’s what I’m talking about, is like, being able to, like, have a place of respectfulness for anybody, and of help, you know, and of information. And, you know, it’s the old thing, the old Pogo cartoon. We have met the enemy, and he is right. You know, it’s like have a bad attitude, making people unhappy, right? You know, if that’s not going, yeah, no, we’re a happy machine. We like to say this is the world’s happiest invention.

Jeff Barber 32:21
I do believe that, yeah, there’s a good case for that.

Gary Fisher 32:25
There’s a real big case for that. And let me sit down with you and explain why. You know, I mean, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever discovered. I’d love to share it with you, and you’ve come to the right place.

Jeff Barber 32:35
Well, that’s really interesting, that you bring up Steve Jobs and Apple. I mean, this is a parallel that I’ve seen in my mind, anyway. And some of the other guys, Joe Breeze and Tom Ritchie, you know, I asked them similar questions about about the place. I mean, the Bay Area is, is there something about that place where, where these ideas sort of germinate more easily. I mean, I just find it fascinating that mountain biking, and, you know, a lot of the great tech booms, you know, have come from the same place.

Gary Fisher 33:08
Well, yeah. I mean, it’s like, Jobst Brandt, the guy that taught us a lot about basic bikes, how they’re built, why they’re built that way. Now he worked for Hewlett Packard. And you can also see placard that dedicated to him on the Stanford Linear Accelerator. And this is, like, typical, like, we like, of like, the mix of knowledge, you know, study, and then some wild new things, like Stewart Brand. He did the whole earth catalog, right? I did the bicycle section for the whole earth catalog. And these were people that I met through the dead and through Ken Kesey and his group of people. These guys, you know, it’s always been the attitude of like, well, why not? We can do that, yeah, you know. And that’s been, that’s been seeped in the Bay Area for the longest time. Was, like, that whole thing with the Altamont that was a takeoff on Woodstock. And Woodstock was about, Wow, man, we have got amplification, and we can create this mega concert that couldn’t be done before. I think we take it for granted. Yeah, that all is as possible.

Jeff Barber 34:15
That’s really cool and really hopeful for the industry as well.

Gary Fisher 34:19
For the industry, though, I will tell you it’s like part of it is this interface that we make better shops and better ways that we supply people and take care of people better information. Okay, that’s one thing. The others are with the kids, the school kids, right? The Nica thing, we want to be in every single high school in the United States. It’s 179,000 high schools. Wow. We want to be in every single one.

Jeff Barber 34:47
That’s ambitious.

Gary Fisher 34:49
And then, yeah, and then, as far as, like, we’re on a program too. We’re trying to talk to a lot of city leaders about doing more mountain bike routes in the cities being. Especially like, you know, creating a network that’s, like, Safe Routes to School that goes through buildings over streets, sort of dominates the second floor start Routes to School, yeah, like, raise indoor mountain bike park bed, where you got, like, a challenge, and then you got to go around all the time. You know, a feature and a go around, because it, we know now, it helps kids calm down and be more focused when they’re in class and people that you know it on. It’s all about making the cities a place where you’d actually want to raise your kids.

Jeff Barber 35:29
That’s a really cool goal. I believe that mountain bikes are part of that, for sure.

Gary Fisher 35:34
Why not? You know, let’s have fun with the thing. It’s like, those rig the city. So it’s like, it’s actually fun.

Jeff Barber 35:42
Yeah, that’s like a playground, yeah? I like it.

Gary Fisher 35:44
Well, yeah, and a really healthy one at that, you know? And it’s like, because it’s all about taking those things, you know, that are good for you and making him a lot of fun.

Jeff Barber 35:55
So we started at the beginning talking a lot about mountain bike culture in the early days, and sort of how it’s evolved. Would a modern mountain biker feel welcome among that first group of riders from Repack?

Gary Fisher 36:09
Definitely, you know, they just have to lay aside their Well, no. I mean, there were always those within the group that were competitive. Always will be, you know. But then there was like, hey, it was like, Are you having fun? Right now, that’s always a question you got to ask, you know? So, yeah.

