Mountain Bike Roots and Branches
Singletracks Mountain Bike Podcast
Singletracks.com
4.7 • 574 Ratings
🗓️ 5 March 2018
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Despite being a relatively young sport, mountain biking has a rich history starting in the 1800s. Over the years, the sport has evolved and branched into different disciplines ranging from cross-country to downhill. In this episode of the Singletracks podcast, we talk about the origins of mountain biking and explain the various forms of mountain biking that exist today.
--Keep up with the latest in mountain biking at Singletracks.com and on Instagram @singletracks
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Something unexpected has arrived in Happy Meal. |
| 0:03.2 | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Hello Kitty and friends are teaming up for the ultimate collab. |
| 0:08.3 | Joining your little ones on a fun-fueled adventure. |
| 0:11.0 | Some fun, some food, it's all inside this happy meal. |
| 0:16.3 | Until the 2nd of February from 11am includes one pre-selected book or toy whilst it's last. |
| 0:20.1 | This podcast is brought to you by Ninja Mountain Bike Performance. |
| 0:27.2 | To find mountain bike skills clinics in your area, go to ride like a ninja.com. |
| 0:32.9 | Hey, everybody, welcome to the single tracks podcast. |
| 0:35.9 | My name is Jeff, and today, Aaron and Greg and I are going to talk about the roots of mountain biking and also some of the branches, all the different styles of mountain biking that are around today. So this is going to be a bit of a history lesson, but we're going to try to make it really interesting because it's mountain bikes. How could it not be interesting? |
| 0:54.1 | A lot of people think that mountain biking started, you know, around the 70s or 80s back in California, |
| 1:01.5 | but there's actually evidence of people riding bikes off road long before that. |
| 1:07.6 | One of the first mentions that I found was from 1891, where the Swiss Army actually set |
| 1:14.7 | up a bicycle regiment, and they use bikes for transportation through the mountains and stuff. |
| 1:21.0 | So Swiss Army is not just about knives. They're also about bikes, which is pretty cool. |
| 1:25.9 | And then also in the 1890s here in the U.S., there was actually a regiment of African-American soldiers known as the Buffalo soldiers that rode bikes off-road because there really weren't any roads from Missoula, Montana to Yellowstone. |
| 1:42.6 | Greg, can you tell us a little bit more about the Buffalo |
| 1:44.8 | soldiers? Yeah, it's a pretty fascinating story. Worth reading up more on if you never read it before. |
| 1:50.6 | But, you know, the Army was testing ways to move troops and supplies. And at that point in time, |
| 1:55.2 | they're like, well, we should give the bicycle a shot. But I don't think it ever caught on, |
| 2:00.8 | you know, primarily with the advent of the automobile, |
| 2:03.1 | like right around that time. |
| 2:04.9 | Henry Ford came on the scene. |
... |
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