Hey there folks! Welcome to the first ever (almost) live Back From The Dead ! Comin’ atcha from the last day of the UK’s premier mountain bike event and expo the 2023 GT Malverns Classic Festival!
There’s been no time for weird repairs and bodges in the shop for the last month as a combination of staff holidays (mostly mine!), the usual summer rush and now the added workload of keeping our roaming band of young cycling street urchins rolling through the summer holidays has taken my full attention. I’ve been looking forward to this weekend for a long time though and have barely been able to concentrate at work for the last week in anticipation of a whole weekend of bike related antics, because bikes are great, right? Spoiler: they are, let me tell you why with the help of a few thousand like minded folks from all four corners of our cursed rock and beyond!
I love just about every aspect of cycling (except British Cycling, boooooo to those guys…) but every other part of cycling is what feeds my soul. It inspires me like very little else in life. Whenever I see people riding to school with their kids, teaching the next generation that they have a valid place on the road and that travelling in a big metal murder box isn’t the only option for getting from A to B it gives me hope!
One of my favourite parts of the day is when we get one of the urchins in with a look of panic on their face because they’ve just snapped something because they’d been trying something daft in the woods, then seeing their panic turn into grins when they learn it can be fixed so they can go try it again. Or when I see someone of a perhaps older or larger persuasion come puffing into the shop on a shiny new E-bike, bouncing with excitement at the sport they’ve just discovered that they can do without struggling to keep up with younger or fitter riders. It’s opening doors to these people to travel to places that they never would have dreamed of being able to without the awesome invention that is THE BICYCLE!
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It’s something that on one hand is one of the most simple, efficient, refined and purposeful tools ever created. Entirely suited to its purpose of carrying a rider from where they are now to where they want to go.
But on the other hand the bicycle is also possibly the greatest toy ever created.
It may not be the topping the sales charts every year at Christmas but there’s never going to be a year when there’s not kids asking for a bike for Christmas. And I don’t reckon that’s a claim that fidget spinners or whatever the latest craze this Christmas can lay. And the good thing about selling a kid a bike for their favourite toy is that if the wind blows just right while the stars are in perfect alignment then maybe, juust maybe, bikes will stay their favourite toy and they’ll keep buying them wayyy into adulthood.
And when enough kids grow up into really big kids and bikes are still their favourite thing what else are they gonna do than organise places where they can meet up with a few thousand other kids to play with their toys together. And that’s how you end up with a GT Malverns Classic Festival (well that and a lot of dedication from the organisers, staff, sponsors, security, vendors, etc).
Hannah had invited the illustrious Fahzure Freeride (of being her husband fame amongst other stuff) and myself to come along to the Festival to cast our critical eye over the entries into the Gtechniq Retro Show ‘n’ Shine competition and incessantly spout nerd facts that nobody really needs to know at each other and a camera. The show ‘n’ shine wasn’t the only thing we were there for though, first off there was some race action to deal with for Hannah’s Kid2! Kid2 was entered in the Rippers category for the XC race and seemed to be looking forward to it with a level of enthusiasm not often seen in this not quite a kid, not quite a teenager. This enthusiasm is something we were all keen to foster and build on, so as soon as the last tent pegs had been hammered in on our base camp for the weekend, we got out rolling to see what’s what at the GT Malverns Classic Festival 2023!
Hannah literally had to shout at me and Fahzure not to get lost at the Retrobike tent and shepherd us through quickly so she could save our, er, witty repartee? for when she had a camera facing us. We made our way over to the airbag that Kid2 hit with absolutely no fear. The only thing that slowed him down briefly was a minor wardrobe malfunction resulting in a torn pair of trackies. A situation quickly remedied by a trip back to base camp for a fresh pair of trousers and some lunch.
