So ‘Mountain Biking’ or ‘Biking on a mountain’ actually started for me on a BMX circa 1986/87 ish (age 7 !!) We we’re free as kids in the valley to explore and play in the lanes/fields/hills/forests/rivers where i’d cycle up the local Welsh hills, then pelt down the bridleways and foot paths and through the field tracks as fast as possible as if we were famous WRC rally drivers on a bike, it was biking off road. I’d even time my downhill runs on my Casio World Time watch. It was pretending you we a landrover off road when you were too little to be allowed to drive one. Most of us did then start driving in the fields circa age 10, before we had left primary school. I could hit 3rd gear getting the car down from the barn !!
It was also, even back then, about what obstacles we could get over and how steep a hedge/drop we could ride down. (I had no idea it was called trials riding) I use to stand on the rear bmx pegs to get my bum/weight right off the back to do hedge drop offs. This peaked one day with accidentally bouncing almost vertical on the front wheel as the drop ended, I figured that was about the limit. The same applies to riding down ‘milk stand’ steps and hopping over piles of telegraph poles.
The birth of ‘Mountain Biking’ as implied by a few of these threads, to me was a marketing and re branding exercise that happened circa late 1980s early 1990s. Hence the endless debates as to where/when it truly started. To me I’d been doing it years already and someone just decided to rebrand it. So when ever I read the ‘it started here/there’ I just read the marketing started out of there, rather than the actual activity, since we’d all been riding off road for centuries already.
In a sleepy village, that renaming of what we already did came courtesy of MBUK & MTB-Pro in the nearest towns WHSmith newsagents, which was our only source of anything that commented on what we were doing. It was probably from there that the name of my chosen hobby switched from ‘Biking’ to ‘Mountain Biking’, since it sounded cooler, more extreme or niche and more accurately described the type of biking we enjoyed doing the most.
We had never called it BMXing as we assumed you needed a bmx track to call it that and we only had 1 slide and 2 tyre swings in our village, never mind a bmx track.
My BMX was perfectly suited to off-roading with wider tyres, good mud clearance, padded top tubes. My first memory that most might stereotype as a ‘mountain bike’ was probably a
Raleigh Lizzard or the equivalents just before that in the late 80s. The attraction of them though was 5 speed or 10 speed gears. I recall kids in primary boasting about who had the most gears. I don’t remember us calling these mountain bikes much though, that only really happened as tyre sizes grew to match the terrain better. And I think the change in tyre widths really defines the moment mountain biking itself was born as we know it. Whoever can claim the creation and use of tyres dedicated to off-road mud can claim the mountain bike creation I feel, rather than tweakes in geometry which still happen to this day. Once you had a wide nobbly tyre, irrespective of frame or gear numbers or mechanicals, it was clearly a bike for off roading over mountains.
My first memory/experience then of a proper mountain bike would be my older brothers when he bought it home from Uni circa 1992, a silver & blue Halfords sold Peugeot Tim Gould edition, with basic front suspension. We made dirt jumps for this and everything.
It was a few years later till the parentals justified me having my own proper mtb rather than the sibling hand me down bikes. I opted for the Saracen Terratrax 1994/95 as the best I could find and afford in the region. As couldn’t find or afford an red M2
Once acquired and the surrounding 10miles conquered, I joined a local towns bike club in the mid 90s and off to WRC forests we would drive on club rides and a few regional races in the Welsh dragon series. The best bikes in that club, a Cannodale Delta-V, an Orange P7 and a few gold Judy forks and that was about it.
The rest is modern history…
