Mountain

Lift your eyes from the road and what's there? Fields. Hills. Mountains. Tracks. Bridleways.

Way back in the dawn of cycling, Baron Karl von Drais was perhaps the very first off-roader. Bumping along the forest tracks near Karlsruhe in Germany, he could have had little inkling that one day the roads would become so good, not only for cyclists, that cyclists would want to escape again to the rough tracks of the countryside.

Cycling off-road was at first a matter of necessity. The 1950s and 60s were the heyday of British 'rough stuff' cycling, a term created by cycle tourists for whom the lack of a road was little obstacle. The bikes were tourers, probably with handbuilt wheels for extra resilience, and rough stuff was the off-road journey you made to link the road sections of a route.

Light, stiff frame, 26" (559) wheels, knobby tyres, flat handlebars with climbing pegs, brake and gear levers right under your fingers, 21 or 24 gears and shatteringly powerful brakes are the hallmarks of the modern mountain bike.

ATBs make up the bulk of modern bike sales, and they have been responsible for a boom in bike ownership. Suddenly, cycling has become fun again and most people can afford a bike that is built to cope with crashing down a steep forest track, without either bike or rider finishing the descent in bits.

As ATBs entered volume production, initially high prices dropped and components started to improve in quality. Steel frames are being jostled by oversize aluminium, titanium and eerily-silent carbon-fibre frames. Manufacturers are fighting to shave grammes off components, and the mountain-bike press reads like a gallery of technicoloured, high-priced bolt-ons.

Suspension, once a desperately high-priced luxury, is now appearing on modestly-prices ATBs, allowing riders to take descents at higher speeds, with front forks and elaborate rear suspension to soak up the battering of rocks, ruts and tree roots. Suspension has radically changed bike design, allowing frame designers to add floating rear triangles, oddly-mounted shock absorbers and even inspiring some to replace tubes with tensioned cables. In the 1970s, a group of American enthusiasts took the heavy American cruiser bikes, fitted the fattest tyres they could find, and began an anarchic series of race meetings in Marin County. Their bikes had grease-filled hub brakes, and moderating the furious descent created enough heat to burn off the grease. At the end of the day brakes would be stripped and repacked with grease. So the races became known as Repack, and they were a phenomenon. Invention was followed by innovation, and the enthusiasts began refining their heavy, essentially unsuitable machines. Soon, bespoke frames were being designed and built, lighter components added. Those enthusiasts had changed the world. They had invented the mountain bike - the brash populariser of off-road cycling. The toughest bikes in the world had been invented just in time to catch a generation for whom hedonism, thrill-seeking and living on the edge were perfectly expressed in the technicolored, consumer's world of mountain-biking.

The same bike that is designed to cope with the slings and arrows of off-road riding takes potholed urban streets with great urbanity. Big tyres, good low-speed control offered by the wide bars and massive braking power make the ATB a good urban survival machine. The loud image portrayed by the ATB press does a disservice to the millions of people for whom the ATB was a revelation. People brought up on heavy roadsters could suddenly afford a light bike with plenty of gears, reliable brakes and the flexibility to move briskly on road and take off-road tracks with gusto.

Disapprove of anodised purple titanium alloy hubs if you wish, but do homage to the Repack inventors of the ATB. They changed the world.