Repack is forty on Friday

The first Repack race – the event that kickstarted mountain biking – was held on October 21st 1976. The event’s fortieth birthday is being celebrated at an event on Friday at the Marin Museum of Bicycling in Fairfax, California.

Repack served as the testing ground for a series of modifications and innovations crucial to the early development and evolution of the mountain bike, which were originally called "clunkers". These were modified Schwinn paperboy bikes. The Repack was so named because the coaster brakes on the 1930s bikes had to be repacked with grease after every descent.

The Repack downhill time-trial race series of 1976-79 only ever had about 200 entrants across those four years, but they included legendary figures such as Charlie Kelly, originator of the race which took place on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, over the bridge from San Francisco. Pioneers such as Joe Breeze, Gary Fisher, Otis Guy, Tom Ritchey, Charlie Cunningham and others helped kick-start a bicycle revolution which eventually spread around the world.

The Repack riders didn’t know this at the time. In 1975, after a ride on Mount Tamalpais, Breeze said to Guy: "This sure is a lot of fun, but who else would want to do it?"

While Fisher, Breeze, Ritchey and others are generally considered the fathers of modern mountain biking (there were mothers, too, such as photographer Wende Cragg and racer Jacquie Phelan) there were earlier Northern Californian innovators, such U. C. Davis professor John Finley Scott who, in 1953, produced his "woodsie" multiple gear balloon tyre bike. Santa Barbara riders and Cupertino’s Morrow Dirt Club members experimented with off-road bikes in the 1970s. But it was a core number of the Marin County clunker riders – and some enterprising Japanese bicycle engineers – who turned a hippy recreation into a global movement.

Joe Breeze, Otis Guy and Charlie Kelly

Fisher and Kelly co-founded a company called Mountain Bikes of Fairfax, California, and this became the generic name for the new breed of fat-tyred bicycles.

A facsimile Repack rock with Gary Fisher’s fastest time down the Mount Tamalpais trail

Fisher still has the fastest time on the course, Breeze the second fastest. The fire road where the race took place is now mostly off-limits to mountain bikers.

Prize Giving Rock is still there, where the awards were handed out, "mainly ‘smokables’” remembers Breeze.

“To us the mountain bike was a lark,” Breeze has said “but, by golly, it got more people onto bicycles than any machine since the 1890s."