Charlie Kelly Talks About the Birth of Mountain Biking and MTB Culture [Podcast #161]

On this Episode

Charlie Kelly is a man who can rightfully claim many firsts in the sport of mountain biking: promoting the first mountain bike race, co-founding the first company to sell complete mountain bikes, and starting the first mountain bike magazine, Fat Tire Flyer. He’s known as one of the founding fathers of mountain biking, and is a member of the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame.

I talk with Charlie about the early days of mountain biking, and how he and others helped shape the mountain bike culture of today. Check out Charlie’s website for more about MTB history, including photos.

There is also a Go Fund Me campaign to digitize Charlie’s massive collection of mountain bike media collected from the 1970s through 1992. Watch the video below to get more info and donate here.

Thanks to Stio for sponsoring this episode. Go to stio.com/singletracks to check out their entire Pedal Collection of shorts and jerseys, and take up to 70% off through June 25, 2018.

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Automated transcript

Jeff Barber 0:00
Hey everybody, welcome to the Singletracks podcast. My name is Jeff, and today I’m talking with Charlie Kelly, who’s a man who can claim many firsts in the sport of mountain biking. He was the first to promote mountain bike race. He co-founded the first company that sold complete mountain bikes, and even started the first mountain bike magazine, Fat Tire flyer. He’s known as one of the founding fathers of mountain biking, and he’s a member of the mountain bike Hall of Fame. Thanks so much for joining me, Charlie, thanks for the call. The first thing I wanted to ask you is, just when you were starting out, did you ever imagine mountain biking would become such a phenomenon?

Charlie Kelly 0:49
Well, I would be pretty hard to imagine that from you know, depending on what stage you’re talking about, but at the stage when there were maybe seven or eight people with modified bikes that you practically had to make out of Flint. She says, No, I would be pretty, pretty hard to project that. I remember one conversation, one of my friends got pretty excited and said, Ah, this will be in the Olympics someday. And I was kind of dismissive. I said, that’s about as likely as an American winning the Tour de France. So you know, you can tell what era that was from.

Jeff Barber 1:23
Right. So, but you guys were pretty passionate about it. I mean, did you was it the kind of thing where you did it and it was, it was so much fun. I mean, could you imagine other people enjoying it to the degree that you did?

Charlie Kelly 1:36
Well, it was so hard to get into at first, because you had to modify this bicycle in a very specific way. At first, you had to find one of these old things, right, and then you had to do the modifications that really most of them took place at the house that I shared with Gary Fisher and Alan bonds. But it was really hard to get into. You had to be passionate just to get there, right? And so, I mean, if you had the equipment, it was because you already had the passion, right? So, but really, it was a goofy hobby shared by a dozen or more people that not, not that many people really.

Jeff Barber 2:17
Well, what was attracted to you about mountain biking in those really early days, like, what made it different or more exciting than, you know, BMX or road biking or even cyclocross?

Charlie Kelly 2:32
There is no comparison. You know, I’ve been riding road bikes for a long time, but there is no comparison between downhill on dirt and downhill on a nicely paved road. And we found that out. Actually the first, the first experience that I had, other than being a kid, was the day that Gary Fisher and I and another guy just took our town bikes, just one speed town bikes, out on a trail, and we push them and walk them and whatever for a ways, and then turn them around. And it turned out that even on $15 worth of junk, posting downhill on a dirt road is pretty much fun, and it’s actually quite a bit more fun than chasing the guy who’s on your bike laughing while you are running behind him, because we only had two bikes and three guys. But anyway, even on junk, downhill on dirt is fun, yes, and the bikes are no longer junk.

Jeff Barber 3:36
Bikes have definitely changed a lot. What was the demographic like back then with your, you know, sort of that first core group of riders were, you all sort of similar ages and backgrounds?

Charlie Kelly 3:48
Although there was one member of our squad that was, he was actually turned 50 years old. I didn’t realize this. Turned 50 years old the day of the first repack downhill. Wow. And he was a retired firefighter. They get to retire fairly young, but everybody else was between the ages, maybe 25 and 30, a little bit older than children, right, but maybe not full grown yet, right?

Jeff Barber 4:19
Yeah. So you know, for people who don’t know, you all were getting started in Marin, you know, which is part of the San Francisco Bay Area, and today, you know, the Bay Area is known for generating a lot of innovation. You know, there’s these huge, global, successful tech companies like Apple and Google there. So, I mean, would you say, is there something unique about the Bay Area that maybe helped mountain biking catch on with, like, a broader audience, like, do you see yourselves as sort of pioneers, or, like, tech pioneers in any way?

