Tom Ritchey on the Birth and Coming of Age of the Mountain Bike [Podcast #168]

On this Episode

Tom Ritchey is credited as the first production mountain bike frame builder in the world, and has introduced countless bike designs and products over the years that are considered standard in the industry today. His company, Ritchey Design, where Tom is still actively involved, designs high performance bikes, handlebars, seatposts, grips, tires, and everything in between.

Tom talks with Singletracks about the history of mountain biking, wheel sizes, the pros and cons of industry standards, and even electric bikes.

This episode is sponsored by Evo.com. Use code “SINGLETRACKS” to take 10% off your next order.

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Automated transcript

Jeff Barber 0:00
Hey everybody, welcome to the Singletracks podcast today. My guest is Tom Ritchey. Tom is credited as the first production mountain bike frame builder in the world, and has introduced countless bike designs and products over the years that are considered standard in the industry today. His company Richie design, where Tom is still actively involved, designs high performance bikes, handlebars, seat posts, grips, tires and pretty much everything in between. Thanks for joining me, Tom.

Tom Ritchey
Hey, my pleasure.

Jeff Barber
So I’ve read that your father was a cycling enthusiast, and he taught you to build wheels and showed you brazing techniques. What was it that attracted you to fixing bikes and bike parts at such an early age?

Tom Ritchey 1:11
Yeah, my dad was always working on his own projects. He was an engineer for a tech company in in the Bay Area called Ampex and but he was also an avid cyclist. Sailor. Was in the Sierra Club. Was was working on crazy garage projects, like a steam car and and, wow, we built our, built his own sailboat. And anyway, there was our garage was very, very active, and there was a lot of things always going on, and I was in the middle of it. So with that, there came tools and use of tools and and basically learning some of it together. He knew, of course, a lot more than I did at that age. One of the pictures you might run across is the electric car I built when I was 12. Wow. And that was actually where I really learned to braise, because that was all tubular steel construction, and I was brazing and basically asking him, when he came home at night about how to execute this, how to execute that. And in some of it I would do, and some of that I’d wait for when he got home, and he’d help me execute it and and I ended up driving the this two seater electric car all over Palo Alto at 12 years old.

Jeff Barber 2:28
Wow. Well, I mean, I find it fascinating, too. You paint this picture of your father and sort of how you grew up in the Bay Area, you know, which is home to all these tech companies and these garage startups. I mean, do you think that was part of why mountain biking came to be? I mean, could it have started anywhere else, other than, you know, the Bay Area, where people are tinkering and people are trying new things like that?

Tom Ritchey 2:55
I’m sure, I’m sure anything is possible. I think there’s quite a bit of difference between the mindset of people in the Palo Alto Silicon Valley, what is now called the Silicon Valley area, my dad and and Jobst and other people that were kind of entrenched in the technology startups and the garage startups of Hewlett, Packard and so forth, and and what I would consider the mindset of people in Berkeley and in Marin County and and other places, not to take away from anything from Marin or other places. But I think Joe’s dad was kind of unique. And in terms of being somebody that was was a hands on guy with with a similar experience that I had, there’s quite a few things that are what I would call the undercurrents of the area that we lived in, the people that were living there, and I would say in a much larger term, the cycling industry that was European focused, and really hadn’t seen any fertile growth in the United States Up until that time. Those are big conversations. Those are major chapters of books that no one, no one has written yet. So we were gifted with a lot of wonderful fire roads and Singletracks that were that were built here over the years, leading up to the idea the mountain bike and idea of what we were playing around off road on bikes, period, road bikes, mountain bikes, whatever you call them, ballooners, right? So I think knowing that the bikes were limited, knowing that we were basically at best riding cyclocross bikes, at worst, we were riding clunkers. What you do with your terrain depends upon the kind of terrain you have. And so when you know, to be honest with you, when, when I was riding with yokes a lot of the time, and we were on Singletracks in the Santa Cruz Mountains, falling wasn’t the worst thing that happened to you, because it was usually something that you were pushing the limit, and you fell into a huge pile of redwood mulch, and you. That wasn’t so bad. Whereas falling, if you had kind of played in the same way that we were playing with with our limits, and you were falling, let’s say in my backyard, down in Santa Barbara, you would be definitely hurting yourself, right? That’s interesting. You’d be gashing your legs. There would be not a lot of room for error. The kind of injuries that you’d have would be very difficult. You’d be, you know, you’d be having flat tires a lot more, and you’d be, you’d be hurting a lot more of your equipment, yeah, so and so. I think a big part of the story that’s never really told is how living in the in the fog areas of the Central Coast and basically north of, let’s say, the Monterey Bay in the redwoods and fire roads was ideal. And it was an area that was well developed in terms of singletrack and fire roads. And so the idea that yoke started riding off road in the 60s and and was leading rides that my dad went on first, and then I went on and that I invited Joe and Gary on, you know, leading up to the the idea the first kind of true off road mountain bikes was, was something that had been seeded and in a unique environment, been been basically presented to us on a platter by Jobst Brand.

Jeff Barber 6:19
Well, it’s interesting too. How you mentioned that mountain biking allowed people to play around a little bit more, and that’s, seems like that’s still part of the culture today. I mean, it’s, it seems like it’s less serious than road biking. People are able to be more free and experiment. And you mentioned your friend Jobst. He was basically a proto mountain biker, and he was doing these off road rides on singletrack in the 60s and the 70s, well before the repack races. So what? Why did you and others decide to follow him on these crazy rides?

