The History and Sport of Mountain Biking

ZACHARY DOMINQUE

St. Edwards University

By asking the audience to visualize racing down a mountain, Zachary effectively captures the audience’s attention.

Imagine that you’re on a bike, plunging down a steep, rock-strewn mountain, yet fully in control. Adrenaline courses through your body as you hurtle through the air, touch down on glistening pebbled streams and tangled grasses, and rocket upward again. You should be scared, but you’re not. In fact, you’re having the time of your life. Like we say, Nirvana.

How many of you like to bike? Perhaps you ride to campus, bike for fitness, or cycle just for fun. You might own a bike with a lightweight frame and thin wheels, and use it to log some serious mileage. Or possibly you ride a comfort bike, with a nice soft seat and solid tires.

Pointing to his lengthy experience with the sport lends Zachary credibility to address the topic.

Good morning, folks. My name is Zachary Dominque, and I’m a mountain biker. I’ve been racing since I was eight years old and won state champion three years ago, so this topic is close to my heart.

Today, I’m going to take you on a tour of this exciting sport. I’ll be your “engine”—your driver—in mountain bike–speak. Our ride begins with a brief overview of mountain biking; then we’ll do a hopturn—a turn in reverse—to learn about the sport’s colorful history.

Zachary previews the speech using metaphoric language in which the speech becomes a tour with courses.

Pedalling ahead in this beautiful autumn air, we’ll chat about the differences between mountain bikes and road bikes. We’ll conclude our tour at a local bike shop, where you can compare downhill, trail, and cross-country mountain bikes. These are the three main types of mountain bikes, designed for the three major types of mountain biking. I hope by then that you’ll catch a little bit of mountain biking fever and see why I find it such an exciting, intense, and physically challenging sport.

Zachary transitions into the speech body.

To start, let me briefly define mountain biking.

Zachary is careful to define his topic for the audience.

Mountain biking is a sport that can be extreme, recreational, or somewhere in-between. The website ABC of Mountain Biking offers a good basic definition: “Mountain biking is a form of cycling on off-road or unpaved surfaces such as mountain trails and dirt roads; the biker uses a bicycle with a sturdy frame and fat tires.”

The idea behind mountain biking is to go where other bikes won’t take you. Mountain bikers ride on backcountry roads and on single-track trails winding through fields or forests. They climb up steep, rock-strewn hills and race down over them. The focus is on self-reliance, because these bikers often venture miles from help.

Zachary uses reputable sources and informs the audience of where the information can be located.

According to the National Bicycle Dealers Association website, in 2013 mountain bikes accounted for 25 percent of all bikes sold in the United States. If you factor in sales of the comfort bike, which is actually a mountain bike modified for purely recreational riders, sales jump to nearly 38 percent of all bikes sold. Some 50 million Americans love riding their mountain bikes, according to data published by the New England Mountain Bike Association (NEMBA). According to NEMBA, that’s 1-1/3 times the population of Canada. And that’s one and one-half times the number of golfers in the U.S.

Zachary uses a transition to signal a change in focus.

So you see that mountain biking is popular with a lot of people. But the sport itself is fairly new.

To add interest and involvement, Zachary supplements his description with photographs.

The history of mountain biking is less than 50 years old. The man in this picture is Gary Fisher, one of the founders of mountain biking. According to The Original Mountain Bike Book, written in 1998 by pioneering mountain bikers Rob van der Plas and Charles Kelly, they, along with Fisher, Joe Breeze, and other members of the founding posse from the Marin County, California, area, were instrumental in founding the modern sport of mountain biking in the early 1970s.

Zachary again supplements his verbal description with a visual aid.

Mountain bikes—called MTBs or ATBs (for all terrain bikes)—didn’t exist then as we now know them, so as you can see, in this picture of Gary Fisher, he’s riding a modified one-speed Schwinn cruiser. Cruisers, or “ballooners,” aren’t made to go off road at all. Nothing equips them to navigate trails, and their brakes aren’t remotely equipped to handle stops on steep descents. But this is the type of bike Fisher and others started out with.

By the mid-1970s, growing numbers of bikers in California got into using modified cruisers to race downhill on rocky trails. They’d meet at the bottom of Mount Tamalpais, in Corte Madera, California, walk their bikes a mile or two up its steep slopes, and hurl on down. As even more people got involved, Charles Kelly and others organized the famed Repack Downhill Race on Mt. Tam. Held from 1976 to 1979, the Repack race became a magnet for enthusiasts and put the sport on the map, according to The Original Mountain Bike Book.

The reason why the race was called “Repack” is a story in itself.

The trail in the Repack race plummeted 1300 feet in less than 2 miles, according to Joe Breeze in an article posted on the Mountain Biking Hall of Fame website. Such a steep drop meant constant braking, which in turn required riders to replace, or “repack,” their bikes’ grease after nearly each run. As Breeze recounts in his own words: “The bikes’ antiquated hub coaster brake would get so hot that the grease would vaporize, and after a run or two, the hub had to be repacked with new grease.”

Rather than relying solely on Internet sources, a practice that lessens speaker credibility, Zachary cites a key book on the topic, written by two founders of the sport.

