Tom Ritchey doesn’t need much of an introduction, not really. Over his 50+ years in the cycling industry, Ritchey’s work has spanned bikes that he built while still in high school, some of the first ever mountain bikes, and a componentry range so broad that at one point it included drivetrain parts. He’s been inducted to the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame and the United States Bicycle Hall of Fame, and has long been something of an industry legend known for his relaxed presence, his warmth and wisdom, and his distinctive moustache.
Today, the company bearing his name is still going strong, producing several beloved steel framesets across the road, mountain bike, and gravel categories, along with componentry to match. The company has commemorated its history at various points throughout the years – like its 50th anniversary editions a couple of years back – suggesting that there’s an understanding of Ritchey’s legacy as a creator, and his position as an eminent figure in the industry. And now there seems more proof of that: at the recent Made bike show in Portland, Ritchey had something new (but also, kind of, old) planned: the unveiling of Tom’s latest project, hand-building biplane forks and bullmoose handlebars for mountain bikes he’d created 45 years ago, resolving unfinished business for his vintage bikes that were missing those parts.
As an interested observer of Ritchey’s products (they make some of my favourite handlebars, and I have a couple of their bikes) I was curious about this latest development – about what it said about Ritchey as a company and a person, about the legacy that he’d created over his decades in the industry, and a few more things besides. I caught a reflective and generous Tom, relaxing on the couch with a beer, on a Tuesday afternoon over Zoom.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. It is also available to members in podcast form below. To add member-only podcasts, including this one, to your podcast player of choice, click here.
Iain Treloar: So, you’re back in the building game hand-creating parts for mountain bikes that were built by you between 1979 and 1982 – did I get that right? Can you run me through that process?
Tom Ritchey: Yeah, it’s pretty basic. It just seems like, as of the last couple of years, more and more people are looking for their personal favorite bike to build up. And they reach out through the grapevine, or they’re scrounging bikes and doing all kinds of things … so I started to think, a couple of years ago, how I want to make their dreams come true, and I also want to keep them from making mistakes, because most people don’t realize the seriousness of the designs that I did. So it was a combination of making sure people understood the reasons why I do things, and having information if they’re going to approach another builder to do something, and also just making a product that is at the same level of quality, and personal momentousness for them. So that was the story in a nutshell.
As far as not building or coming back to building – I don’t know that I would ever consider myself retired in any way. I’ve always carried on building, and people just probably assume that I haven’t. But you know, to me – whether it’s making my own bike or making bikes for the select few people that are on my list – there’s plenty of people in my life that are on a list of, “well, if you ever get around to doing one of these, I’d really like it, blah blah blah …” So for me, it’s just in my blood and it’s just what I like to do. It’s not hard. It’s easy.
IT: Can we dig into that a little bit? What does bike building give you? Is it something that you find a little bit meditative, or is it something that engages your brain to think in a different way? What is the thing that drives you to want to create?
TR: It starts off on my bike. It starts out, you know, being creative from the saddle and thinking about things. A lot of the stories that I’ve told about my beginnings have to do with the bike – the bike was the beginning. The bike in its crude form, in its rough form and in its ability to be made custom and fixed and reconditioned – all that basically came to me at a very young age. And at that young age, I found a lot of opportunities in my racing, in my building, in my relationships, that came about on the bike.
When you can make yourself happy and you can do something that’s at the time, unusual – granted, I understand that it’s not unusual now. But in a good sense, there were a lot of people that saw that “hey, if Ritchey can do it, I can do it.” And early on, it helped make me a good racer, it helped make me financially independent at a young age. And it helped other people in the United States, particularly in the California area, become builders, and think in out-of-the-box ways.
It wasn’t that big of a circle. It was a number of people in Northern California, maybe in Oregon, a group in the Portland area. And then, of course, [Albert] Eisentraut. And then there was – all the way across the United States – Ben Serotta was firing up his torch and starting to do things too. This group of us – it just seemed like there was something about it that gave people permission to build bikes and that just led to doing things in a unique American tradition.
