40th anniversary of the UK's first multi-disciplinary MTB competition

[GrahamJohnWallace]

Today we have many MTB events each year and it may be difficult to imagine a time before they existed.

In 1977, British Journalist Richard Grant, later of Richards bicycle book fame, happened across some hippies riding bicycles down mountains in California. He so enjoyed his experience of riding in the mountains with Charlie Kelly and Gary Fisher that he bought a Gary Fisher clunker off them and shipped it back to the UK.

Despite not have been into cycling previously he became an evangelist for what later came to be called mountain bikes. He displayed his clunker at bicycle trade shows and in 1982/3 teamed up with Richard Ballantine in importing a small number of Ritchey Montare MTBs into the UK. Aware that there was going to be an influx of these bikes into British shops in 1984, he set up Bicycle Action magazine to promote the new bikes. Though there was not enough of a market at that time for Bicycle Action to solely focus on MTBs.

In collaboration with Charlie Kelly, Grant created the Fat Tyre Five, a series of five MTB events to take place in 1984. The first four in the UK and the last in California. The first event, a cross country race event took place on the site of the Eastway Cycle circuit in North London on May the 27th. It is thought that this was a hastily set up event tagged onto an HPV race taking place at the circuit and to coincide with the launch of Bicycle Action. However, it rained on the day and much of the banking at the circuit was too steep for the unexperienced riders who had to dismount and run up and down cyclocross style.

Earlier on, Grant been introduced to Geoff Apps by Charlie Kelly. So for the next event he approached Apps for help and guidance because he was both an experienced off-road cyclist and competitive motorbike trials rider. Using his knowledge of off-road riding in the Chilterns, Apps chose a suitable site for the next event and negotiated the required permissions from the Forestry Commission. Unfortunately, the FC later got cold feet with regards to allowing a long cross-country route by restricting the event to much smaller area than originally agreed. Apps got around this by devising a short course circuit with multiple laps with knockout heats based on the cycle speedway format. Not being allowed to use exiting tracks meant that the course had to be created by clearing a route through the overgrown woodland.

So on Sunday the 17th of June 1984 the great and the good of the early UK MTB scene gathered at what used to be a WW1 shooting range at Mansion Hill near Halton Buckinghamshire for the first of the Wendover Bashes. This was the first UK MTB specific multi disciplinary event featuring MTB downhill racing, trials, hill climb events and the second to feature cross-country racing. This time the weather was warm and sunny and the event was deemed to be a great success.

One rider competing at the event was Jeremy Torr, later to become a co-founder of the UK Mountain Bike Club (MBC).
The MBC went on to adopt the same multi-disciplinary precedent used at the Bash with each competitor participating in a range of events and the winner being the rider with the highest overall score. This format continued until British Cycling took over stewardship of the sport in the late 1990s and split the sport into separate disciplines.

 

[longun]

Thankful to everyone and all of it cheers buddy

 

[Tsundere]

Interesting to see the birth of British MTB laid out so clearly, and amazing when you think that all these decades later the sport is still evolving and growing in the UK. It hasn't peaked yet!

An off road bike park only recently opened up here in Northampton, it's packed every time I go there, people of all ages having a go with courses to suit all abilities.

Of course we here like to think of our particular era as the best, the golden age of MTB, and in many ways it was, being the time when the sport really took off. But it's heartwarming to think that there are kids out there today, who will one day be old farts like us hunting obsessively for overpriced retro bikes and parts, stuff that has yet to even come into existence.

All because some fella with no interest in bikes bumped into some Californian hippies 40 years ago, that must have been some damned fine weed.

 

[GrahamJohnWallace]

Of course we here like to think of our particular era as the best, the golden age of MTB, and in many ways it was, being the time when the sport really took off. But it's heartwarming to think that there are kids out there today, who will one day be old farts like us hunting obsessively for overpriced retro bikes and parts, stuff that has yet to even come into existence.

The 1984 Wendover Bash took place at a time when no one really knew that mountain bikes were here to stay. Some, including the directors at Raleigh believed it would be 'a short lived fad' and so initially decided not to manufacture MTBs. And many early riders were concerned about being restricted or banned if their activities upset existing users of the countryside.

It was the slow burn of UK mountain biking in the 1980s that led onto the 'golden age.' Clever advertising campaigns like those of Muddy Fox and the publicity surrounding expeditions like the Crane Cousin's Kilimanjaro ascent gradually raised the profile of the sport to a level where it became cool and aspirational. This was in contrast to the 1970s where cycling was too often seen as just a low status form of transport.

Today I revisited the Wendover Bash site. Though nature has now reclaimed much of the site, I was surprised to find evidence of the cross country course still surviving forty years on. It seems that enough local walkers have adopted parts of the course as an unofficial footpaths to kept the undergrowth at bay.

Every week hundreds of mountain bikers must ride through the site on their way to Wendover Woods without knowing anything about its history as the birthplace of competitive mountain biking in the UK. It could even be argued that this was the first purpose-built trail centre because the courses were conceived and cleared specifically for the event, even though if it was only used for one day every year.

It will be a shame if future generations of mountain bikers in Britain are unaware of the origins the UK sport.

Hopefully, people will be enjoying mountain biking for hundreds of years into the future. But the sport will only ever have originated once.

 

[GrahamJohnWallace]

Because the 1984 Wendover Bash was the UK's first multi-discipline MTB event, Channel 4 TV sent a camera crew to cover it. However, there was no internet or catch-up streaming back then, and so to record a program you had to find it in the TV Times, Ceefax or Oracle listings and set your BetaMax or VHS machine to tape it.

On the 20/06/1984 Channel 4 featured the Bash as part of their Wheels, Wings and Water series. I later tracked down somebody who taped the programme, but unfortunately when they watched the tape they discovered that their son had taped over it. That programme is now in the BFI archives and available for viewing but I am not aware of it being available anywhere online.

However, thanks to Muddy Fox Co-founder Drew Lawson we do have this short edited highlights clip of the event to remind us exactly how British mountain biking started.