How Steve Peat discovered mountain biking

Steve has had a long-standing career racing downhill mountain bikes that has spanned more than twenty-five years. His many racing achievements include 2009 UCI Downhill World Champion, 3X UCI Downhill World Cup Champion and 2X European Champion.

The UK mountain biking scene grew out of a group of American pioneers known as the Canyon Gang, based in Larkspur, California, in the late 1980s. It was Steve's school friend Steve Merrill who first introduced him to this new type of bike at the age of fifteen. For Steve it was the perfect fit; the ratios of gears made it perfect for Sheffield's hilly terrain and it gave him his independence, opening up a new world of possibilities. He saved up the money from his milk round to buy a Muddy Fox Roadrunner and his passion for mountain biking was born. 

Read on for an extract from Steve's autobiography, Forged by Speed.

It’s 1989. I’m a six-foot-plus, gangly and hyperactive fifteen-year-old. The BMX bike, the TY 175 and my footy boots are abandoned, leftovers from pastimes I don’t have much time for or any interest in pursuing. I now spend most of my waking hours looking for outlets for my energy, some creative, some destructive, both equally as much fun as the other. Oblivious to what’s round the corner, I continue at full throttle, addicted to fun and motoring towards nothing in particular. Life’s okay. I’m enjoying myself and am blissfully unaware of my capacity to enlarge the person I’ve become – and I have no inclination to do so either.

But things are about to change quickly on that front. I’m about to be introduced to something that’s going to get under my skin and into my blood. I’m about to catch a new, shiny and incurable virus called mountain biking. I’m going to catch it from my school friend Steve Merrill. Shortly I’ll give you a little background on how Steve became one of my great friends and how his interest in a form of cycling I’d never heard about before would spark a wildfire in me, a fire that’s never gone out. First, though, we need a little history about how mountain biking was born and how it came to settle on these shores in the late 1980s.

More than 8,000 miles away from my little life on our estate in Chapel- town, an exciting, gravity-focused bike scene was growing amongst some teenage kids living in Larkspur, California, just across the Golden Gate Bridge north of San Francisco. I’m sure there were scenes like this in other countries, but this is the one that made it to my house via Steve Merrill. These Larkspur riders were known to locals as the Canyon Gang, among other names. They were a freewheeling bunch, riding boxcars all over the western United States, living the hobo life. They also had a passion for cycling and would ride their beater pushbikes down the never-ending trails spread across the girth of Marin County’s Mount Tamalpais, known to locals as Mount Tam. The Canyon Gang and others were America’s pioneers of the new sport of mountain biking.

Their origins on Mount Tam go back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. The ten or so turned-on, tuned-in and dropped-out Canyon Gang heads all met while still at middle school. This crew were doing something similar with bikes as all us kids in the UK were doing. California mountain bike legend Joe Breeze recalls seeing them as a youngster. ‘Self-described adrenalin junkies, they became obsessed with riding down the slopes of Tam. They chose cast-off balloon-tire bikes from prior decades, for their plenitude and stoutness. Through trial and error, they figured out what worked best and pieced together solid, soulful machines that inspired others to join on. Their passion popularised biking among their peers at a time when bikes were otherwise not a part of the landscape.’

Thinking about it, that wasn’t so different to what me, my dad and brothers were doing, searching the dump and making up ‘bitsa’ bikes from old frames and parts to build something rideable and then going and destroying them in a day or two ragging them round, and thrashing down slag heaps and the crazy hills and woods of north Sheffield until they literally fell apart. Then we’d be back to the dump. Or at least Dad would, if he hadn’t found anything in a skip.

In no way can the Canyon Gang and their unique brand of rescued bikes from the dumpsters of America be regarded as the definitive start of off- road cycling. That would be near impossible to date. Bikes have been ridden off-road since they were invented at least two centuries ago. But mountain biking, at least as far as the name goes, can be traced back pretty accurately to this corner of the West Coast. The name was in essence a commercial choice. Once industry pioneers decided that what they were up to would be called mountain biking, it shook off its other names and seemed to explode in popularity. The name made it so much easier to market as far as the media were concerned. The die was cast.