Jeff Barber 36:29
As long as you have an open mind and you want to have fun, then, I mean, it seems like that would be that was kind of the only requirement to be a part of that.

Gary Fisher 36:39
It wasn’t uptight roadies, that was for sure. I mean, you know, it was like, the basic tenets is, like, everybody gets a place, everybody has a finished time. Everybody, you know, gets respect, you know, last finishers or last person in it just as important as the first one you know, and the fast experience is just over faster. That’s it.

Jeff Barber 37:06
Well, obviously you see a lot of opportunity with mountain bikes and mountain biking in the future. Are there any challenges that you see that we’re facing right now, or that maybe we’re going to face in the future?

Gary Fisher 37:17
Yeah, mostly my generation that doesn’t understand and it just like we’re dying off.

Jeff Barber 37:23
Don’t understand in what way, like trail access, or…?

Gary Fisher 37:28
Any of that. They just think it’s all like for the betterment of, like, just a few people having thrills, and the thrills aren’t fun. Yeah, you know. So it’s this is plenty of that here in Marin County. You know, it’s, it’s difficult. You know, people are, they just don’t understand. You know what we’re doing. But fortunately, the kids do. You know, that’s what’s amazing, is that with Nica, we don’t have to bribe the kids to be on the team, right? We there is the teams wind up being bigger than the football teams. Football’s in decline a bit. But you know, overall, athletics, and especially girls athletics, are coming up, and we have more and more evidence that this is really good and good quality and that it’s not in the long term, we save money by doing this, especially we get the kids to ride to school and learn their own responsibility and everything. So it’s, it’s a movement. It’s a grassroots movement. And the grassroots movements are defined by these are things that people would do left on their own. You know, this, it’s not like the big, bad bike coalitions are putting this together, which is another really funny thing. I was at the Nike convention, you know, a couple of months ago, and I was talking there, and I said, Hey guys, I’ll tell you, a really good source of money in the cities is all the rideshare guys. Oh yeah, Scooter guys, all these guys like bird, they’re evaluated at $2 billion geez, they they’re talking about, these guys are talking about, I love what these guys say. They say, why do we have all these cars in the city? Why don’t we have, you know, separate, uh, Scooter bike lanes from the cars? We’ll even pay for them. They’re even saying that these are the guys are going to make this crazy stuff come through, come true.

Jeff Barber 39:17
Yeah. Is anybody in the bike industry? You think doing that as well? Seems like trek is definitely involved.

Gary Fisher 39:24
Well, we throw more money than any other bike company, okay? And I forget at one point, we figured it out we were doing like, seven times as much as number two. Okay, let me tell you these other guys, bird and these other guys, they got real money. They’re gonna do like 5050, times as much as we do, that’s going to have an effect. I mean, I’m just talking about the size of the money. They’re much bigger than we are.

Jeff Barber 39:47
Yeah, well, it’s like, that’s baked into a lot of these business models now. I mean, do you think were bike companies thinking about that in those early days? I mean, with, with, were you thinking about that? With mountain bikes and with your own label?