Charlie Kelly 4:50
To some extent, we were just the right people standing in the right place at the right time, because we were not, by any stretch, the first people to take an old bike out there and go. Down a dirt road. I mean that, you know, I’m pretty sure that that had been happening for quite a while. The difference between us, and I guess every other group that might have done that is that we’re also mostly road racers. And so I had this 50 plus pound converted swim bike, and I also had an Italian hand built racing bike. And if you set the old Schwinn next to the racing bike is you could say, actually, I see some room for improvement here, but the room for improvement had to start with someone who could build a frame. And maybe the difference is that, because we were road oriented or not completely, but at least partially road oriented people, we understood the modern concept of frame building, and I felt that if someone would build a frame for this purpose, it could be a lot better bike than what I was riding. And another factor that maybe is not as well known, is that those bikes did not last very long under me and or most of my friends, because they’re built for kids to deliver newspapers on right, and they’re not built for some 200 pound fool the descending, you know, 1300 feet, which was the difference in elevation on repack right in little under five minutes. And I’m sure there’s a formula that will tell you how much heat is generated, but it was considerable. And the other thing is that I rode that bike everywhere for my my town bike, and eventually I would just fatigue the frame, huh? Because it was just not built, built for a guy to race bicycles.

Jeff Barber 6:40
You know, yeah. So would you, I mean, was that unique at the time to have, I mean, you mentioned Joe breeze and I guess Tom Ritchie was building frames around that time too. Was was that going on in other cities? Were there people building bikes sort of from scratch?

Charlie Kelly 6:56
Well there were other people converting old bikes in a similar fashion to what we were doing, because we actually picked it up from some other guys that we saw. But the as far as building a frame for that specific purpose, as far as I know, Joe breeze was the first person to do it, and I leaned on him for most of a year before I talked him into doing it. And it’s kind of ironic, because now Joe breeze, of course, is an internationally renowned bicycle designer, right? And I spent a year talking him into designing the first bicycle that he designed. And, you know, I wouldn’t suggest in a podcast that Joe breeze owes an entire career to me. Maybe just part of it.

Jeff Barber 7:39
Well, I mean, that’s interesting to me too, because today, when, when I think of custom bike frames, I mean, that that’s kind of like a really elite thing, or that’s something that you do if, you know, you have a lot of extra money, or whatever, was that a big deal back then? Like, I mean, it seems like you were pretty dedicated if you’re willing to go to the lengths of having a custom bike designed and commissioned.

Charlie Kelly 8:06
Well, that’s true, because really, you could go into a bike store, and if you had the kind of money that it took, you could leave with a pretty nice Italian or French whatever race bike, and you could buy it off the shelf. Now, if you are going to have one built by a custom frame builder. And this is really actually kind of key to the whole origin story. If you’re going to go into a custom frame builder, then you’re going to go with eight pages of specs, because you can buy a pretty nice bike off the shelf, right? So, right? What? What is it going to cost? WHY would you spend three times the money on that bike frame, if you’re not going to ask for something actually totally unique, right? Okay, now, Tom Ritchie had been building bike frames for seven or eight years. He started when he was 1422, when I met him, actually, and had built over 1000 bikes. And when Gary Fisher brought, well, actually, he saw Joe’s bike, he came and raced on repack and had seen Joe’s bikes, and Gary had asked, Gary Fisher had asked him to build a bike similar to Joe’s. And Tom Richie realized almost immediately that first when he were building these new kinds of bikes that weren’t called mountain bikes, yet. First, you don’t need to buy that $150 double butted tube set. You can use straight gage tubing, and it cost you 20 bucks, right? Or they are that tubing it takes to make a mountain bike, as long as you use in straight gage comes right from the foundry, and just pick the sizes you want. Okay. First, okay, so the tube sets quite a bit cheaper. Second, he realized that nobody’s going to come to him with eight pages of specs on this bike, because he can do two sizes or whatever small variations and build and essentially, again, mass produce them, as much as you can do. A garage. But what that meant was that he could spend a morning cutting 50 tube sets because they’d all be identical, and then start welding in the afternoon, and essentially, he could make five or six of these new kind of bikes in the same time it took to build a custom road bike, and it would cost him maybe a fifth of much for the tubing. And so the Tom Ritchie profit motive did not escape Tom Ritchie. And he thought, well, I’ll just build a few more of these. And then he found out, of course, that that the only people that were tapped into that market were all in Marin County. And he kept with Gary Fisher, and then by just by coincidence me, because Gary and I were pretty well connected at the time, the three of us changed the world while changing each other quite a bit. Also, it was actually a partnership that was doomed from day one, but it was really what it took to get this thing off the ground. And I’m still not sure about you know, whether we made it happen or whether it happened around, you know, right? All I know is that we sure got a pretty good seat for the greatest bicycle adventure of the 20th century.