Tom Ritchey 6:53
Because he was the leader, and he went on incredible, epic, hard adventure rides. You know, the who’s who of Northern California racing was living a stone’s throw from Jobst His departure in his house in Palo Alto, and the kind of, I mean, the Olympic team and and myself and and others were very much aware of yokes is Sunday rides and left at eight o’clock on his front doorstep in those days. I mean, whether it be John Finley Scott up in Sacramento or Gary or they, everyone knew. Everyone knew yokes was leading epic rides. And they were epic, not just because they were all day very difficult rides, but yokes was a renowned cyclist of strength and endurance, his rides would often leave people that were on the national team and category one riders in the dust. Wow. And people don’t realize how typical these rides were. I mean, when you leave at eight o’clock in the morning and you and you don’t get back until six o’clock in the evening, and you’re on all day and in 30 miles or so of it was on dirt, wow, with flat tires that. I mean, it was, it was completely different than any imagery that you could imagine that had to do with repack, yeah.

Jeff Barber 8:14
What was the draw, though? I mean, was it, was it seen as like a training ride and you just went out to push yourself or to train. Or was it, or was it more of like a fun adventure type thing?

Tom Ritchey 8:25
Oh, it was both. To give you a better idea that there was serious road races that we would call one another, amongst people that I trained with, Dave bol the Olympic he was on the Olympic team. He just passed away. You know, Keith VIERA. There’s many, many riders that were my training partners. And we would call one another. We go, what, what are you doing on Sunday? And there might be, there might be 120 mile road race out in wherever, Fresno, or some somewhere, and we knew where yo says, Yeah, I’m going to do Bonnie doing or I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. And the conversation would be, I think I’ll do the road race. I’m not in good enough shape to do the yokes. Wow. And that, that is a legitimate story. I’m not exaggerating. So Jobst, his abilities were renowned. You can talk to anybody, anybody that lived those years. And the thing that came with yokes as rides was not just an amazing experience of rides that you roads and places you’ve never seen before. I mean, we were, we were cyclists, but we were, we were lifestyle guys too. I mean, we were competitors, you know. And to a degree, some of us were more competitive than than the other. But we lived in a time when things like the Sierra Club was just taking hold on public, on the culture, you know, Chouinard was starting Patagonia, and all these kind of epic things were happening in other ways in the culture. Cal. California was, was a wilderness playground, starting with, you know, cycling and Yosemite and all these places that that people were adventuring to. And so it’s a very, very fertile place to find people to do outrageous things.

Jeff Barber 10:15
Well, was, was Jobst designing these rides off the road and through singletrack and places like that for the scenery, or was he doing it just to make it more difficult? I mean, what do you think his motivation was?

Tom Ritchey 10:29
So the other thing about every Jobst ride, and Peter Johnson and other people will attest to this, is that it was an education. It was basically a jokes. Was the professor leading a ride. We were all getting an education and usually getting dropped in the process. Sometimes we didn’t do his rides for the education, but we got it anyway. And for me, being 15 years old and starting out, you know, with with a ride like that, I got to live somewhat everything I wanted to, not only did I get the training experience in an outdoor adventure ride that was seeing areas that someone was leading me into, that had been there before and knew, knew that it was possible for the most part, but I was also getting an engineering course, because yokes was as much of a professor as he was a cyclist?

Jeff Barber 11:21
Well, yeah, getting back to talking about pairing bikes, and you started doing that at a very early age, and it also seems like you were cut out to be a bike entrepreneur, for lack of a better term in those days. So was that out of necessity, or were you also interested in the business side of things?

Tom Ritchey 11:41
You know, I was friends neighborhood kids. Everyone was mowing lawns, you know, throwing papers. They were doing stuff. And I was, I was no different. So as as far as being able to find a way of making an extra amount of money, it was that kind of a culture. No one was getting things handed to them. As far as I knew, everything was everything was a matter of making some spare money. And first thing my dad taught me is not wheels. He taught me how to repair tubulars. And in fifth grade, I was repairing tubulars for the local bike shop. And my dad was an archer, and he basically made his own bow strings and arrows and things like that. Wow. And so some of the materials that he was using were bow string material was suited to repairing tubulars. He practiced it and proved it, and never had it. You know, it was before the age of YouTube or anything. And so he developed his own techniques of repairing tubulars, cutting them open, re sewing them back up. At, you know, repairing them, booting them, whatever they needed, and taught it to me. And at $3 a piece, I was able to repair three tubulars an hour. And at 11 years old, that was a significant amount of money, yeah. And so I would say I was, I was, you know, whether it be that or or building wheels. And soon thereafter, I was, I was aware that I, I could work on all kinds of things that people weren’t good at. So repairing a frame was not anything anyone did that I was aware of. So it may be something that was a common thing if you were in Europe, and maybe in a small village in Italy or whatever, but in the United States, no one was repairing frames. So repairing frames meant understanding frame construction, knowing how to knowing where to buy tubes, being able to heat something up, take it apart, be able to clean it out, replace a tube, put it back together. You’re basically building a section of a frame, right? And so, because I just built an electric car and and was aware of grazing techniques and stuff, I started repairing frames. And one of the first frames I repaired was a Cinelli Model B, and that I bought for 50 bucks for myself at 14 years old. And I ended up starting on my own product. And ended up people saying, wow, you know, could you repair my Ron Cooper? Could you repair my kalnago, could you repair my mod? Could you repair my Cinelli and and it just, you know, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of repair work. There’s a lot of people that just hung up their bikes, didn’t have any didn’t have any way of repairing. And so I became somewhat of a unique, a uniquely skilled guy. And as a result of that, building a frame was just straightforward.