A lot of builders came along also that just wanted to do things very traditionally. My simplest way of putting it: they really didn’t deviate much in terms of building bikes in a very straightforward way, with lugs and diameter tubing and execution and stuff. That wasn’t something that interested me. I was intentionally looking for some advantages that were, in my mind, going to make me a faster bike rider. Some worked, some didn’t, but I was really – in my own way – trying to take some liberties to be innovative, and to do things that were different. So that meant making my own stems and forks and dropouts and tubing ovalization, diameters of tubing, lugs, lugless – you name it. Everything was scrutinized in my world, and looking at what advantage could I play that hadn’t been played before.
IT: I’m interested in this spirit of innovation that came to your early work – you’re still putting out new products now, although you have pared back the range from dabbling in carbon frames and titanium frames to now just steel frames. Are those the purest expression of your bike products to you – the most authentically Ritchey product? Is the steel frame what you’ve identified as the niche that is the most pure reflection of the brand’s ethos?
TR: Well, every material has an advantage [to] it and a place. There’s no bad materials – but there are benefits and advantages that people aren’t really that aware of. There’s so many know-it-alls in the world, especially now, with the advent of YouTube and the ability for people to share their opinions very openly. I don’t want to argue every material with the marketplace, because there’s just things that people don’t know that I know.
There’s enough people that are happy with a classic steel frame with innovative features and updated, upgraded things. I’m trying to make the best steel frame for a group of people that like steel and like the affordability of steel, that like the fashioning of steel and the feel of steel. Now, I’ve made carbon fiber frames that I feel are also in the best tradition of carbon fiber and optimized for what the best carbon frame can be, too. And I’ve made a mixture of titanium bikes and titanium/carbon bikes that I would say represent a unique, very personal touch in terms of how I would execute another material. The market is very much, for the most part, a homogenized mob [laughs]. When it comes to the different materials, pretty much all carbon bikes are weighed and merited on their weight, practically. And to me, a frame shouldn’t be weighed and merited on its weight. A frame should be weighed and merited on its ride.
And that’s a complicated answer, because everyone’s ride is different. If you live in Germany or the Swiss Alps, your ride is going to be different than my ride in California. If you’re in Moab, Utah, your ride is going to be different than my ride in California. There are going to be exceptions to a range of things that people value as important to a person that’s going to make one bike better than another.
If you live on German streets and Swiss streets and your road smoothness is so predictable you might as well be in a velodrome; even their dirt gravel roads are so wonderful. If that’s your situation, you don’t need to worry about anything that I’m concerned about living and designing a bike for a Northern California riding experience. Because the farthest thing in my imagination is to ever have road conditions that are nice and predictable and something [where] you’re not going to come home with a certain amount of angst because of how bad the roads were. For me, it’s always been a hard question for me to delve into in a very short amount of time, because the best bike for a person is going to be very, very heavily dependent upon what their riding environment is.
IT: So how do you balance the need to create something that has appeal for as broad a market as you want to attract, versus what’s optimised for what you need?
TR: What I am trying to say, but it’s hard to make my point, is that I want to – whether it’s steel, carbon, aluminum, titanium; whatever it is, whatever category – I want to be true to the things that I design for, to be true to what people are looking for. And typically, that is the unknown adventure bike – and a road bike is an adventure bike in my world. Regardless of weight, it’s got to have a design that’s stable and that makes adjustments and accommodations for unknown road conditions, period.
If people are looking for a bike and they live in that kind of an environment, and they buy something that’s the lightest carbon bike that’s out there, I know that they’re not going to have the best ride. Because in order to make that bike that light and so optimized for weight alone, the design of the bike is going to have to be so stiff and so oversized in terms of its tubing to make it that weight; you’ve got to go into the paper-thin world of carbon, where your diameters are the best, most important tool, the diameters of the tubing is going to [give] the bike the opportunity of being the lightest weight.
You’re going to end up also – simultaneously to making it that light, which is the one thing that a carbon company is trying to do, is set another weight benchmark for everyone to celebrate – is you’re going to end up with something that’s stiff and it’s harsh, and they’ll usually put aerodynamic, deep section rims on it at the same time to make it even worse.