Jeff Barber 11:15
Right? Absolutely So, right. In 1979 I believe, was when the three of you formed mountain bikes, which was the name of the company, and you all were delivering complete bikes. The first to do that, is that right?

Charlie Kelly 11:30
Correct. And because Tom would build the frames. And actually Tom could build a whole bike, but I could build a wheel. Tom can build a wheel, but I can’t build a frame. So Tom, you build a frame, I’ll build a wheel. And it was like, I say it was a unique partnership, because all three elements were required, but the doom of the partnership was sealed on day one, because the business there was no business plan. It’s like, hey, let’s sell these bikes, right? Because you didn’t see, you know, we’re thinking that 10 or 15 of these a year. It’s kind of a glorified hobby, you know, not so much a business as a hobby that we might make a little money from, right? But the demand as we now know, you know, we were wrong about a lot of things, but we didn’t see the demand coming. And also we didn’t see that Tom Ritchie would just crank out dozens and dozens of these frames because there was so much easier to build for him, you know. And right? And so Tom, everybody, everybody brought tremendous enthusiasm and not much of a plan.

Jeff Barber 12:42
Well, I mean, it reminds me so much too, of the Apple Computer story. I mean, same kind of thing where people were interested in computers, and, you know, there were these partnerships formed, and, yeah, just so many parallels. I find that really interesting. So back then, too, people were calling bikes off road bikes. I guess that was the more generic term. But today, obviously we call, we call the sport, we call it’s all based on, it’s called mountain biking. So why? Why do you think that term stuck on? I mean, that was what you chose for your company. Did people start using that term because your bikes were just so ubiquitous, or was it, you know, the quality is, like, mountain bike was the best off road bike you could get. Like, what do you think made that the more popular term?

Charlie Kelly 13:30
Well, it’s an interesting story, because Gary and I, we formed the company, and we thought, well, what are we going to call ourselves? We call ourselves mountain bikes, and we paid a trademark attorney to file for the trademark on that on that name. And this is when I learned about trademark law. And there are only two trademark attorneys in Marin County at the time, and I picked the one that was the shortest bike ride, because hey, and I don’t know if I picked the right one, because he he failed to secure the trademark on our company name. And the reason is that you cannot trademark a description. Hey, Who knew this trademark? Trademark attorneys are supposed to know that anyway. And so, for example, you can’t trademark red car, right? And so he gets a note back from the Commerce Department that administers these things, and it said, well, are these bikes made to be ridden specifically in the mountains? Well, this is what you paid the guide, no. And the proper answer was no, it’s a bicycle ride. It in a parking lot, you know, wherever. No. But he said, Yes, of course, they’re built for mountain use, and that made it a description, and our trademark was denied. Now we knew that, but the rest of the bicycle industry did not know that, and it’s not like we were sending out press releases that we don’t own the name mountain bikes, and so. Bicycling magazine actually ran a contest to decide what to call these machines that you can’t call mountain bikes because that’s a brand name, and the winner was the clumsy handle all terrain bicycle. Well, when’s the last time you heard anyone use that term?

Jeff Barber 15:17
It’s been a while.

Charlie Kelly 15:21
But at some point, about maybe a year and a half after we were denied that trademark, somebody actually did the research and found out, and we were busted, and it went it went generic. We, you know, our company name was one word with a capital B on the bikes, it is now, you know, lowercase, two words.

Jeff Barber 15:45
And it’s not just a noun anymore. I mean, it’s a verb too. You go mountain biking.

Charlie Kelly 15:51
It’s like a lot of words can be the noun, the verb or the adjective, and, well, it’s, lately, not the most important one of those. But anyway, yeah, mountain bike. Who gets to put words in the dictionary? And we did, yeah? So a small satisfaction.