Refuelled and ready to ride again Kid2, Fahzure and I decided to check out the junior XC course to give it a look over and puzzle over tactics before Kid2’s big day on Saturday. The course consisted of a grass loop around one of the lakes with only a few minor technical challenges but also frustratingly few places to pass. The start/finish straight would be critical as it was the only doubletrack on the course, the rest of the track was a narrow singletrack trail with long, thick grass to each side making every passing manouver even more of an effort than it usually would be. We gave Kid2 a few tips on weaving through a short, tight section of woodland he was struggling with and how to set up early for the loose gravel entry to the bridge crossing before the final straight. After a good few practice laps and a few against the stopwatch Kid2 was improving visibly and measurably by the lap and was also highly stoked on bikes, asking us all question after question about bikes, racing and riding for the remainder of the evening.
So Saturday dawned and race day was here for Kid2 (also for Fahzure, but nobody wants to read about some Yankee’s hundred and somethingth race!) While Mum prepared a racers’ breakfast I decided to give Kid2’s bike a full factory race prep so it was as good as it could be for his race debut. A new cable and a few tricks to keep the bike quieter and it was time to strap on a raceplate and get to the start line.
Getting lined up for the start was a chaotic affair and Kid2 needed to show just a little aggression to fight his way to being on the front row. Hannah is raising nice polite kids though and not wanting to be pushy, poor Kid2 ended up getting stuck with a start position close to the back of the pack right next to the tape. To make matters even worse for Kid2 a pair of riders just ahead of him crashed with each other on the start line squeezing Kid2 careening into the tape which then got tangled on his pedal. He’d been robbed already and he wasn’t even off the start yet! After a disastrous start Kid2 fought hard for way more laps than I’d ever want to do on a flat track covered in thick, draggy grass but come the end of the race, even though he hadn’t got the result he’d hoped for, he was still stoked on bikes! He’d also come to something of a realisation. “XC is not the one, there’s no jumps like there are in downhill. I think I like downhill now!”.
So after the excitement of Kid2’s race and before Kid2 was able to collapse from exhaustion back at the tent, Hannah and I managed to lure him up the hill to watch Fahzure’s second run of the DH with the promise of a drink of some nuclear coloured and flavoured carbonated chemicals that were being given out from a truck up on the DH track. This perked him right up and provided all the energy needed for us to drag him up to the perfect spot to give Fahzure (or Stem Man as a group of children at Leeds Bike Park called him!) a good heckle during his race run.
After heckling the oldies it was time to get to work heckling oldies of a more bicycular persuasion. We’d come here with a set task and damned if we weren’t the right men for the job! You see retro bikes are kind of my thing. They’re also Fahzure’s thing, so when he walked into my shop a few years ago and asked whether we had a basement or an attic we became fast friends. This is his standard line when he walks into a bike shop and it’s reliably found him plenty of retro gems for his collection in the past. And though we don’t have either we definitely did have some of what he and I were both looking for. Plenty of weird old retro stuff and someone to talk about it with!
Hannah has been subjected* to Fahzure and I going at it with each other about parts that haven’t mattered for years on more than one occasion, and had finally found the perfect thing for us to focus that energy on. A whole rack of bikes built with those parts! Built by people like us, people for whom these parts and bikes still matter greatly. Matter much more than any Kashima coated fork with no soul or some battery operated, wireless doodad future landfill, or at least they do to us anyway.
Now I’d seen pics from previous years of the retro show at the Malverns but I really didn’t realise the scale of the show they have going on. There was stuff from every (past) era of mountain biking and I was struggling to stop and focus on any one bike, the problem being every time we stopped to look at a bike something on the other side of the display would catch my eye and pull my attention away.
One of my favourite things about mountain biking is that the entire history of the sport is not only documented in writing, it’s still here riding! Many of the very first people to build what would turn into the sport we all love so much are still doing it to this day. And just as many of the bikes they built are still being painstakingly restored by men (we don’t think there was a single woman entered into the Gtechniq Retro Show ‘n’ Shine?) whose wives possibly need to take a slightly closer look at their husbands’ spending. I’m not naming any names but I spoke to one gent who spent £600.00 on a full bike just to take the saddle from it to complete a build to its ‘proper’ spec! Truly a man after my own heart…
There’s hopefully gonna be some pretty extensive video coverage of the retro bike show appearing over the coming days but before that I’ll give you a little rundown of my top 5 bikes of the weekend in no particular order because they’re all totally different bikes that are each worthy of a category win in my eyes!