If you want to write a book on the industry’s history of over-reaching designs in the world of materials, it’s a big book. It’s at least 500 pages, but [to me] that’s like, you know, 10 pages a year for me.
I don’t want to make enemies with people; I want to sell good components to so, you know, 30 years ago, I thought there’s nothing I can do about stupid frame building. There’s just nothing I can do. But what I can do is I can make really good stems and handlebars and seatposts that fix all their stupid mistakes. And that was my business model.
IT: I think the durability of the business, that it has been around for 50 years, is testament to the fact that has worked.
TR: I mean, it wasn’t without some very hard years and difficulties and things that happened that cost dearly. If you look at the Bay Area and you look at the businesses – the bicycle industry that was there 20 years ago, 30 years ago, it was a completely different scene. I’m the only guy left that [still has] a bike company in Silicon Valley. It is just very expensive, and certain people just don’t want to live there, and certain people that want to live there want to do things their way. Making a company work in an environment like that is something that I consider to be challenging, difficult, and you have to have the right respect and regard for the people that you’re working with. It’s always been my goal to collaborate and let people speak their mind and do a lot of open conversations, and I think that people know that I respect their opinion. That worked for me.
I would say that I’ve always tried to run a very different and unique company. In spite of my opportunities and the things that people saw, my conditions were very different than other people that had companies. What for me was important was my personal life – being a father, being a husband, having a family, and riding a bike. I became a father in ’82, so basically, 10 years after I started the company I was a father, a couple years after I was married. I was alone running Ritchey as a one-person company up until ’79, ’80 – a lot of things happened to me in that period of time, but I was still very young, and I married young; I married at 22 years old, and was a father at 24, 25 and I didn’t want to change the quality of my life.
I had a great life. I worked in my shop on Skyline, in a log building that I built, and the idea of growing a company, was a very, I would say, dubious idea, because people that I saw that owned companies didn’t have a life; they had a business, and that was their life.
To me, I was interested in having a life, you know? I thought that’s the whole idea – if you’re successful in business, you have a life. Well, it turns out, if you’re successful in business, you don’t have a life, for the most part. [But] for me, I wanted to be with my family, be close to my family, and work out of my garage. And that’s basically the way it’s stayed for 50 years. Nothing has changed, and that has given me a lot of wonderful moments.
Some people would say, hey, you don’t want to take your job with you. But if you know the beast, and you don’t want to be a part of the beast, and you know how to say no to things, you can do it. So for me, I didn’t travel that much; I traveled, but it was very pulled back. Most of my competing company-owning bike industry friends were on planes all the time, and they were working every which angle that they could work, and I didn’t need it. I was saying no rather than yes to everything – because I wanted to be a regular dad and husband and friend to my friends, and riding with those friends, and eventually riding with my family and just being untethered by how complicated life can be.
IT: I’m thinking of this Ritchey sticker I’ve got on the back of my car, and it says ‘inspired by life’ on it … I don’t know why I put it on my car, but I have one on my bikes as well. [Tom laughs] Anyway, you talking about that desire to have a normal life and be present for the people that are in your life. I think there’s an interesting distinction echoed in your work – because the products do feel less … when you talked about carbon fibre and how people are pursuing stiffness and light weight and those attributes which don’t necessarily reflect in the riding conditions that people might be using them, I think that there’s an interesting parallel in the way that you’ve chosen to live your life, reflected in the products that you’re creating.
TR: Well, I know what I know, and I know what makes me happy, and I know what makes a lot of people happy … and I don’t need to make everyone happy. I don’t. I’m not making a bike for everyone. I’m making a bike for people that probably know some of my story and know some of it like you’re beginning to know, and they like what I do because of it; there’s probably that. There’s probably some people that are also very [discerning], and understand at a deeper level the functional mechanics of the designs that I produce, and want to produce, and strive to produce. And they find me doing those things – they find that those things actually have been accomplished, that I’ve actually done it, in their mind, for them.
