“Strong, light, cheap – pick two.” Mountain bike pioneer, product designer, agitator.

WORDS CHIPPS PHOTOGRAPHY CHIPPS & STEVE BEHR

INTERVIEW

Keith Bontrager has been a bike industry name since the earliest days of the sport. While not a great self-publicist, his thoughts on bike design have nevertheless had a great influence on mountain biking over the last three decades. It’s been 15 years since we last interviewed him in Singletrack and so we reckoned it was time to see what had changed. We despatched Chipps to Keith’s house in Santa Cruz to quiz Keith and to have a particularly good chicken molé and pulled pork tortilla lunch.

Keith has always been merciless in pointing out the emperor’s new clothes and has never taken anything at face value. If someone says that a particular tyre size rolls quicker or corners better, Keith will ask for proof or he’ll go and create his own experiments to prove or disprove the theory.

It’s the same with interviews and journalists. If you’re asking the same dull questions as everyone else, then you’ll quickly know about it as he’ll tell you that you are. And even when we think we’re being clever, he’ll quickly bring you back to earth.

Keith, we were talking about the continual pursuit of increasingly niche bits of the mountain bike world. Is this because we’re running out of new ideas? Or is there still room for innovation in the bicycle world?

It depends on what you consider ‘new ideas’ and innovation. I get asked this kind of question in every interview I do. My response (in an interview with another UK mag about ten years ago) was that the improvements in mountain bikes would not be in big new ideas. It would be in refining and perfecting the bikes we already have. I think that’s still pretty close to right.

We’ve become convinced that everything we use should be replaced with the new and improved model on a regular basis. Like cell phones. But it’s not simple to improve bikes continuously. They are not silicon chips – they do not behave according to Moore’s Law. Improving a mechanical device becomes increasingly expensive and complex as the design approaches an optimal state, and the incremental improvements in performance get smaller and smaller.

Luckily the bicycle world operates according to the rules of fashion (as do most retail industries). The rules of fashion offer a simple solution – it’s about change. Change can be innovative, but it doesn’t have to be. It can also loop back on itself whenever it has to. The clothing industry is a simple example of how long that sort of thing can go on and how weird it can get. There is plenty to be done as long as we are all willing to play along.