Jeff Barber 16:11
That’s got to be, it’s got to be exciting, yeah. So we were talking about the bikes too, and you’re talking about some of the tubing choices that were made early on. But I was reading there was, there was an early review of the of your mountain bike in BMX plus magazine, and in the article, there’s this picture of Tom Ritchie holding the bike above his head to show how light the bike is.

Charlie Kelly 16:35
Actually that Gary Fisher, he’s wearing a bombers that’s in the jersey he’s wearing some bombers on it. It’s actually a roller derby jersey from the pay bombers. But, yeah, that’s Gary Fisher holding the bike over his head.

Jeff Barber 16:50
Well, it’s funny because, you know, I’ve I started mountain biking, probably in the late or early 90s, and I always wondered why, as mountain bikers, we did that. You know, people, you’d be out for a ride, and someone would hold the bike up over their head and take a picture. Yeah? I mean, I guess that’s because mountain bikes were surprisingly lightweight for being so durable, right? What were the bikes? What did they weigh back then you have any recollection?

Charlie Kelly 17:17
Yeah, actually, when, when Joe breeze first delivered his Well, my bike breeder number two, that bike was monstrously heavy, uh, lighter than the Schwinn was still monstrously heavy, probably in the neighborhood of 35 or 36 pounds. And part of the reason was that the rims and tires had not yet come on the market that really were the quality that we needed, because we had to use steel rims and these Uniroyal knobby tires that were designed in the 30s and hadn’t been changed since, and cost three bucks. You know, I mean, that was actually one of the jokes is, man, we’re selling a $13 $1,300 bite with $3 tires. But anyway, when the alloy rims and lighter tires came out in 1979 that not knocked six pounds right off the bike right there. Oh, wow. And when you take that off your wheels, it’s like, you know, running with weights on your feet forever. Then, wow, then going barefoot or something. But it’s like that was a huge breakthrough. And so, okay, our bikes were then, when in the on the order of about 28 pounds for the Richie bike, which was much lighter frame than the Breezer bike. And now, of course, you got full suspension mountain bikes that weigh what my Italian race bike did in the 70s, you know, right? 21 pounds.

Jeff Barber 18:48
But you look at the enduro bikes today, you know, I mean, these are full suspension, and they have dropper posts and all kinds of other doodads on them. But, you know, if you can get one under 30 pounds today, you’re doing pretty well, you know, 28 pounds, that’s a pretty high end bike. So it’s interesting to me that they were not too far off, you know, at least in terms of the more aggressive bikes.

Charlie Kelly 19:09
One observation that let me make about the bikes that I’m riding now, and a couple of observations. First, we started riding those old schwims Because they were relatively bulletproof, especially next year Italian bike, you know, and and then we went to the multiple geared conversion. Turned out that those were, man, you had to keep a lot of repair stuff with you when you went out on the trail right. And then that, then you got to the, you know, the Breezer and the Ritchie, first generation mountain bikes. And those were very, very bulletproof, you know, I mean, really tough bikes, but everything you asked for in terms of performance, you’re giving up something in terms of maintenance. And so now I’m riding this incredible machine that if I had to pay for. It would cost five or $6,000 and I little perk of being who I am, but anyway, but that bike is not gonna last as long as my now 30 some odd year old Richie, you know, because there’s just hydraulic systems. There’s so many moving parts, right? And here’s another minor observation. In the 80s, most of the mass produced mountain bikes were, at least at first, cloned off the Ritchie design, and so you got your stump jumpers and your rock hoppers and your Diamondbacks and and a number of other mass produced bikes, and say, Diamondback, 1985 Diamondback, I still see those bikes ride around with the original owner, because that design was so robust and straightforward and practical that it doesn’t have to be an expensive version to be useful for 30 plus years. Oil that chain and that bike runs forever. And now the bike that I’m riding, well, that so much hydraulic stuff on it, you know, that it’ll be leaking and whatever that, I don’t think you’re going to get the kind of durability out of that much more expensive bike.

Jeff Barber 21:12
So do you still have some of those bikes in your shed?

Charlie Kelly 22:04
My oldest bike, actually, I went through four or five Richie mountain bikes when I was in the business of selling them because, because I could. But my, well, my two oldest bikes right now are Breezer number two, which is a pretty famous bike, and that is in the mountain bike Hall of Fame display. And I have 1983 Richie and perna I had, after Gary bought my interest in mountain bikes, I asked to do me a custom, custom frame, and I still have that. And that one, that one, went a lot of places with me for quite a few years, but it’s now in the retired collection, uh, out in the backyard.