It’s hard in this world to differentiate between truth and fiction and marketing hype and real experience. There’s a lot of people out there enjoying a bike ride on bikes that, to me, I would never make and I would never want to put my name on it – but God bless them, they’re out there enjoying it. There’s just no taking away from the value of a bike, even in its compromised form, because it is a wonderful invention. It’s a wonderful gift. And I can sit here and talk tech with just about anyone. The bottom line is it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know the bike, if you don’t have a good time and a celebrated time on a bike, and truly ride for the right core reasons.
You could probably go down a bunch of rabbit holes with what I just said … [chuckles]
IT: Well, I think the one that I come back to is – you’re right, there are many reasons that people ride bikes, and they are this wonderful tool for all of the reasons that you’ve articulated, and transport and recreation and social connection and also mental health, processing the day, all of those kind of things.
On a personal level, what does riding give to you? You still ride a lot – is there something that you’re still chasing from riding, or is it something that you feel compelled to do?
TR: Well, there’s an unlocking that happens. There’s so many things that modern society throws at you because you start to just live more and more complicated lives. It’s almost impossible to turn off the complexity. Just today, I was having some trouble with the water system at the house and it was really complicated because it was underground, it was under concrete, it was all kinds of things that were difficult to figure out, and water was being wasted … it’s a long story, but for the most part, I’ve just learned that trying to focus on something, for me, almost is counterproductive.
For me, taking time to go out and ride a bike so that you can think thoughts that are at a higher level of ability and imagination is phenomenal. It’s unique. I’m sure that other people, there are some activities that they’re doing where they can do the same thing. But I’m uniquely blessed in the idea department [where] riding a bike every day unlocks certain things that I don’t think about and that I need to think about. Some are personal, some are family, some are design. Some are just, you know, crazy water systems at the house that I can’t figure out. But getting on a bike and riding has always somehow unlocked a process to figure something out that’s challenging, and it’s always worked.
I’m very, very grateful to continue to be able to have the physical strength and the riding ability and the enjoyment to do many things – to share the moment with my wife, to go do some errands, to share moments with friends, and to do things, and to look forward to those things – and at the same time, solve some problems, which means, you know, 50 years of design problems when it comes to componentry and bikes and what makes the world go round. Which is another bike ride.
IT: As a sort of final question: your most recent product – the most recent thing that you’ve publicly done – is these handlebars and forks for bikes built right back at the beginning of that journey. Is there a sense of full circle in bringing that around? Or is this just the next step in a journey that leads to the next 50 years of Ritchey?
TR: [chuckles] Well, I think – coming back to the beginning of the conversation and the questions you had: what’s behind it? – it’s basically that 40 years ago, I got myself into a position of delivering everything that was coming at me. And it was the beginning of thinking big and how to think big – not wanting to become big, but how to think big. And I could make frames, and that was the core of what people wanted, but adding a fork on top of that, and adding a bar on top of that, I started to change how my bikes were sold, and changed their availability. And I also started imagining that certain components would be made by other factories that I was developing a relationship with.
I think the bigger story for me with the bars and the forks is that I developed solutions outside the company, and designed new tubing and new components and new bars and stems and seatposts and things that were my first products. And on that journey, I basically was transitioning, and the ability to be everything to everybody wasn’t possible. I was learning my limitations. I’m living in a much more relaxed state at this point in my career. I’m happy with how things went in my life. I’m blessed. I’m truly thankful for the way that I’ve been not consumed by normal business passions and pursuits and I’m looking at things from the ability “I’ve got time for this.”
I’ve earned the time at this point in my life to come back and to make people happy. And to make people happy means to make these bars and forks possible, because they’re the missing link in these people’s [bikes] – and a lot of people, probably 100 or 200 or more people that had a bike and didn’t have a bar with it, basically because I was not promising delivery of bars and forks like I was frames at the time – I’m just kind of enjoying having earned the time in my life, and the celebration of so many wonderful people that are wanting to resurrect a 50-year-old or a 40-year-old bike into something that was [of its] era … that is just a fun idea, you know, at this point, and it’s making someone’s day.
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