MBA: When did you come to think that this new sport was going to spread around the world?

Kelly: By 1983 it was on its way, and a few of us organized the first sanctioning body, because the regular bike community represented by the likes of the UCI wanted nothing to do with this craziness.

Charlie Kelly.

FORTY YEARS OF BIKE CHANGES

MBA: What were the biggest changes in frame designs as the sport took off?

Kelly: When the sport first took off, every major bicycle company cloned the Ritchey/MountainBike that Gary and I

were selling. It saved them the five years of R&D that we had already done. Charlie Cunningham introduced aluminum around 1980, before Klein and Cannondale jumped in. The “Bullmoose” handlebar, which was not a great design but had a great and iconic look, disappeared. Frames got steeper and tighter. Titanium frames arrived. The “Unicrown” fork replaced the Bullmoose bar as the iconic look.

MBA: What were the biggest changes in forks?

Kelly: Forks were a problem at first, because they took as much time to make as the rest of the frame. There were no cast fork crowns available like the ones used for road forks, so the crown had to be fabricated. Tom Ritchey used several different fork crown designs during our association. The boys at WTB developed the modern Unicrown, although the same design had been used for bikes before. They started with just the crown, with regular fork blades inserted, but that created problems with matching the blade to the crown, and around 1983 the one-piece, double-curved blade became available. Now of course we all have a front shock. Even a cheap-o bike from a box store has a front shock.

MBA: What were the biggest changes in drivetrains?