Jeff Barber 22:49
What’s, what’s the oldest bike that you you’re still riding here? Do you throw a leg over any of those early bikes anymore?

Charlie Kelly 22:57
Yeah, my oldest bike that I’m still riding is about three years old.

Jeff Barber 23:01
Nice. Well, I mean, that’s, that’s how we all are. I think as mountain bikers, we’re addicted to the latest and greatest. So that’s really cool, that that, yeah, to hear that you’re the same way, I want to get back to talking about repack the race series and those early races. What was, was the competition like? Was this a really competitive group? I mean, were you all looking for this competitive outlet? Or what was the focus in those days?

Charlie Kelly 23:29
Well, when we would go on these rides because of the terrain where we live, towns are at the bottoms of the hills, and there’s hills on all sides, and so every ride started out with going up, and doesn’t matter what you’re going up, eventually you’ll be out. You’ll run out of up, and you’re on top of something, and no one just like, turns around and rides down. You throw the bikes down, you throw the Frisbee around you, you know, refreshments or whatever. But you hang around on top of whatever for a while, and a phenomenon emerged, which is that somebody look at his bike and it would be on, and you didn’t have to say, hey guys, why don’t we risk our lives on junk bikes for no stakes, because it was going to happen anyway. And right, you know. And so you know, when the rides are five or six people, it’s kind of a goof to do these mass start downhills, but the rides kept you know as the popularity of our goofy hobby expanded while Now there might have been 10 of us, and suddenly it looked pretty hairy dicing down these narrow roads when, right when the sweet spot of the road really one rider wide and and turned out that one of the members of our regular riding group was a two and 20 pound sociopath. And those are, those are competitive advantages. And I. Yeah, it was worth your life to try to pass this guy. And so it was kind of a goof. But man, sure would be fun if that guy wasn’t there, you know. And so we but now, as you pushed your bike up to the top of these hills and the wood, quite often you push them for half an hour, we talked the subject to death, and we decided that a time trial would settle once and for all, who was the fastest on the downhill, because these mass starts, one guy was going to win every one of them, just because he was so threatening and so so on that October day, one of the 22nd October, 19 76/21, whatever Joe breeze knows, I went out there with five or six of my friends and some clocks and and we held that, that race that was to decide everything. Well, it turns out there’s a reason that they play the other 161 baseball games after opening day. The reason is that if you play baseball, you like to right? And it turned out that couple of things about that first race. One is that losing the race was almost as much fun as winning it, because you got what you were looking for, which was nobody in front of you, okay? And second, it turns out that everybody wants a shot at the title. And so, okay, Alan Barnes, my roommate at the time, won that first event. And you know, he’s hosting, hoisting the metaphorical belt buckle, you know, and saying, Okay, I’m the world champion. And everybody says, well, sun got in my eyes, and are you going to defend that championship or retire undefeated? Because we’re going back out there and and so it turns out, and I’m being a little bit hyperbolic here, but turns out that if you’re a champion, you can either defend it or retire, but other people want to compete. And so five days later, we were back up on that same hill. And then, I mean, I have the records after all, after the first race, I have all the records, because we didn’t even keep the records for the first race, because who cared, who was going to care? But I actually have all the finished results from all the subsequent races, but, and within about a week, the guys from the neighboring towns are starting to show up because, you know, there are other guys riding in other parts of the mountain on similar bikes, and we knew each other. It’s just we had no reason to ride with each other. But once there was a race, now there’s people starting to show up. And then people started showing up from Berkeley, across the bay. We didn’t, man, we didn’t even know where, you know, How’d you even find out about us?

Jeff Barber 27:49
Yeah, there was no Internet, right?

Charlie Kelly 27:53
That’s right. But it turned out that this Goofy, Goofy event brought people together. Okay? That had no reason to hang around each other. I mean, we all had similar interests, but we had no reason to, you know, share them. Because, you know, you guys right over there, right over here, no big deal. But once there was a race, there was a reason for other people to come to our part of the downhill world. And also, the other thing about the race is that you start looking for that edge. And like I say, if you’re looking at your Italian bike and this 40 year old Schwinn, you’re thinking, Well, actually I can maybe, if I improve the frame or whatever, you know, I’d be faster. And so that really started us thinking about maybe moving into the next phase of building these bikes.

