’80s Mountain Bikes Sucked

Generally, I say this as a joke, but there’s more than a kernel of truth in what I’m about to say:

I’m not sure why I liked mountain biking back in the 1980s and ‘90s. 

The experience I have on a mountain bike today is unlike what the sport was, circa 1987. The experience I have today, better yet—the fun I have today—was not possible back then. Here’s the thing: Road bikes have changed a fair amount since the 1970s: The bikes are lighter, the tires more durable, we have more gears, integrated shift and brake levers, better brakes and more gears. However, any road descent I do today, I could manage just as well on a bike made the year I was born. 

Let’s contrast that with the fact that very few of the descents I do on a mountain bike today are ones that I’d have had the guts to tackle on my first mountain bike, which was a GT Avalanche. 

Let’s consider all the changes: I’m going to try to do these in chronological order:

• Top tubes got longer and stems got shorter, increasing wheelbase and pushing the front wheel farther in front of the rider to reduce the chance for an endo—let’s consider that that word has nearly been stricken from the cycling vocabulary. 
• Disc brakes mean you can always stop. I recall being at a race at an Alpine ski area in New Hampshire in 1991 and I was pulling on the brake levers as hard as I could and I couldn’t stop. 
• 29 in. wheels roll over stuff that would stop 26 in. wheels dead. They also offer greater stability at speed than 26-in. wheels do. 
• Suspension has improved by several orders of magnitude. I recall being on a ride with coworkers in 1998 and riding a full suspension bike and with each pedal stroke I gave up a foot to the other riders. Today, 145mm of travel is more efficient than 100mm of travel was 20 years ago. 
• Slacker head tube angles and wider bars. I tend to think of these two changes together, and while some of the evolution was co-occurring, I don’t think one depended on the other. But they made fast descents much easier to handle. 
• Tires are so much better. Tubeless technology took a while to get the kinks out, but it has been a game-changer, of course. I’ve had exactly one flat on a mountain bike in the 2020s. But that’s not all. I don’t think the other aspects of tires get enough credit, but the casings are better, the treads are better and the compounds offer so much more grip while still being durable. 
• Today’s drivetrains work much better than the old ones, and I’m not just talking about SRAM’s war on the front derailleur. I’d have been okay sticking with two chainrings, but current 12-speed systems keep me happy. 
• Lastly, dropper posts. I think it’s pretty easy to underestimate the impact this has had on mountain bikes and descending. Well, descending in general, now that they are a thing on gravel bikes, too. The best way I can frame it is to use an example from my experience with gravel bikes. A few years ago, when I first installed a dropper post on a gravel bike, by the end of the first day, I found that I was so much more comfortable descending with the seat down that I was dropping the saddle for descents that weren’t actually steep. Having a lower center of gravity always gives me confidence, which, when I thought about it, I didn’t find surprising; I’ve always preferred bikes with a lower bottom bracket. 

Here’s what I find especially curious: If we pulled out any one of those changes improvements, our experience of mountain biking would suffer. It is in aggregate that we have a machine that can roll through terrain like nothing else.

Did I enjoy mountain biking in the 1980s? Yeah, I did, but my gravel bike is every bit as capable today. We had fun on those rides, but when I think about the yardstick by which I measure fun—flow—there’s no doubt I get more of it today. And that’s the thing: The gear is never an end in itself; it’s a means to an end, a flow hack.

The evolution of the mountain bike has been a quest for flow. The engineers, designers and inventors who led us here may not have been able to articulate just what they were chasing, but we all know that feeling. There’s a speed at which the world turns fun. Once you’ve experienced it, the only question after that is:

How do I get more?