Jeff Barber 14:41
It seems like too you you learn a lot about the modes of failure that you’re seeing on these bikes, and sure you got ideas for how they could be improved, right?

Tom Ritchey 14:50
So if you lived in Jobst’s world, he was six, four, weighed 190 pounds, had a pile of broken. Yards, you live fully aware of how things failed, you also starting to race. And we don’t. We don’t really understand what it was like in the amateur years of American cycling before Greg LeMond. But everyone was lucky to have one good bike, and they were even more lucky to have one good bike and two pairs of wheels, one to race with and one to train with. There’s very few people that I could even think of that had more than one bike.

Jeff Barber 15:29
Why was that? Was it hard to find quality bikes in the US? Were people having to import them? Or was it just competitive, and you didn’t really need to have more than one bike?

Tom Ritchey 15:38
It was totally economics. People don’t I mean, the idea of being able to keep a good bike going, to have a new bike, I only knew a couple of people that had new bikes. I mean, we were living the big years of American cycling in the beginning, and to have a brand new, Nueva record group was an unheard of thing. People that had good jobs and were and were racing were few and far between. Most, most of the, I mean, Lindsay Crawford was about the only one that had a new bike. And he was a United Airlines pilot. My dad didn’t have a new bike. Yokes had a, you know, a 10 year old Cinelli that I started to repair after he broke stuff and and as a getting back to yokes, I was repairing yokes Cinelli for years, until he finally said, Yeah, I think I’ll let you build one. But it was a pile of broken axles and broken parts and continual repair. And I don’t think there was one pair of wheels that yokes hadn’t rebuilt 10 times. Wow. And so that means that you’re repairing broken axles and bearing races and balls and everything. It’s just like Africa, just like what I experienced when I went to Rwanda in 2005 it was truly an amateur sport with all the limitations of a non existent industry. And the thing that changed, and the big story that no one really connects the.is is that everything changed before mountain bikes. Mountain bikes didn’t change everything. They were part of this. But the catalyst, the unique opportunity that set up the opportunities that I had with mountain bikes, was set up by one individual and one individual only, and that individual wasn’t yokes. It was Greg Lamond. When Greg LeMond started to attract worldwide attention, the eyes of the world were all of a sudden on the US. He did things differently. Other Americans went over to Europe, raised Boyer Neil. A number of Americans went over and they basically raced on their terms. Lamont was the first one that went over and raced on his terms. And his terms meant American product, his buddy’s bikes, Boone linens, bars, Oakleys, glasses, yeah, carbon fiber frames from one off Greg did it his way, and he won. Yeah. All of a sudden, cycling culture of the United States is elevated to worldwide cycling attention at the time, those first mountain bikes weren’t interesting to anybody, and immediately, people like Hugo de Rosa, Chino Cinelli, Antonio, Columbus, yozo Shimano, were Buying my bikes. It wasn’t because, in my opinion, we were, we were all of a sudden change in the cycling world. It was because the cycling world was something that Greg was changing, and we were in the we were in the shadow of him.

Jeff Barber 18:51
Yeah, well, I mean, what year was that? Would you say when sort of that shift happened?

Tom Ritchey 18:56
Yeah, it was the early 80s. Greg had, Greg had won the junior world championships, was signed, was starting to race, and, you know, the beginning of his commanding career, yeah, you know, we were just getting things started.

Jeff Barber 19:07
That seems like really great timing for a lot of people who were involved back then. I’ve read that one of your mentors, somebody you mentioned already, John Finley Scott, encouraged you to build an early off road bike, which some people described as a woodsy cow trail bike.

Tom Ritchey 19:25
Well, that was John’s. That was what John called it.

Jeff Barber 19:28
Okay, so the bike was based around a 650B tire and flat bars. What kind of rides did you imagine the bike would be good for?

Tom Ritchey 19:40
Actually, John’s bike wasn’t based on flat bars. John’s bike was based on a drop bar.

Jeff Barber 19:45
But it did have the fatter 650 B tires, right?

Tom Ritchey 19:49
It was an available standard. It was something that was primarily a European standard. Super champion made a 650 B rim. You could find him, and John didn’t encourage me. I. Don’t know that anyone could say John encouraged anybody? John badgered you? No, I love John, but he was definitely somebody very similar to yokes. Had an incredibly strong attitude. He pretty much beat you over the head, and he beat me over the head enough times I said, okay, just, I’m gonna build one, just to shut him up.

Jeff Barber 20:24
Did he want you to build it for him to ride, or was this for you to ride? I mean, where did you imagine a bike like this would be good to Well, right?

Tom Ritchey 20:32
If you know John’s story, John’s whole goal was to ride every dirt road in the state of California. And that was something he always said. I mean, it’s just like, yeah. I just yeah, I gotta, gonna go ride, you know, up in the Feather River. I’m gonna found this dirt road, and I’m gonna go, right, you know, anyway, so he had a, he had a very annoying kind of way of getting his opinion out. And not that that bothered anybody. I mean, it was just John, I don’t know, maybe it did bother me.