Jeff Barber 28:45
Yeah. Well, yeah, it sounds like the competition for those early days, for sure, was very good natured, and, you know, really was about building community more than anything else. But I’m sure it got very competitive and serious. I mean, we see today, sort of where we’re at, and it seems to there’s a lot of parallels with enduro racing today, where, you know, you kind of take your time getting up, and people are hanging out at the top waiting for their turn to drop in. To me, that’s that’s really cool to see those parallels. Would what would what did the times look like? Would you see those times improving? You know, you said you have those records from all those races. Did you see the times improve and and if so, how are people doing that?

Charlie Kelly 29:29
Yeah, the first the first winner, didn’t get under five minutes. But it turns out that five minutes was a pretty good standard. If you could get in under five minutes, you were pretty good at it, and I actually created categories. You were an expert. Anybody who ever got under five minutes was it was forever after that an expert. And because actually I, I would hand out prizes, no entry fees, but the bikes. Off would support the effort. And so just in order to distribute the prizes, I created novice and expert categories. And really the experts, there were only maybe 15 experts, because you had to really be passionate to get under five minutes. And it’s actually hard to describe in current terms, how this thing took over our lives, but we hiked up and down that road, we studied it, we practiced it, and as time went on, the fastest riders were all riding very consistent times. And you know, the the top three times are separated by only two seconds. Wow. And so ironically, there have been people coming out with very fancy downhill bikes trying to shatter the records. They can’t shatter the record. And there’s a couple of reasons. One is that the high point of the course is actually not at the start. It’s about maybe 150 yards from the start, and we just picked the start because here’s a spot, dude, nice place to start the race. Well, there’s a big rock there. We figured that rock will never move, so that’ll be the starting line, right? And the same thing at the other end, there’s a big rock at the finish area, and we figured, well, that will never move, so that’s the finish line and so, but because it actually slopes a little bit upward from the start line, these guys that show up with these really fancy downhill bikes, they can’t bolt off the line like, like a road racer on, you know, I mean, for and the top three times You’re helped by held by road racers. Oh, well, but, well, Gary Fisher, Joe, breeze and Otis guy are all really good road racers too, but, but the start is key, and you actually have to ride uphill at least, you know, 150 yards or so. And the modern bikes don’t do that very well. And so that’s that’s why, really, the old guys with their junk bikes still hold the records.

Jeff Barber 32:11
When you say modern bikes, what do you mean? Have people, from what I understand, the course is no longer open to bikes, right? Oh, yeah. Oh no, you ride it. Oh, you can do people go out there and contest it today on their modern bikes.

Charlie Kelly 32:25
They go out there with their what is it? Their little timers on their phones, you know, right? And what is that called?

Jeff Barber 32:34
Strava?

Charlie Kelly 32:36
Yeah. So they Strava that and, and, and, yeah, people do it unofficially. The there’s only one day a year when they don’t really want you there, and that’s the during the Thanksgiving day ride, when 1000 people show up and, and they prefer you don’t ride 1000 people through the creek at the bottom, but, but that’s the only day and, and nobody minds that too much, because we get it the rest of the year.

Jeff Barber 33:03
In 1980 you and Denise caramano started Fat Tire flyer, which was the first magazine dedicated to the sport of mountain biking, and for six years that was the only publication covering mountain biking exclusively. So what made you want to start that? Did you have a background or an experience of running a magazine, or what led you to that?

Charlie Kelly 33:28
Like so much of the other, like so much of this, it was an accident. We thought briefly that we would have a club for mountain bikers and and so we had a meeting for this club, and what does the club do? Well, let’s see. You got your President, Your secretary and your treasurer and a newsletter, and I had a couple of articles published by them, and so we my girlfriend and I said, we’ll do the newsletter for the club. And yeah, Fat Tire flyer. Oh yeah, it’s great name. So okay, so, so we published this photocopied, funky, eight page little newsletter with not much news in it, because really, everybody that got it had been at the meeting, but anyway, but made the mistake of putting issue one on it. And the club never, I’ve never met again. Oh, wow. But because, as it said, issue one people started saying, well, when’s issue two coming out? You know? And like, Okay, well, I guess. Okay so anyway, and the first six or seven issues were actually just, I would just type them, photocopy them, and, you know, fold them, escape them. And but it was, you know, there was a demand for something in print. And, you know, the race schedules, if there’s going to be a race, how do you find out about it, all that? And so eventually we went to, you know, a real. A commercial graphic artist and the typesetter, and learned about that stuff. And a couple of years in Denise and I parted company, and she sold her interest to another guy, and he had inherited some money, which we lost a lot of the magazine, but good time doing it. And really, it was, it was the most creative thing that I’ve ever really done, because along the way, I learned all of that stuff about old school magazine production and and now, of course, it’s all done on a computer. And I was, I was right on the the cusp of when it went from physical layout to computerized layout. But it was really fun doing them, you know, the hands on, you know, with a wax here. I mean, I It’s, it was a fun thing to do. It was very artistic and creative and and I lost a lot of money.