Gary Fisher 40:02
Well, bikes all the time, like all the time, and as a kid riding around saying, it’s so easy for me to ride around, and people are so stupid in their cars, and then they get they’re unhealthy, and this thing is so dangerous, this is crazy and polluting and everything, and it’s just a big scam. You know, the whole thing to know. In a lot of ways, it is, you know. And you go through the history of the whole thing, they were really had a lot of imagination, a lot of will, you know. And they made us dependent on automobiles, 100% in the United States, it’s the world’s most expensive transit system. You know, when you try to, when you go to, like, the cost of moving an individual around, and then it doesn’t work. We get traffic jams that are, like, ridiculous, and people don’t like to do things. You know, it’s the bike thing. When you travel around, you go to other countries, they have have and evolved bike infrastructure. It’s like, wow, this is incredible, you know, because a lot of cities couldn’t exist the way they are in Northern Europe, you know a lot of you know Amsterdam, all these you know cities in Holland and and Sweden and all these places, they could not exist with the density they have. It’s like going to Tokyo. I mean, there are 20 million people in Tokyo. It’s one of the largest cities on earth, and they use subways and bikes and walking like you can’t believe. You know, you did bikes everywhere. You know, from an engineering standpoint, that city would be absolutely impossible without those two things, those three things, you know, and ours is, we went on a program of, in his states, of getting rid of pedestrian and bicycle and all the and transit. You know, starting in 1932 General Motors. Was Chairman Sloan. He was a genius of General Motors, and he formed a consortium with Standard Oil back truck, Firestone Tire. They bought up 87 different rail entities in the United States. They put them all out of business. They would go into receivership, and then for forgiveness of debt, they would turn over the right of way to the municipality under the proviso that the tracks be torn out. They’d be paved over and all the trolley cars burned. Now, in 1947 the US government found them all guilty of a conspiracy. They fined the individuals $1 each, and the corporation’s $5,000 each. And remember, at the time, we had a slogan, what’s good for General Motors is good for the United States. Now, in 1956 Dwight Eisenhower, our president, spent more money than ever before had been spent, and actually than ever has been spent since, and adjusted for inflation, on one thing. That’s the interstate freeway system. We’re having a hard time repairing the thing right now. You know, it doesn’t move people around so much, so it’s like we made a heavy duty investment in that and for us to like, back out of it. Ooh, it’s sort of painful. You realize this when you travel in Europe, go to Asia, and especially now China, oh, man, they put in a ton of high speed rail, you know? They realized that, like, cars were not going to be the answer, and we’re just going to create more pollution thing. And they’re trying to get a hold of their whole pollution because they’re trying to, like, create a good environment for people to raise their families. And we’re going the other direction.

Jeff Barber 43:19
Well, cars seem to be a part of mountain biking culture today. I mean, for most people, when they imagine going for a mountain bike ride, they imagine, you know, I’d load the bike up in the car, and then I drive 30 minutes or whatever to the trailhead. But was that something that you did in the early days, or were you all able to ride, you know, to all the trails? I mean, was there a lot of driving involved.

Gary Fisher 43:41
Yes and no, yes and no, you know, come on. I mean, like, I was a hardcore, I’d say I’m gonna ride to everything, right? But then Fred, good old Fred Wolf, I mean, he made the thing happen because he had a truck, and he take people here and there. No, it did, you know, and it and so I’m not gonna say we were pure, you know, we had a lot of attitude about bikes and cars and a whole thing like that. But no, we weren’t pure, no way. And B, I mean, it’s like, come on, I’ve been sponsored by Subaru, by Saab 20 years. I had a free car. So I’m going to complain, you know, it’s a nice perk. It’s a real nice perk, you know. But it’s like, am I going to complain? Well, you know, it’s sort of like the car brought us all kinds of good things, right? I mean, Chairman Sloan was a genius doing what he did. But too much is too much, you know, that’s on cars as we know them, do not belong in our cities, you know, as anyway I could go on about this.

Jeff Barber 44:38
I mean, clearly you’re, you’re passionate about it and the transportation thing. I mean, that’s a theme that that we hear from a lot of people in your position in the industry, that this is a thing that’s happening, and it’s a The bikes are a great solution, and especially when it comes to electric bikes. And so what are your thoughts on that as it pertains to mount. Mountain biking. Do you think electrics have a good place in mountain biking or or, how does that sort of fit in?

