The TALENTED Mr RITCHEY

Gravel riding may seem like a modern trend, but famed American framebuilder Tom Ritchey was designing road bikes to go beyond the road nearly half a century ago

Words STU BOWERS

hings were very different in 1972. NASA was only just implementing its Space Shuttle programme, an Atari was a cutting-edge computer and a 15-year-old Tom Ritchey was building his first bicycle frame in his father’s garage in Menlo Park, near San Francisco. THe might not yet have been able to grow what has become his trademark horseshoe moustache, but the teenage Ritchey did already have a keen eye for bike and component design, and a mindset that was prepared to challenge the accepted norms of the time. Frame and fortune Ritchey was himself a successful junior road racer, and like most other young guns didn’t have money for a top-end race bike. Seizing an opportunity, he bought a broken Cinelli frame – a highly desirable race bike of that era – for $50…

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Cyclist Off Road (Digital) - 1 Issue, Spring 2020

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