PICTURES BY GEOFF WAUGH
I remember first getting into mountain biking. I’d bought my first bike in the late ’80s – an Emmelle Cortina in a lovely smokey red finish and, living in pancake-flat Cheshire, I’d pottered about a bit in the Lakes and the Peaks. But I didn’t properly get the bug until the early ’90s, when I lived in Bristol. One bike theft and a subsequent folded hybrid frame (they don’t like trees: who knew?) saw me emerge, blinking, into the light as a fully fledged mountain bike obsessive, as I attempted to build my own bike armed with nothing but a meagre part-time income, a vaguely knowledgeable friend and a copy of MBUK. Back then, the trails I learned to ride on were sparsely populated, even by walkers; the very few riders were all known to one another. There were no trail centres, there was no trail conflict; we were met with mild curiosity, and an amazement that you could ride bikes in the woods at all.
But was it really better? Well, that’s a question. It seems that plenty of people think so – a recent nostalgia-filled Facebook group about the ’80s and ’90s UK ‘golden era’ has over 8,000 members, so there must be something to it. I turned to some people who might have more of an inkling than me – people who perhaps moved a little closer to the epicentre of mountain biking at the time, and I badgered them: ‘Was mountain biking really better back in the day?’
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