STRAIGHT TORQUING GUY KESTEVEN: Ways to go

Mountain biking has come a long way in a short space of time, but the best (and worst!) is yet to come

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Twenty-five years (and a few months) ago, I wrote my first words for mbr. Mountain biking seemed pretty damn sorted back then. We had global media coverage with mainstream brands like 7-UP, Mercedes, Toyota, Volvo and Subaru wrapping their logos around riders and events.

In theory all the basic ingredients for properly sorted bikes existed too. Stem length and suspension travel were still often the wrong way round, but full-suspension, carbon-fibre monocoques and hydraulic disc brakes were all in play by 1997. We had body armour, full-face helmets and purpose-built trails starting to appear.

OK, so there wasn’t really an internet and the mbr website was years away but the magazine had a VHS video on the front of the first issue. Sprung was in production too, so the shift towards moving pictures was definitely starting. But as mtb pioneer Gary Fisher said in the first ever TV news broadcast to feature ‘Klunking’, back in the late 1970s; “We’ve come a long way, but we’ve still got a long ways to go.”