Jeff Barber 21:00
He sounds like a character.

Tom Ritchey 21:02
Yeah, he was a professor at UC Davis, and he was, he’s a founder of the Davis double century. I mean, he’s very influential. I think the main thing is that John was just looking for somebody to build, build him a bike and do something that he thought was cool, yeah, and he knew I was going off road all the time with yoats, and so he had more of a purpose built idea based on a 650 wheel size and stuff. And I was building cyclocross bikes and other other tandems. I was building everyone knew that I was building much more than just a standard racing bike. So it wasn’t a big deal for me to build specialty bikes and to do them without lugs, and to go create a new way of making clearances and other things. So it was, it was, it was just a normal thing. So I did that, but it didn’t last very long. So the first fix that I built was very soon thereafter, and next year, after my meeting with Joe and and I was kind of off to the races in that direction, people were wanting as many as I could build. And I did build 10 of them. I actually built 10, 650, B bikes in the very first year, I presented them as as alternate the ballooners. I mean, they weren’t called mountain bikes in the very first year. They were called Mountain Bike second year. But the idea was, is that, hey, you save 10 pounds on the wheels. And who doesn’t like that, right? You know, so, so really, what people don’t realize is the repack era of ballooners cruisers. They were downhill bikes, right? They weren’t cross country bikes. I was all about cross country. I was all about yokes riding. I was all about long distance. They were the Marin guys were, throw your cruisers, your 50 pound clunkers in the pickup truck of Red Wolves, pickup truck, and, you know, get a ride up to the top of, you know, the intersection of Pine Mountain and and blast down. So really, it wasn’t that interesting to me. I only, I was the only outsider ever to do one because I was in relationship with those guys. They were all just friends that lived close by to one another, within a couple of miles, yeah. And so, you know, assembling together was an easy thing. It was very, very informal and and I found myself getting invited ones one weekend to what they were up to. And I said, Okay, you know, I’ll go do that. I’ll go do that, then I’ll go for a real ride.

Jeff Barber 23:28
Yeah, that’s interesting. The distinction between the direction that that group, you know, with Joe Brees and Gary Fisher, those guys were pursuing, versus sort of the direction that you were pursuing at the time.

Tom Ritchey 23:42
Yeah, they could have gone on, they could have gone on more of a cross country ride. I just, I just had never heard about that the bikes were, you know, they were guys that had ridden on a yokes ride. I’m pretty sure by then, I had invited Joe and Gary on a yokes ride. I mean, they knew the distances that we went, but it seemed like to them it was much more of a more of a social thing, yeah, you know, they, they grew up together. They went to high school together. They right bombed out, repack together. It was, you know, they did other things together, including, you know, things that I didn’t do. We’re coming at cycling from a very different place.

Jeff Barber 24:17
Yeah, that’s really interesting to me too, because we see that split today as well. You know, I wanted to ask you about how those bikes were perceived at that time. Were they seen as being limited, or was the idea that you could have this bike that could ride anywhere? I mean, today we have bikes for, you know, cross country and downhill and enduro and fat biking, and there’s just all these different sort of niche applications. But at the time of those early mountain bikes, were they truly seen as being able to tackle anything?

Tom Ritchey 24:51
In a local sense, yes. As the influence of the mountain bike grew to places like Moab and other places, no, I mean. And you have to realize that in the very first prototyping, the wheel size of 26 inch. To me, made sense. I was coming down. I was going from 650 down to 26 other people were experimenting with BMX size wheels. And to me, those bikes were definitely limited. I remember Ron scaran had a victor vincenti bike that was a large front wheel and a small rear wheel that he raced on. So there was all kinds of experimenting with wheel sizes. But for me, I was, you know, I couldn’t take IPS his words out of my head. You know, his training and his engineering kind of formulas and all the things that he talked about made so much sense to me that a bigger size wheel, the bigger was bigger was better, and to an extent. So coming from 700 C, which was basically what we call 29 ers now down to 650 down to 26 was always a limiting factor. And yet it it was what component makers and wheel tire makers were holding to and right. So in the first 10 years or so, basically the wheel tire guys and I was, I was the first guy to come along other than senior and actually design a tire. And senior, I don’t even know if he was designing them. He was taking mitsuboshi product and putting specialized name on it. But there was a kind of a, you know, a renaissance period where I was kind of in, in the driver’s seat as far as new designs and new new standards, and the big manufacturers of the world were asking me what they should do. And I realized in 84 that I wanted to take control that as my future, and that’s when I focused more on the component side of the company, rather than the bike side.

Jeff Barber 26:49
Yeah, I mean, you started out the building frames and worked with Gary Fisher and his mountain bikes company at the time. What was that relationship like? How did, how was the business sort of structured and and then how did you end up sort of branching out on your own?

Tom Ritchey 27:07
Well, I think you got a little bit of the facts backwards. I was the company, okay. I was in business since 73 filing a tax return at the age of 16. Oh, wow. In terms of an entity, in terms of a company, Richie custom cycles, and then Richie USA and then Richie design were the evolution names of my company. They were two guys that rub two quarters together. And after I suggested that they do it and that at that point, I would sell them bikes from Richie, my company. Okay, so talk Charlie Dr Gary about this, I don’t think I’m saying anything that would hurt anyone’s feeling or or challenge them. They, they hadn’t been in business.