We’ll start off with this awesome Tushingham B52 owned by Singletrack reader Dean. I dragged Fahzure over to Dean while he was having a drink on the Friday night because I knew how important a piece of (Calderdale) MTB history this thing was! Tushingham rebranded fairly quickly after building these things and became a little company called Orange Mountain Bikes. Dean seemed a little miffed on Friday that we were the only people that had harassed him about his bike. It was rad to see that things had changed by Sunday and the judges had seen the importance of his bike and awarded him 3rd place overall! I saw him later on as he was leaving with a big novelty cheque and an even bigger grin!
Next up we get 2 for 1 with the pair of Jason McRoy Specializeds on the Retrobike stand. You’ll notice I didn’t say Jason McRoy replicas there. That’s because these are no replicas, these are the actual bikes JMC rode. In my eyes these are the most important bikes on display here this weekend. There’s a lot of really REALLY cool stuff, but these are on another level. The amount of kids these bikes inspired to go out and ride is probably immeasurable but it’s a LOT! The cover art to the old MBUK VHS Dirt is a strong contender for the most iconic image ever in UK mountain biking and I can name plenty of riders who don’t ride with half as much pure style on the bike in 2023 as JMC had back then.
Next up it’s the Litespeed Machete just for pure weirdness and rareness. It’s a Ti framed, URT suspended “downhill” bike. Owned by Jamie from Mountain Mania Cycles, perhaps the man with the most extensive and eclectic retro bike collection this side of the Atlantic (or the Pacific if what Fahzure tells me about the Japanese MTB collecting scene is true…) It has a super cool spec with possibly prototype or maybe just one off Marzocchi SuperT featuring a 1-piece fork arch and bolted seal mount. Production models had a bolt-on fork arch. Old Hope Bigun hubs and the enormous Titec Beserker saddle scream 90’s excess in all the best ways but even more excessive than that is that headtube! It’s unnecessary, it adds weight, it’s kind of ugly but also I love it!
Next up is another one from Jamie’s collection, the only bike he actually entered into the Gtechniq Show ‘n’ Shine this year, is this absolutely stunning GT Xixang Bimetal. Originally designed as a cheaper alternative the the exorbitantly priced all titanium Xixang this one somehow ended up costing even more to produce that the full Ti frame! Due to this only 10 were ever built of which 4 are known to survive. Of the 10 that were built one had a fluoro yellow back end. This is that bike. Rarity levels off the scale!
Next up on this list of five bikes that were my favourites is five more bikes… in fact probably about twelve. It’s the trials riders. If you didn’t ride bikes and at any point between 1995-2002ish and you happened to pick up a mountain bike magazine you might well have thought that all mountain bikers did was hop about on their back wheels! Trials was MASSIVE! The Martins and the Pashley team were all over everything. Hans Rey was regularly going on wild adventures to bring his trials skills to crazy new places (in fact he still does this…) They had sections in every video, every magazine, not to mention at every expo or bike show trials would have a huge presence. And when the Martins came up with “speed trials” for one of the old NEC Bike Shows I remember being there in the packed grandstands screaming my 10 year old heart out as I finally got to watch my heroes ride in person. So this whole fleet of trials bikes all lovingly, fastidiously restored to be exactly the bikes I was seeing on those pages as a nipper was stirring big feelings!
I’m not going to go into the bikes here because we got a great video with the guys who built them so you’ll have to wait for that for the full rundown but it’ll be well worth the wait I promise!
Bit of a different Back From The Dead this month but considering some of the before pics I was shown of these bikes I think they still well meet the brief! An enormous thanks to everyone involved in putting on this amazing event and an even bigger thanks to all the amazing fellow retro bike nerds out there keeping the retro dream alive!
*Hannah would like to confirm that she quite enjoys it. Enthusiasm is infectious.
P.S. Dieter thinks you need this link: Cycling UK (there’s a 20% membership discount until end of August!).