As you might imagine, these early enthusiasts eventually tired of the routine: The bikers had tinkered with their bikes from the start, adding gearing, drum brakes, and a suspension system. In 1979, Joe Breeze designed a new frame—called the “Breezer”—which became the first actual mountain bike. By 1982, as van der Plas and Kelly write in The Original Mountain Bike Book, standardized production of mountain bikes finally took off.

To help foster understanding, Zachary compares and contrasts the mountain bike with the more familiar road bike.

Now that you’ve learned a bit of the history of mountain biking, let’s look at what today’s mountain bike can do. To make things clearer, I’ll compare them to road bikes. Road bikes are the class of bikes that cyclists who compete in the Tour de France use.

Mountain bikes and road bikes are built for different purposes. Mountain bikes are built to tackle rough ground, while road bikes are designed to ride fast on paved, smooth surfaces. To accomplish their task, mountain bikes feature wide tires with tough tread. In contrast, road bike tires are ultrathin and their frames extremely lightweight. If you take a road bike off-road, chances are you’ll destroy it. Without the knobby tread and thickness found on mountain bike tires, road bike tires can’t grip onto the rocks or other obstacles that cover off-road courses.

The handlebars on the bikes also differ. Mountain bikes feature flat handlebars; these keep us in an upright stance, so that we don’t flip over when we hit something. The drop handlebars on road bikes require the cyclist to lean far forward; this position suits road cycling, which prizes speed.

The gears and suspension systems also differentiate mountain bikes from road bikes.

Mountain bikes use lower gears than road bikes and the gears are more widely spaced. This gives them more control to ride difficult terrain.

Zachary internally summarizes the speech points he’s covered thus far and previews what he’ll discuss next. Note his use of biking jargon to draw the audience in.

As for suspension, road bikes generally don’t have any kind of suspension system that can absorb power. That is, they don’t have shock absorbers because they’re not supposed to hit anything. Imagine riding over rocks and roots without shocks. It wouldn’t be pretty. Many mountain bikes have at least a great front shock-absorbing suspension system; some have rear-suspension systems, and some bikes have dual systems.

I hope by now you have a sense of the mountain bike design. But there are finer distinctions to draw. These are actually three different types of mountain bikes, designed to accommodate the three major kinds of mountain biking—downhill, trails, and cross-country.

Let’s start with downhill. Downhill bikes have the fewest gears of the three types of mountain bikes and weigh the most. That’s because downhill biking is a daredevil sport—these bikers are crazy! They slide down hills at insane speeds, and they go off jumps. Lots of what they call gravity checks, or falls. As described on the website Trails.com, downhill racers catch a shuttle going up the mountain, then speed downhill while chewing up obstacles. Think of downhill racing as skiing with a bike.

In this transition, Zachary extends the metaphor of his speech as a tour.

Now let’s swing by trails biking.

Trails bikes look quite different than either downhill or cross-country bikes. They have very small wheels, measuring either 20, 24, or 26 inches, and smaller frames. These differences in design help trail bikers do what they do best—jump over obstacles—cars, rocks, and large logs. The trail biker’s goal is not to put a foot down on the ground. In trails biking, the course is set right there in front of you. Trail bike racing is one of the few types of biking that’s done by time, not all at a mass start.

The third major type of mountain biking, cross-country, or XC cycling, is my sport.

Cross-country biking is also the most common type of mountain biking—and the one sponsored by the Olympics. That’s right. In 1996, mountain biking became an Olympic sport—just two decades after its inception.

With cross-country, you get the best of all worlds, at least in my humble opinion. The courses are creative, incorporating hills and valleys and rough to not-so-rough terrain. If done competitively, cross-country biking is like competing in a marathon. Done recreationally, it offers you the chance to see the great outdoors while getting, or staying, in great shape.

Cross-country bikes come in two forms: XC bikes are very lightweight, with either full or partial suspension. The Trails/Marathon XC hybrid bikes are a bit heavier, with full suspension; XC bikes are designed for seriously long rides.

Zachary signals the close of the speech by reiterating his opening analogy in which he compares the speech to a tour.

Well, it has been quite a tour, folks. Our course began with an overview of mountain biking and a hopturn into a brief history of the sport. We also learned about the differences between mountain bikes and road bikes, the three major categories of mountain biking, and the three types of mountain bikes made to accommodate fans of each type.

Zachary’s use of vivid language makes the conclusion memorable and leaves the audience with something to think about.

To me, mountain biking, and especially cross-country, is the perfect sport—fulfilling physical, spiritual, and social needs. It’s a great sport to take up recreationally. And if you decide to mountain bike competitively, just remember: ride fast, drive hard, and leave your blood on every trail.

Works Cited

“Cycling, Mountain Biking.” London 2012 Olympics website. Accessed November 9, 2010. www.london2012.com/games/olympic-sports/cycling-mountain-bike.php.

National Bicycle Dealers Association. “Industry Overview, 2012.” Accessed October 13, 2013. nbda.com/articles/industry-overview-2012-pg34.htm

“Types of Mountain Bikes,” Trails.com.

“The Economics and Benefits of Mountain Biking.” Accessed November 1, 2013). www.nemba.org/

Van der Plas, Rob, and Charles Kelly. The Original Mountain Bike Book. Minneapolis: Motorbooks, 1998.

“What Is Mountain Biking?” ABC of Mountain Biking website. Accessed November 23, 2010. www.abc-of-mountainbiking.com/mountain-biking-basics/whatis-mountain-biking.asp.