Jeff Barber 27:58
Yeah, that’s where it’s all confusing. So were you building the bikes, and you had your company and essentially your brand, and then were they sort of rebranding them, or were you all co branding them at the time? How did that sort of work?

Tom Ritchey 28:14
Well, in the first year, as I said, there, there wasn’t a name mountain bike. If you look at the first year and the historical images and and the catalogs, the company is Richie mountain bikes. Basically it’s Richie and then mountain bike gets folded into Richie mountain bikes, and then mountain bikes, so there’s a there’s kind of a three stage evolution, yeah, when I first started selling them, the first 100 or so bikes, the name on everything they sold was Richie. There wasn’t that was it? Because Richie was an established brand who was established for years, and, you know, a number of years, 10 years, almost I had a reputation for building a good, quality product. You know, I had built 1000 frames before I built my first mountain bike.

Jeff Barber 29:02
Yeah, I read that. That sounds like a lot of frames.

Tom Ritchey 29:06
For me to have raced at the level that I raced at, and to had been a builder in an industry that was that was pretty much a non existent industry in the United States, developed a business that I could have a family and provide for my family and and employment, for employees and stuff. It was kind of a unique thing. Yeah, definitely. I think the story has been told a little too many times, in in one direction, and, you know, I didn’t, I haven’t really cared about it. I think that, you know, having the opportunity to correct the record is, is a good thing.

Jeff Barber 29:41
Well, like I said, it’s there are a lot of different accounts online, I guess. And that whole part of it’s pretty fuzzy some ways. But at the time, did you foresee, like, a huge market for this, or was it sort of a gradual realization that you had that this mountain biking thing was going to be pretty big?

Tom Ritchey 29:59
It was. Was definitely a complete shot in the fun direction. It was something that I was just like John Finley Scott. I was into building all kinds of things. I built crazy ideas for people. And this was something that, to me, looked interesting based on having grown up with such great trails in my backyard and ridden them to doing something that was a little bit more dedicated. I was, at that age in my life kind of done with racing and but building, building racing bikes for people, and I would say, more interested in having fun and having had a great many years of adventure riding with yokes and other things. It just, it just seemed like something that I could do more of, and I built it for me personally. And after Joe left, after ordering his tandem for him and Otis, he just, I don’t know what the conversation was like, All I heard was he ran into Gary and Marin and said he just placed the order with me for a tandem and showed him his number one and and I said, I think I’m going to build something similar. And next day, the phone rings, and Gary says, Hey, if you build one, build one for me. I without telling him, built a third one. And in a fortuitous kind of situation that would have happened, possibly in another way. But when Gary came to pay for his bike, I said, By the way, I’ve got it. I’ve got another one that I built, if you know of anyone that wants one, and that was the beginning. So he got together with Charlie. Said, Hey, Tom just built this amazing bike. He’s offering to build more of them. What do you think about, you know, selling them. He knew of people he was working at, at Sunshine bike shop as a mechanic, and he knew of people that that wanted him. So he had, he had people in in his world that wanted him. I didn’t. I was very, very busy providing for the racing industry, the touring Turing and other people in the in the traditional cycling industry, and so, you know, I, I said, Okay, I’ll build 10 more. And they didn’t have any money. So basically, I had to finance everything they did for years.

Jeff Barber 32:16
Yeah. So you must have believed in, I mean, you must have figured there’s least some market for those types of bikes, right?

Tom Ritchey 32:23
Well, yeah, soon, it soon became apparent, you know, another thing people don’t understand and don’t see in the steel side of the industry is a frame builder. Was not just a frame builder. He was doing everything. So there, there weren’t ways of making a fork. If you look at Joe’s ballooner, he he takes another fork and he uses it. I’m out of the box, making, not only the frame with unique characteristics, like a sealed bottom bracket with a 120 millimeter fill with axle in it, building the first one with with a unique double plated crown that I had also been doing for years and years and years on the roadside, and then soon thereafter, adding custom stems and and then the Bull Moose bar and seatpost and other things that made the bike unique in its own way that the world could look at and go that is a different bike, that’s something new, Someone with a lathe and a mill and more than just a frame building set of skills to, you know, step into that space. And I was first guy to pretty much do it/

Jeff Barber 33:31
Would you talk about all the things that go into building a frame? And eventually you started designing your own tubes. Why did you feel it was necessary to go down that path?