For the pastime to grow as quickly as it did in the mid to late 1980s required a lot of manufacturing support but mountain biking was attractive. It was seen as something adults did and since a lot of bike companies hadn’t been quick enough in keeping up with youth trends like BMX, mountain biking seemed a more stable platform for the big bike brands to get a decent return on investment. So they were fully on board. It had however taken a while for that touch paper to be lit globally and we have to look back further than the 1970s for the start of that.

In 1953, a guy called John Finley Scott made a bike with flat handlebars and derailleur gears from a Schwinn World Diamond frame that had caught the attention of many cyclists. John named it a ‘Woodsie’ bike. In the UK that sort of bike was called a tracker and the kids who rode them were ‘skid kids’, speedway fans haring around bombed-out towns in the late 1940s making tracks over rubble and jumping over gaping chasms left by the Luft-waffe. They had ‘cow horn’ bars and big wheels so the riding position was sit up and beg, perfect for off-road fun. They also broke a lot. But despite cow-horns being popular, flat handlebars were better as they didn’t move in the stem when you landed from a jump. Stems were pretty useless then and the leverage from wide cow-horns meant your bars moved all over the place.

Adapting bikes in this way was called ‘repacking’ in California for a reason. Mount Tam and Marin County sit perfectly positioned with the Pacific Ocean to the west amid roughly 525 square miles of prime off-road bicycle-riding terrain. Those square miles are full of fire roads and singletrack starting at an elevation of about 785 metres, the height of Mount Tam, and running to over 2,000 metres. It’s a mountain biker’s paradise. It’s certainly more than the 150-metre elevation of Chapeltown woods and the slag heaps in Smithy Wood here in Sheff. The Canyon Gang would race down the fire roads of Marin’s hills, sometimes taking a good five minutes to get to the bottom at high average speeds, using the coaster brake to slow down for the switchback turns on the fire roads. This made the bike hubs really hot and the brakes eventually stopped working. Then the wheel would jam and stop rotating. So at the end of a run, depending on how hot things had got, they’d have to take the hub apart and repack it with grease before they could go again. It was a right pain compared to a freewheel-equipped rear hub and rim brakes. They only used coaster brakes because that’s what was available at the dump. Beggars can’t be choosers.

The Canyon Gang had a lot going their way, although clearly not the quality of their bikes. Their vision and appetite for mischief and adventure helped, along with a bike-friendly climate. Then there was the elevation Mother Nature had provided. So, they were doing the right thing in the right place at the right time with the right people hearing about it. We didn’t have the weather and nor did we have the expanse of terrain that would be anything like as perfect for the fire to take hold here. That crew had everything on their doorstep bar the name. The off-road riding at the time was known by various names, but it was ‘mountain biking’ that finally stuck after a concerted effort by those investing in the movement deciding on a simple-to-understand name that would make it easier to take to the mass market. And once that name arrived, mountain biking spread like Californian honey on hot buttered toast.

Even so, the UK has always had a huge passion for all sorts of cycling. Cycle speedway was a really big deal from the late 1940s, with thousands of spectators turning up to watch races. In the mid 1980s, Jim Varnish, father of Olympic track star Jess Varnish, was a real superstar in the cycle speedway world. Track racing was ever present. The legendary Herne Hill Velodrome in London hosted cycling in the 1948 Olympics. Cyclo-cross was and is popular in the winter months, and road riding and time trialling drew strong fields and spectators.

In 1955, Liverpool’s Bill Paul formed the legendary Rough Stuff Fellowship at the Black Swan pub in Leominster with other cyclists interested in riding off road, although mostly on drop-handlebar bikes with the obligatory steel toe clips, essentially touring bikes. Nowadays that kind of riding would be called bikepacking or gravel riding. Those folks were quite a distance from the vibe in California. They were more likely to be smoking tobacco in their pipes than the Acapulco Gold popular with the counterculture heads up in Marin County. The closest parallel in the UK we had with the Canyon Gang would be the hill bombers riding track bikes on the edge of towns.

