REAL MOUNTAIN MOUNTAIN BIKES

BARNEY TAKES A LOOK AT THREE LONG-TRAVEL BIKES THAT AIM TO LAUGH IN THE FACE OF THE UPHILL POINTY PLACES.

WORDS AND PICTURES BY BARNEY MARSH

Back in the day, it was all so simple. To unobservant eyes, mountain bikes all looked the same. Two wheels, rigid frame. To modern eyes, sure they had amusingly croth endangering top tubes, way-too-narrow bars, tiller-like stems. But essentially there was one design, and it was used for everything.

Everything? Well, if you rode and raced in the 80s and early 90s, it would have to be. The same bike you’d ride trails on every day (if you were lucky) would be same bike you’d race at the weekend. And the race might include a cross-country component, a downhill component and a trials component. And maybe in the summer you’d take the same bike over to the continent, or Wales, or Scotland, to ride up and down some real mountains (chairlifts? Pah!). One bike. And it would do everything. A bike to conquer mountains. A Real Mountain mountain bike.

Technology didn’t actually change all that, though. Not at first. What did change that was an increase in the popularity of our sport. Which meant that more people of different abilities and interests came into it, and attempted, quite naturally, to make the bikes work for them. This allied to a sudden increase in the market for innovation, and there’s where technology took a hold. And bikes started to change. Slowly at first, pushing against the innate conservatism of the consumer space, and then more quickly. The range of innovations became quite startling. Front suspension. Disc brakes, rear suspension. And – all important, this – specialisation. There were mountain bikes for riding around on, sure, but there were some which were much better at cross-country racing (stiffer, and more uncomfortable). Better at downhill (actually, these ones were pretty hopeless at mostly anything else, weighing more or less the same as an ocean-going yacht). Some were better at four-cross or trials too. An increase in the number of available wheel sizes didn’t help.

And suddenly there were many bikes, and they wouldn’t do everything.

Then things reached a tipping point, it seems. The slow and seemingly inexorable expansion of our mountain bike world slowed. There is only so much experimentation a bike can take, after all, before it actually becomes more difficult to use, given that it needs to accommodate the peculiarities of the human body to actually work at all. And designs began to fall towards a seemingly happy medium. And seemingly disparate disciplines began producing bikes that made a funny kind of sense for other disciplines, too. Which can only be a good thing for everyone. And bikes started to become jacks of all trades once again. And there were all-new Real Mountain mountain bikes.

So what is a ‘real mountain’ mountain bike? It needs to be able to rip at descents and master the climbs. It needs to be light enough to huck over obstacles and lift over gates, spry enough to leap up the steepest, techiest climbs, nimble enough to perk up at the slightest bit of singletrack, and stable enough, and strong enough, to handle the very steepest drops. It needs to be light enough, and burly enough, to be ridden in very pointy parts of the world and to laugh casually while it’s doing it. And the guise of the enduro bike, the do-anything, Real Mountain mountain bike is back. It’s likely to be made of more exotic materials than the old do-everything bikes of yore. It’ll be around the same weight, though – somewhere between 25lbs and 30lbs, depending on how much cash you throw at it. And it’s got a lot more suspension. Different disciplines are coalescing, and the true mountain bike is back again.