Tom Ritchey 33:43
Well, it was, it was the obvious issue with with people throwing away lugs, they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to how to join they didn’t know how to join tubes together, right? If you were, if you were going to, if an industry was going to gear up and start to build something called the mountain bike, and they didn’t have good lugs, and they didn’t have a proven geometry, and they didn’t have the diameters that that everyone was associating with with the mountain bike. Then they they didn’t have a tube set, and the two the tubes had to start, the tubes had to be in the beginning. And logic tubing was unique in that it was the first set of oversized tubing that was intended for lug less construction. Lugless construction was a brand new thing, and so people were experimenting with TIG welding at that point in time. TIG welding was not something that anyone used for any nice bikes. TIG welding was a was used for BMX, when you had a very thick tube, and you had a very small frame, and you could, you could build in all kinds of extra gussets and reinforcements that that made the bikes extremely heavy and and not interesting to the serious side of cycling. You know, having proved that luggage construction was viable, leading up to the mountain bike, and then mountain biking being. Able to showcase it. It was obvious to me that we were very close to the introduction of TIG welding and being a standard in mountain bike construction. And if I could build a special set of tubing which was condensed budding with differentials that made TIG welding appropriate, for example, a normal tube from a lug history of 100 years had a differential of point 9.6 or point 7.1 if I made a tube that was point 5.9 no one had ever done that. No one had ever pushed a differential that far. Matter of fact, Columbus was the first company that wanted, wanted to make my tubing, and they didn’t succeed. And they had been in the tubing business since 1890 reluctantly, I went to Japan and knocked on tanga’s door, and tangay accepted the challenge that they succeeded. And then that was in the very beginning of them launching e treated tubing called prestige, and I had a very productive, unique opportunity to develop a standard that had never been developed, right? You know, kind of side story. Columbus finally figured it out, and they offered their tubing. And when they offered it, after I offered my logic tubing, they called their tubing genius.

Jeff Barber 36:24
You mentioned a number of standards that you were instrumental in creating and, you know, popularizing in the industry. I think you mentioned the 130 millimeter rear hub standard and the 120 millimeter bottom bracket spindle. So these days, we hear a lot of grumbling whenever a new standard is introduced, but it seems like this is kind of a necessary move to make mountain bike designs move forward.

Tom Ritchey 37:50
To an extent. I have a lot of voices in the back of my head, okay? And they were from people that I really benefited tremendously from in terms of their education, their well meaning, their design prowess, their influence in in their industry. They were unique individuals, when I look back on it, they were people that said, You better not develop a new standard, if it just creates a standard for the standard sake, and not really, after truly vetting the design and being sure you’ve solved a problem. And that last statement, and the Do No Harm solves problem, is a haunting voice that’s always there for me.

Jeff Barber 38:33
I mean, it seems like you have to be really careful when you’re coming up with these standards. And I mean, do you think are there a lot of examples of bad standards out there? I mean, I don’t, I don’t expect you to name any, but, but does that happen?

Tom Ritchey 38:49
In the industry, more often than you would realize the current through actual standard in the rear hub is a bad standard, and people won’t figure it out until they’ve either fixed it and gone through evolutions, or are on the other side. There’s, there’s a lot of standards. I could, I could write a book on bad standards when I was in the beginning stages of creating new standards, and this was before mountain bikes by swing magazine was interested in doing an article on me, and they killed the article because they were concerned that my experimentating ways was a bad influence on the industry. That’s 40 years ago. Yeah, now it doesn’t matter what you do, it’s celebrated.

Jeff Barber 39:40
As long as it’s new, and, you know, there’s, there’s some argument that it’s innovative,

Tom Ritchey 39:44
Things have changed in such a dramatic way that we do not have, unfortunately, you know, the the old sages that are there that people say, Well, what do you think of this? I mean, I don’t know where to. Start. I mean, I could go through the UCI, all the different standards that the UCI and how they vet them.

Jeff Barber 40:05
Yeah, that’s one of the things that Joe Breeze mentioned when I spoke with him, that in road cycling, you know, the UCI has a lot of rules that really limit how the bikes can be built. And, you know, the standards that they use, whereas mountain biking was from the beginning, was more open in terms of the racing standards, and so that’s allowed a lot of this innovation to happen, more so on the mountain bike side than the roadside over the years, it definitely seems like a balance. You need to have some new standards. But also, you know, not, not get too carried away with them.

Tom Ritchey 40:39
I would love to have a forum discussion with Joe and some other people about it, because there is value to these standards, especially when an industry takes off in a direction for no for no reason other than business reasons, and embraces things that they haven’t vetted out with true testing and research, And then people buy that and buy into something that is, is is inherent, is inherent with problems that they don’t recognize. That’s hard earned money that people are spending toward things that they are perceiving there to be value in, that there isn’t right. And to me, the consumer side in me, is always looking for the True. True, what my dollar, my personal dollar, buys. And I know that marketing, when marketing gets involved in back in the day, when I started people that own companies were actually the engineers, whether they be in the tech industry, whether they be, you know, in the European cycling industry, whether it be with Columbus or Chino Cinelli or DeRosa or any of these guys. They were the they were the engineers. They own the company, and they were in charge of vetting of things to be done, right? And as I’ve lived my last 40 years in this industry, the people that are leading companies are much more the sales and marketing people demanding something new every year without really understanding what they’re demanding, right, and making sure that what they’re producing is a positive thing for the consumer, the end consumer.

Jeff Barber 42:11
Yeah, it’s a really interesting point. I wanted to ask you, too about developing some of the first mountain bike-specific treads for tires with the Japanese company IRC, what were the existing mountain bike tires like up until that time? What? What were the tread patterns like? What tires were people using back then?

Tom Ritchey
Do you know what an x1 is?

Jeff Barber
I don’t personally know.