Jeff Barber 36:02
Well, I mean, what’s fascinating to me about, I mean, your whole story is, you know, just this learning how to do things, trying new things, and really, you know, it’s sort of what people call today, like sort of the hacker mentality, where you know you’re building things and you’re doing things that maybe people have never tried before. Do you see that in mountain biking today? I mean, is that, in your opinion, is that sort of carried through?

Charlie Kelly 36:29
Well, one thing that I’ve observed is that when we came into the market, the bicycle market was, let’s see you got your your your cheap road bikes like Schwinn varsities or whatever you had, your expensive road bikes, and you had BMX, and that was pretty much the bike market. And mountain biking opened a new niche that certainly the manufacturers didn’t see coming, although they obviously jumped all over it, but now I see that there are lots of small niches that people are creating and filling. And maybe the latest example would be fat bikes, which wouldn’t have happened in California, because there’s no need for them, but in Minnesota or Alaska, there is a need for things like that, and people created a new niche, a new type of bicycle, and then you got your gravel bikes, which is not really a cross bike and not really a road bike, but it’s kind of a new thing that fills a niche that nobody had even noticed before. So I think that what we did was maybe show people that imagination is all you need, and you can create your own market niche for any kind of cycling equipment.

Jeff Barber 37:49
And these days, too, a lot of people like to point out and talk about how at the elite levels, you know, racing, downhill racing in particular, that’s where a lot of the technology is being invented. And, you know, people are constantly tweaking and trying to find new ways to get faster. Was that part of it in the early days, too? I mean, were people modifying their bikes pretty regularly so that they could do better in those competitions? Or was it was it less serious at that time?

Charlie Kelly 38:19
Well, one thing about mountain biking, as opposed to road racing, as a road racing, they define the bike, right? They tell you exactly what you can ride, and it’s got to measure this and that and so forth. And mountain biking is like, run with your brung. If it works, if it works, we’ll all be riding the next week and so and so. Much more than road racing. Mountain Biking is is open to innovation, and in road cycling, the UCI has limited the definition of a bike so completely that obviously you can’t ride a recumbent in the Tour de France, but if you could race a recumbent downhill and win on it, no problem, you know. And so it’s just a more open atmosphere to what really is a bike. It’s anything that you want to ride, really.

Jeff Barber 39:10
Yeah. So in 1983 speaking of racing, you were instrumental in founding norba, which was the first sanctioning body for mountain bike racing. What was the idea behind that? It sounds like, like part of the idea was, was to make it a little more official, a little more legit. Is that, right?

Charlie Kelly 39:30
Well there was a couple of problems. First, is that the last, well, one of the last repack races that I actually, yeah, one of the last ones that I put on was one that KPIX, local TV station had come out and filmed. A whole bunch of people came out there to be on TV, and one guy broke his wrist, a guy and I guy didn’t know, and he sued the TV station, because suing me Sue and me wouldn’t have done anything for him so and he lost because they had better lawyers. But you. It was real, a message to me that, hey, man, you’re like, actually exposing yourself here, right? And so I thought, Man, I’m gonna and at that point, I was starting to build bikes with Gary and and my interests were changing, and I just got out of the race promotion thing, because it just felt like I was exposed pretty badly. And but at the same time, other people were putting on races cross country, races all over California. There was Victor vincenti in Southern California, and there’s some guys in Central Coast Country, classic Glen ODell and in whiskey town in Redding. Anyway, there were more, there are races taking place, and was real obvious at first, it would be nice if we all raced under the same rules. First, okay. And second, there was no way we were going to get any kind of insurance to protect these promoters without some sort of an umbrella organization. And that organization would probably have to require helmets, you know, I mean, and maybe the model would be the BMX sanctioning bodies, but it was clear that the the road racing sanctioning bodies had no interest whatever in what we were doing. So we just formed our own and the whole purpose was, well, there were only really two purposes. One was so that we could have a the same set of rules for everybody’s race. And second was so we could get some insurance to protect promoters. The rules were remarkably simple, out of four or five, as far as what the bike is, and then then a few, as far as how the promoter has to deal with marking the course and so forth, you know, but just basically, the very least we could get away with in the way of rules.