When BMX hit the shores of the UK in 1979 there was reluctance from some in the industry, like Raleigh, to get behind it. Halfords jumped right in though, and it took off like a mad one thanks to visionaries like legendary Tour de France commentator and Moulton-loving trike racer David Duffield. (As the Halfords marketing man, he gave the band Queen fifty bikes to shoot the promo for their single ‘Bicycle Race’.) Pioneers like Duffield meant the sport got established very quickly in the UK. Kids were excited about riding bikes and what you could do on them.

I met Steve at school and we became good pals. There was one thing though that I didn’t know about him. He had a mountain bike. Meeting him out of school one night I saw him riding this weird-looking bicycle. It was white with big, wide, knobbly tyres on wide-ish 26-inch rims. The cranks had three chainrings, not two like a road bike. One was tiny, called a granny ring. Brakes were cantilever, like the ones I’d seen on cyclo-cross bikes. The handlebars were one piece, called bullmoose bars, and the brake levers were almost as big as the ones I had on my motorbike. It was made by a company called Ridgeback. I’d never heard of mountain bikes at that point, let alone ridden one. I asked Steve if I could have a go.

I couldn’t wait to get on it and it took all of five minutes to know that this was the best thing I’d ever ridden. It was love at first ride. From the moment I slung my skinny leg over the bike and popped a wheelie in the smallest ring at the slowest speed, I was hooked. It was definitely a eureka moment. I was a mountain biker. I knew it. I’d found my thing.

Everything clicked. I could ride this thing for miles. I didn’t need my dad to take me anywhere now. And being about six feet tall, going far on a BMX was less than ideal. I loved all the different ratios of gears, plenty of scope for riding on all kinds of terrain as the area where I lived was all hills. This thing was perfect. Getting into Sheff and over to Ecclesfield would be easy. All these lights were going on in my head in a stream of awakening. It felt like my world had just got way bigger. I knew right then I was going to get a mountain bike. My brain went into overdrive and my vision for what was possible for me, on my own with no need for outside help, went stratospheric.

I was still doing my milk round and that was how I was going to pay for it. I’d save as much as I needed and buy a mint bike. Pretty soon I was buying Mountain Biking UK magazine every month. I remember one edition with Sheffield lad David Baker on the front cover along with Matlock’s Tim Gould. I was really psyched to see fellas on there I’d recently heard about from around my neck of the woods. The mag was full of stuff that looked fun to do and had a vibe I could relate to: upbeat and going somewhere. I’d already saved a fair bit of cash from working in the pizza place to add to the money I’d made from my milk round. I needed some more though, and I wasn’t asking Dad. So, while I was saving, I did some research.

The bike I had my eyes set on and lusted after was a white and pink Muddy Fox Roadrunner. I’d seen the ads in Mountain Biking UK for it, and colour-wise, 1980s-speaking, it was perfect. I went along to local bike shop JE James with the ad in Mountain Biking UK, deposit in hand, and laid the readies down for my all-white-with-a-splash-of-pink thrashing. JE James had to order it, since they didn’t have my size in stock. In hindsight the geometry was like a 1970s Raleigh Superbe but the tubing was chromoly and the wheels were Japanese made. The parts on it were good quality. I loved it. Did I say I loved it? I still have it – it hangs in pride of place in my man shed.

As for my relationship with Steve and how that went, Chapeltown would see a few black eyes from the pair of us. He was cock of the school while still in the fourth year, with a full year above him. And I would be a close second. We were inseparable after school too, drinking QC sherry and Thunderbird Blue while riding our MTBs around on an evening. At weekends we might step up to Thunderbird Red. He was best man at my wedding, so I guess that’s all you need to know about our friendship.

I’d ride with whoever was interested. I’d go on my own if no one wanted to come. I’d go miles on my Roadrunner. Then, for almost the first time ever, something amazing happened at school. Our science teacher at Ecclesfield, Mr Milson, started an after-school club for mountain bikers. Of course, Steve and I joined up. We’d spend hours after school at nearby Windmill Hill Primary School, doing laps of the school and the sports fields. It was where I met Daz Westby, who couldn’t half rail a corner on his Raleigh Maverick. For ages at school that’s all I did. Flying round every night, bombing all over the place. Starting at Steve’s house two miles from ours, I would burn home as fast as I could. In two years, the Muddy Fox was trashed, beaten to death, and I was about to be thrown into the open jaws of the big wide world.