Tom Ritchey 42:38
You should look it up. An X x1 was a BMX tire. It’s basically all the mountain bike kind of evolutions of rims and tires came from the BMX side and the BMX side came from the motocross side. So an x1 was square blocks. Okay, that was the simple mindedness of the tire industry. At that time, no one had come to them, as I said, and said, Hey, I want to design a tire this way in the first 10 years of the mountain bike industry, they were, they were the people that controlled designs and decided on changes and that a product had a 10 year design life. Was a normal thing. If you look at campy and nuevo record. It was a group that had been on the racing side, group that had been around for 20 years before they almost, almost 20 years before they made a nueva record, super, or super record. So there, there was a longer, a much longer baking in product development process that I was used to when I, when I started, and design evolutions were very you know, I know that this isn’t answering your question about tires, but in a broad sense, it was a change that happened with the mountain bike. I have to say, I benefited from factories letting me basically prove my designs, first for them and then second to myself, and then walking in that door being the first to start steering design for my own brand and and basically having a having a wonderful beginning of of that part of my company, when, when I saw that opportunity.

Jeff Barber 44:12
How did you even know what you wanted at that time? I mean, if, if the tires were these square block tires. I mean, were you cutting up tires and doing some prototyping, or how did you even know where to start?

Tom Ritchey 44:23
Basically, I put my face down as though I was the dirt, and I was looking up at the tires, and I was seeing where the tire blocks were wearing out, and they were wearing out in one direction, and I realized that all the tires in the marketplace were an inefficient design, if only one side of the blocks were seeing breakdown interesting as the breakdown was differentiated from front and rear, I realized that was the first to realize that tires needed to be directional. That was before. That was before the car industry realized car. Industry didn’t develop the Aqua tread until after the first directional tires that I developed. Wow. So there was a lot going on in and then the motorcycle guys discovered it. So if you look at the history of treads and and the influence of directional treads, it was either me or somebody that was on their own course of figuring it out.

Jeff Barber 45:25
Yeah, yeah, that’s really cool to see how. I mean, it seems like bikes are unique from those other applications, because it’s, it’s human power that’s powering that, and you’re going to be much more sensitive to, you know, those efficiencies and things. Then, you know, maybe somebody who just is driving a car around, or a motorcycle.

Tom Ritchey 45:44
Well, physics is physics. Jobst would would take me, as I said, on a physics course, anytime I wanted, I just had to ask the question, push the right buttons and and out came the course. So directional treads and wearing condition, differentiating front, rear load ratios, and what happened with, basically the first generations of tires, and the directional in the weight reduction and all that was what I was after. I was after for I was after in the beginning for the lightest tire. So basically IRC was, was one of the only companies working with 127 TPI, and they were doing it for the road. I came to them and said, I want to do it for mountain and they said no. And in the same way, Shimano said to me, I want to use Dura Ace cassette hubs on my mountain bikes in the very beginning. And Shimano said no, and I did it anyway. And then the Dior group was birthed. I don’t know if you know the story about Shimano Dior. I don’t. It was based on my conversations with Shimano and how to do it, and this was before I developed any of my own products, and I was giving away my ideas.

Jeff Barber 47:00
Well, yeah, I mean, it sounds like you had lot more ideas than time. I mean, it’s hard to imagine the things that you were able to accomplish, let alone the others that, you know, maybe got away or that other people ended up running with.

Tom Ritchey 47:12
Well, I was very fortunate to do a lot of my ideas myself, but a lot of them I just just gave away. And, you know, I don’t regret that I had, I’ve had a wonderful life of seeing things that I haven’t tried to control every every bit about it. So thankfully, there’s always more ideas. And just seems like I’m just one more bike ride away from figuring it out.

Jeff Barber 47:37
Well, yeah, that’s the perfect segue into my next question. You know, today’s mountain bikes are stronger and lighter than they’ve ever been before. So are we approaching an optimal state or, I mean, is that even, is that even a dumb question to ask? Are we, are we ever going to reach any sort of optimal?

Tom Ritchey 47:53
There’s lots smarter people in history that said men would never fly and all kinds of things would never happen.

Jeff Barber 47:58
But the bike is such a it’s such a simple machine. I mean, it seems like there, there are some limits, and that a lot of a lot of aspects of the bikes have remained the same over time. I mean, we’re talking with Joe Brees about head tube angles and how they’re essentially kind of the same as they were back, you know, at the very beginning. So, so is there sort of this perfect bike out there?

Tom Ritchey 48:23
Let me jump around a little bit on that question. I noticed today an article about tire size in the Tour de France, they’re looking at tire size differently than they did 40 for the last 40 years, and they’re basically going back to 27 millimeter tires. Guess what size tire I raced?

Jeff Barber 48:41
Guessing it’s pretty close to 27 millimeters.

Tom Ritchey 48:45
Have you ever heard of a Clement pair Roubaix? Look at the size of a Clement Paris Roubaix. That’s what I raced on. There are things that are more chiseled in stone as far as standards, and they always and they always will be. Geometry is based on the human physiology is based on a lot of things that have to do with ride performance and balancing characteristics and rolling resistance. Is is largely based on a lot of things that have to do with displacement and float and things that have things that are air, air related. So there are a lot of things that aren’t going to change much, and it’s pretty, as I said, it’s pretty much chiseled in stone. But there are things that can change, and there are areas that will see change, and there are also areas that will see retreatment. We’ll see a devolution, in my opinion. You know, the tires and things like that are, are basically people rediscovering characteristics that they have been falsely sold by the sales and marketing people of the of the new industry that we live in that are part of the reeducation process, and which is a good thing. Thing, I’ve lived a dream of creating things that also have come and gone, and for the most part, I’ve been the product test guinea pig on those things. So there’s nothing that I could say bad about experimenting. It’s part of my getting to where I’ve gotten, and there’s part of other people getting to where they get. I would say that the encouraging thing that I’m looking at right now is the kind of people ringing the bell of the all purpose, or the gravel bike, or whatever they want to call it, which is basically how I started.

