Everyone knows that Bush is a mountain biker. So am I. So are a few tens of millions of other people. It may be the one connection any of us have to his world, because we do one thing that he does, which is that we ride mountain bikes and we ride hard, although
his skill level seems suspect.
I dislike Mr. Bush for a lot of reasons, but when it comes to mountain biking, it's personal.
Allow me to digress slightly from Mr. Bush, to a time during the 1970s, when I, a simple roadie for a
San Francisco Rock band and a fanatic bicycle enthusiast, shared a rented house in Marin County with a fellow bicycle enthusiast named Gary Fisher. Over the course of several years a number of third roommates moved through, but if you didn't love bikes, you never even walked through that front door.
Where other people had a dining table, we had a workbench with power tools and a vise and a wheel truing stand and open cans of grease on it. We also ate from it, when we just didn't eat standing up. We drove nails into the walls to hang bike parts and tools from. We oiled our chains so often the rug had a grease spot where we did it. We divided the larger room with decorative hangings of bikes. We drank lots of beer and started smoking dope before breakfast but we also rode hundreds of miles a week. We never seemed to keep girlfriends for very long.
Did I mention that we were bachelors?
Gary and I and a few other cycling friends put together some old balloon tire bikes for riding to the store and such. After a while, like many others before us, we started riding our tough old bikes in the dirt.
Then we put on a race. Wouldn't you know it, but the combination of the competitive aspect and our total immersion into fancy European bikes led us and our friends to start building our own bikes from scratch in order to keep up with an off-road arms race.
One thing led to a lot of others, and in 1979 Gary Fisher and I and a 20-year old road bike framebuilder named Tom Ritchey opened a business. We were introducing to the bicycle market what we thought were the coolest bikes ever made, unlike anything then being sold, with rugged, overbuilt diamond frames, fat tires and multiple gears and heavy duty brakes and flat handlebars, made for extreme dirt riding. The name we decided on seems obvious now, but we were the first to ever use it. We called our business "MountainBikes."
The introduction of the mountain bike in the early 80s turned out to the most dramatic change in the sport of bicycling in its entire history. Now it's the president's favorite sport. Who would have ever thunk that from the 1976 perspective of a few hardcore crazies with no day jobs doing their best not to be mainstream and mostly held in contempt by the rest of the bicycle industry?
George Bush is a mountain biker, a description that never existed before Gary and I hung a sign with that word on it on the rented firetrap garage where we started our business. You might think I was proud of that. The president is defined by a word that my friend and I coined. But look at it from my perspective. Here is my contribution to modern society and to the sport that has been my lifelong passion, a sport I have participated in for 30 years now and a huge part of my life, something I do at a high level and enjoy, something I have literally shed blood and broken bones for, and George W. Bush has turned it into a symbol for high-tech, elitist jacking off.
If there is any consolation for me, it is the sure and certain knowledge that I can ride something that he with all his power and money and all his high-tech widgets, will never ever ride.
That would be a horse.