Jeff Barber 41:49
Well, I mean, was this, was this commercially driven, or were at that point, was it still, I mean, it sounds like it was still just, you all really loved what you were doing and wanted to spread the Gospel?

Charlie Kelly 42:01
Well, yeah, it was commercially only in the sense that getting insurance was maybe the the prime goal, right? And the rules were just an outgrowth that, well, you’re gonna got, not gonna get insurance unless you have a rule about helmets and so forth, you know? So really, the rules were a byproduct of wanting the insurance, and insurance was the, really, the driving factor here, right?

Jeff Barber 42:28
Well, yeah, speaking of helmets, you know, I’m fascinated seeing that the photos from a lot of those early events and races and things and and you don’t see people really wearing helmets there. But what also stands out to me is guys just, you know, in blue jeans and flannel shirts and, you know, work boots. What do you see that? I mean, is it interesting to you to see these days that that’s still kind of how mountain bikers dress? I mean, you guys were setting, setting, sort of the style back then, which is pretty interesting.

Charlie Kelly 42:59
It’s like you’re wearing what you walked out the door in the morning, you know? I mean, it’s like, and now, of course, I go mountain biking on a very expensive bike, and I wear a bike Jersey and I wear, you know, psychic shoes and a helmet and all that stuff, right? But really, it just didn’t feel like you wanted to be wearing your lycra and your jersey, you know? Because quite often you would put your knee on the ground and, yeah, you’d like it to be covered with something. So, right, yeah.

Jeff Barber 43:31
But it seems like in the 90s, there was a lot of that in mountain biking. People were wearing their lycra and, you know, these really tight fitting jerseys and things. But now it’s, it seems like we’re getting back to the roots, you know, where we want to as mountain bikers differentiate ourselves, say, from people who are on the road and and where the performance apparel stuff, maybe at least, as mountain bikers, we don’t want to look like we’re trying too hard.

Charlie Kelly 43:57
Well, yeah, I generally wear a pair of cargo shorts over my lycra shorts. And I know baggy shorts are big for the mountain bikers now, because I written I wear cargo shorts is because they got lots of pockets, and I keep a lot of stuff in my short pockets, and and so, yeah, I I, I do wear a bike Jersey because they they are practical for a lot of reasons, but but generally going away from the skin tight ones, because aerodynamics are not that important to me.

Jeff Barber 44:31
So what do you what are your thoughts on the mountain bike industry today? Are you excited about where mountain biking is going, or are there challenges that you see with what do you think about your baby in 2018?

Charlie Kelly 44:47
Well, at this point, I’m just an old guy talking about what it’s like to be young, because really it has gone so far away from where we start. Started that I no longer have the ability to work on my own bike because it has so much stuff on it that didn’t exist when I was building bikes. However, fortunately, the local bike shops treat me very, very well so, but really I I am just in awe of the where it’s gone, but I will point that out once again, that a 1986 Rockhopper that cost maybe 350 then will probably outlast the much more expensive, hydraulically controlled bike that I am riding now, because, yeah, we, we’ve gotten a wave gone in the direction of performance and away from, you know, and that requires a lot more maintenance, so away from bulletproof and more in the direction of performance. Although, having said that, there are plenty of people making simple, rigid frame more or less bulletproof bikes these days. And, and I think the Fat Bike People are onto something.

Jeff Barber 46:10
Yeah, very cool. Well, thank you so much, Charlie. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about the history of mountain biking and, yeah, all thank you for all that you’ve contributed to the sport.

Charlie Kelly 46:22
Well, I appreciate the fact that I’m an old guy talking about being young once, and that you want to hear it.

Jeff Barber 46:30
Well, thank you. Well, for more episodes like this one, be sure to subscribe to the Singletracks podcast. If you enjoy what we do, we’d love to have you rate us in your podcast app, and if you’re not stoked, drop us an email anytime info at Singletracks DotCom to help us improve talk to you next week. Peace.