Gary Fisher 45:06
I like a good, clean, pure bike, and then again, in an acoustic bike, and I also the electric though. Man, it’s way too much fun. That’s a problem, because you can, you know, you you equip the bike with more heavy duty stuff, because you’re not worried about the weight so much. And man, what a rippin bike that thing is, and it’s still, you know, this is the world’s most efficient motorized transport, right? And the guys in the Forest Service, they’re starting to eat up because they’re quiet, right? They don’t think about the same amount of noise as the wind rustling the leaves, right? And they like them quiet, because you can hear your victim. You know they want to go on search and rescue, and they can hear their victim. They can’t do that with a helicopter or a motorcycle or an ATV, and then it’s like it is the cheapest way for you to get around your property, and in a lot of cases, the fastest. So we’re actually selling a lot of electric mountain bikes to the Forest Service guys. So it’s, it’s like, and then it’s like, they’re not, like, the big problem, man, you got, like, motorcycles and bikes don’t mix so well, because the Moto guy has a full face helmet. He’s making a lot of noise. He doesn’t hear you, man, he can’t hear you. And a guy on an electric bike. Can actually hear you yammering and stuff, and, you know, and riding along, you can electric bike is quiet enough where you can hear somebody on a regular bike. So we’re also watching what happens in Europe, because they’ve been around there for 10 years, electric mountain bike. And there are places where there’s lots of them, and they’re, you know, they’re just suffering sometimes from just there’s a lot of mountain bikers, so then you got to direct things and make things and deal with the pressure. But it’s funny. I mean, we had our Marin County board of supervisors had a meeting couple of months ago, said they announced the meeting and said we plan to ban electric mountain bikes from the Water District, and, you know, in all the territory out here. And so a bunch of old people showed up the right electric mountain bikes and said, Hey, we’ve been doing this for a few years. We don’t bother anybody. Or the supervisor said, Okay, we’re not going to ban them. And in fact, I’m telling you, the old people run this place called Marin County. There’s a bunch of old people here, and there are other counties. It’s the oldest population in the whole bay area, and the population is old. And I go to other places. I go to the southeast of the United States. I go to the Midwest, and people are so open to mountain bikes and realize all the goodness it does for kids. And right here, it’s, it’s funny. I mean, all seven high schools have got a team. So this is, you know, and it’s really funny, there’s an underground movement in the water district, which is the biggest district, and and all the other guys, the Rangers, the young Rangers, to say, I look the other way. Man. No, seriously, they do, you know. And the old guy. There are the guys that want to nail everybody.

Jeff Barber 48:01
Well, fortunately, a lot of the younger guys, you know, I see this all the time, where people who started writing in the 80s or the 90s, you know, now, they’re the guys who are in charge of some of these groups. And, you know, they’re that’s that’s changing and and it’s gonna change. It’s inevitable, just based on demographics. But what would you make of the sort of the debate among mountain bikers about whether e bikes have a place within mountain biking or not? Does that kind of bother you that people are sort of choosing sides in the debate?

Gary Fisher 48:38
Well, people are people. People are going to talk and everything. You know, one of my very best friends from a long time ago came out totally against bikes, and I told him, I don’t care what you say, you’re always going to be my friend.

Jeff Barber 48:56
That’s a good way to look at it.

Gary Fisher 48:58
And we totally respect each other, you know, but it’s sort of cooling out, you know, the whole thing. And I think it’s definitely going to benefit trail building. There’ll be more trail building, not less.

Jeff Barber 49:13
Well, do you think that’s, I mean, it seems like a lot of people are opposed to it, because they it’s unfamiliar to them, and it’s new is that, I mean, is that another one of those people or people things? Or are mountain bikers more guilty?

Gary Fisher 49:29
No, no, no, no, no. That’s just people being people. That’s people being people, you know? And I’ve seen it all the time. I mean, you know, it’s like, like some of my best racers have been so adamant they don’t want to try some new things out. I gotta hold their hand. I gotta, you know, rub their hand, you know, talk to them, and talk to them and do this. And then finally, after six months, they might try something. And it’s really funny, it’s all over the place. You know, you’d think it would be this way for this type of person, that type of person, it’s all over the place. That’s okay. And a lot of that has been because they. We hadn’t actually ridden one, or seen one, or seen the reactions. They hadn’t done anything. So there’s, it takes time, you know, and we see this, I mean, it’s like I was saying, like when we put a shock fork on there, I mean, a unit crown fork, that was the look. And to put this thing on there, that was like it looked like a Bontrager fork, but then it had these stanchions with rubber booties and all this crazy stuff on it is like, that looks strange. And then three, four years later, that looked normal, and the other setup looks strange. And that’s just the evolution of things and how things go, you know? And it’s like, man, the way bikes look today is really different. And so from even, like, 10 years ago, yeah, I love it, you know. It’s like the thing with carbon, you know, and and with hydroforming of aluminum. I mean, 15 years ago, we couldn’t say, sell a curve to bike to seller, you know, save our soul. And now it’s like they all have curves and shapes. And they’re beautiful, you know. And they’re well worked out, because you work it all out on it, on, on the computer, you know, and you really can what’s happening, you know. It’s like we used to have to build things and then destructively test it, or, you know, ride it and all this stuff. And it would take so long, and it was so little. Everything was so conservative, you know? And it’s really opened up. I love it, you know?