Jeff Barber 50:32
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking when you’re talking about John Finley Scott’s 650b bike. It sounded to me like a gravel bike.

Tom Ritchey 50:40
Yeah, you know, we’re, we’re at this place where carbon fiber makes things light. You can’t design steel tubing like you can design carbon fiber. Carbon fiber, you can create shapes and organic structures that can be joined with with seamless, you know, monocoque conditions. And so there’s certain, there’s certain value to to the way things are going right now, but there’s also a downside to those things that that people don’t realize. So there’s pluses and minuses to everything that is in the in the industry right now, and we live in the soup du jour of times in the bike industry. But the good thing about it is, is that there’s a natural gravity force, or pulling force back to utility side and simple side. And the steel bikes and other things that I enjoy, yeah, that natural force is basically the force of simplicity of people understanding the basic value of the bike, and and, and wanting that, yeah, and reducing, reducing the noise that has led them into thinking the bike is something different. And the thing that I’m concerned about, probably the segue into, is, is the advent of the electric motorbike. And basically, we’ll see it. We’ll see a fracturing of our industry. In the not too distant future, will you have two industries, and you’ll see, you know, the human powered side go down one, one direction, and the electric go down another. There’s a lot to be said for people for choosing electric and electrified bikes and electric haul bikes and all these kind of things that can they can make, make it easier for them to get around without a car, not to diminish the value on that. And as I get old, and as I get to be at an age where I’m going to be either able to ride or not ride. And my as my dad is at 89 years old, there’s going to be probably an electric bike in my future.

Jeff Barber 52:47
Yeah, well, will you call it a mountain bike, or will you we call it an electric bike?

Tom Ritchey 52:53
Might be an electric trike at that time. Can’t even balance, you know?

Jeff Barber 52:59
Yeah, you in. You still ride a lot too. I wanted to ask you about that. You How many miles a year are you typically riding?

Tom Ritchey 53:07
Well, until recently, I was putting on upwards of 10,000 miles a year.

Jeff Barber
Wow.

Tom Ritchey
And I’ve had a couple of car accidents, and I’ve broken some things, oh, man. And I’m in in kind of repair mode I’m getting. I’m pretty much back, but I enjoy riding every day. Yeah, I ride a lot with my wife on the tandem, so I kind of split it up between every other day with her on the tandem and alone by myself.

Jeff Barber 53:33
One final thing I wanted to ask you are, what are some of the mountain bike innovations or new products from the last few years that you’re most excited about. I mean, I think you probably better than anyone know or have a sense of which innovations are kind of game changers and here to stay, and which ones are sort of, you know, fly by night or flavor of the week. So which ones are you really excited about?

Tom Ritchey 54:00
I’d probably say it’s, it’s a mixture of old and new. When I think of the things I’m excited about, I’m excited about things that people would laugh because they’re not new technology. They’re just, they’re just technologies that have been around for a long time and that I’m enjoying.

Jeff Barber 54:16
New old tech. I mean, yeah, you must have gotten a kick out of seeing 650b become this phenomenon, you know, a few years ago where everybody acted like it was this brand new thing. And, you know, the greatest, greatest thing that happened to wheel sizes. But, you know, like you said, it had been around for forever.

Tom Ritchey 54:36
Yeah. So the rediscovery of things is, is something that I I’ve enjoyed seeing cycling is, is truly an honest pursuit. It’s a noble sport. It’s something that that brings out your limitations very quickly. Anytime you make something that is as light and as it is, it is, it needs to. Work as good as it needs to work. It brings you to an honest point, usually, and it does it to you. You don’t do it to it. So much of the stuff we celebrate these days, in terms of technology, we don’t really have a lot of true understanding of its value. We we project value into something before we truly know it personally. That is something I feel like I’m at my age, I’m growing, hopefully, more wise about, you know, I’m excited about having one bike right now, having one bike that can do a lot of different things, and I know that that’s kind of very much in my roots and things that that I’ve done. In the very beginning, I started out with one bike you probably, you know, don’t need to hear my all my stories, but it’s, it’s important for me to go to a place like Moab and ride my road road bike around slick rock. Because I know I can. I want to do it. I just know that it’s that it’s something that is something I want to check off my list. Yeah, whether it be that, whether it be the original yolk rides that got in me and never, never gotten out of me, or whatever it is it’s, it’s that kind of mindset that I like, I like to carry into my product, into my life, into my hopefully, in the simplicity of things.

RitJeff Barber 56:21
Yeah, that’s a great perspective. Well, thank you so much for talking with me and giving our listeners insight into the early days of mountain biking and where sort of the industry might be heading in the future.

Tom Ritchey
You’re welcome.

Jeff Barber
Well, you can keep up with the latest products and innovations from Tom Ritchey and Ritchey designs at ritcheylogic DotCom, and don’t miss our upcoming interview with Gary Fisher as we continue our mountain Bike founders podcast series. Thanks for joining us. Peace.