The misunderstanders write the history books

Dredging around on the interwebs for a certain specific mutant mountain bike from the 1990s, I found a site depicting bikes of that period, viewed through the perception of young modernists. Discussing the flat, narrow handlebars we ran back then, these analysts said that we did it to reduce weight. This is entirely inaccurate.

The mountain bikes of the early ‘90s had short top tubes and long stems. We cut the bars down for better clearance on narrow trails, and to reduce unnecessary steering leverage. No one today understands bar ends, either. I don’t miss bar ends, because I bought a late ‘90s frame with a longer top tube, and put wider bars with more sweep on it, but I also don’t ride off-road in the 1990s cruising style anymore. Back then our rides were little journeys, not a series of linked stunts. We actually chose to challenge ourselves with long climbs, and liked riding cross-country.

The inheritors of mountain biking, the children of parks, ramps, moto-style courses and highly evolved suspension, have come up with their own narrative about a world they never knew. It doesn’t matter. Mountain bikers can pick and choose which antecedents to honor. It’s a young person’s game, so it will always exist in the present and recent past. The machines of history will be judged by the standards of modern riders who have not had to fumble through the period of discovery and refinement.

The older I get, the younger I realize the ages are that I once thought of as old. But if your sport is highly likely to tax your body’s ability to heal quickly, it is a young person’s game.

Back when cycling was just cycling, riders pedaled as best they could over whatever surfaces they had. The first bike ride across the United States predated the first official transcontinental road by about 30 years. And that was on a bike with skinny tires and no suspension. Really differentiated speciation didn't afflict us until the late 20th Century.

Granted, bicycling innovators experimented relentlessly, and forms of suspension can be seen from the beginning. At the start, roads themselves were often little more than trails in some places, or a set of ruts that would be dusty or muddy depending on the season.

The first mountain bikes continued that time line of branching but still related lines. The basic objective was the same: get from point A to point B over a given type of terrain. Riders in different regions, with different backgrounds, took the basic form and mutated it to suit their local conditions and tastes. Are your trees close together? Cut your bars down.

Commuting in the city, I had 38cm drop bars on my fixed gear so that I could slip through skinny gaps. On my open-road bike I had 44cm drop bars. When I started commuting over longer distances of open road, and didn't need to thread the needle in a tight cityscape with close traffic and parked cars, I put wider bars on all my bikes. It's called adaptation. Riders who adopted the mountain bike as an urban platform also modified their bars based on those considerations. Riders who visited our rugged, forested part of New England from the wide-open spaces of the golden West often had bikes adapted to plush singletrack through open range and meadows. But even they exhibited slightly narrower bars than the current norm, because of the top-tube-to-stem ratio I already cited.

Different brands adopted the longer cockpit gradually, taking a couple or three years to shift every company's offerings to the format now viewed as normal. Stems shortened. Bars widened. Riders wanted to sit up a little higher for better weight distribution and a better view down the trail. With suspension, you don't want to risk being way out over the front end of the bike. With full suspension, you can  and should stay more neutral on the bike anyway. And of course suspension has bred its own nuances of kinetics to propel the bike. Once you embrace the expense and complexity of a fully modern mountain bike, you might as well take advantage of everything it has to offer in return for its need for maintenance.

The website also dismissed threaded headsets as a misguided carryover from road biking. The article states that the pounding of mountain biking would make the locknut and top cone loosen up. If the headset had been properly adjusted and secured, it would not loosen. The major problem is that the explosion of bike business led to an explosion of shops, and a need to hire lots of "mechanics" while still trying to pay them dirt. Legions of inexperienced people came in who had no idea how a locknut works, and no patience. And why should they, when they just took the job to get the employee discount on schwag, and their employer was trying to nickel and dime them?

I ran threaded headsets without a problem until the turn of the century, when you could hardly find good quality product in quill stems and threaded headsets. The threadless headset is very convenient to work on, but it makes adjustment of bar height an awkward yank a lot of the time. Young riders on their stunt machines don't mind being locked in at an aggressive angle. Riders looking for a little more relaxation end up with a stack of spacers or a stem with a dorky rise that makes the bike steer funny.

Their picture shows someone adjusting the threaded headset without a stem in place, which will result in a headset that binds once the stem is installed and tightened. That kind of makes my point that the vast majority of people getting into the game in the 1990s knew the latest thing, but they didn't know everything. And now the current archaeologists look back from what they know and guess about what they see.