Jeff Barber 51:26
Yeah, yeah. Well, clearly, you’re someone who’s willing to embrace change and to try new things and and you’ve had a lot of success because of it. So hopefully that’ll be a model for others to sort of follow in the years to come.

Gary Fisher 51:39
We embrace change, but we try to do it responsibly. You know, it was like way, way back in the day 1980 we had an opportunity to use 700 C or 650 B tires. We had some from Finland. We had a supply we could get our hands on. They were like 44 millimeter. And really, if we had really worked on it hard, we could have gotten some custom tires made. But man, every bike shopping in any states had a 26 by 2125, tire in it, a Uniroyal knobby for $11.95 and this tire we would have had, this had to have sold for $130 each. And nobody was selling tires for that expensive. It was like, you make decisions based on practicality. Sometimes you have to have tires available. I mean, God, you can make a tire a bike that, like, the tires are, like, really expensive, only I supply them, and you can get them anywhere else that sounds not good, you know. And you take what happened when the 650 B, you know, hit a 27 and a half man, it’s like everybody stood up and said, Okay, we’re gonna do be silly like we were with the 29 ER, and we’re gonna supply these things. And it’s like, boom, I can get these easily. This is great. And I can get a huge variety of these things. I love it, you know. So I like that we’ve got more variety and everything. I like that, you know, the 27 plus size a lot. Yeah. I mean, it’s a 20 diner, almost on the outside. It’s pretty but, man, that thing’s got, it’s got plushness and everything. Then it’s like, you know, our 29 plus, that’s almost 31 inches, and it’s like, 100 years ago, the two most popular sizes in bikes and everything was off road was 28 and 32 inches. Of course, they were sort of narrow and everything. But what do they know about that? I mean, the outside diameter and everything. It has a lot to do with, sort of the speed that a bike handles at. You know, the gyroscopic is the combination of both the gyroscopic stability thing going on, and then just how long the wheelbase gets stretched out to and everything, especially the rear ends and everything. So it’s funny me, diameter is one thing, and then the whole thing with width and plushes, oh, man, that’s a whole new place that we’ve been able to take it, you know, it’s like, you used to be able to do that, but it was all the high quality stuff was in road and cyclocross bikes and all that way back in the day. And then finally, you know, we’re getting better and better tires and, like, 26 and all that. And now it’s like, Wow, you got all these different crazy sizes that you can play around with. Yeah, so as a designer, you know, it’s a it’s really great to be able to have the resource, you know, to play around with it. I’m glad people aren’t afraid to play with stuff. Now that’s like, what I’m proudest of is, like, I sort of broke down some doors and let people, like, run inside, and now they’re trying things even I couldn’t have imagined. I love that.

Jeff Barber 54:44
Yeah, that’s really cool. Well, you’ve been such a huge influence on the industry and the culture. Thank you for sharing the story with us and for letting us know what’s going on with mountain biking today.

Gary Fisher 54:58
Thanks to everybody that dedicates themselves, their bodies, their hearts, their souls, into this beautiful sport. And let’s go out and make the sport better. And let’s go out and teach our kids about it. And let’s go out and knock down the institutions that say no.

Jeff Barber 55:17
Well, you can keep up with the latest news from Gary Fisher and the trek brand at trekbikes, DotCom, and you can follow Gary on Twitter at Gary underscore Fisher, and be sure to subscribe to the Singletracks podcast so you don’t miss more interviews like this one. We’ll talk to you again next week. Peace.