While digging through the Mountain Bike Action photo archives recently, we found this photo of our friend Jack Phinn with one of the largest mountain bikes we had seen at that time. This was somewhere around 35 years ago.
The bike in the photo belonged to another rider, one who was around six-foot-six (or a little taller), and we wanted to show how that taller rider’s bike looked next to Jack Phinn, who was MBA’s shortest test rider at that time. Jack used to say he was “five-foot-four on a good day.”
Check out the length of the head tube in the above photo and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what size rider the bike was made for.
Jack was a very good motocross racer back in those days and a frequent test rider for both Motocross Action and Mountain Bike Action, even appearing on the cover of Mountain Bike Action a few times.
MXA used Jack as a rider when they tested mini-cycles. In spite of his smaller size, Jack was an amazing rider on both motorcycles and mountain bikes.
Here’s a shot of Jack riding a downhill mountain bike that appears in the Motocross Action article linked below.
Jack Phinn on his downhill mountain bike. Photo: Motocross Action
Jack Phinn told MXA a few years ago, “Not long after I started mountain biking, I crashed at Mammoth Mountain doing 53.2 mph at the Kamikaze Downhill, resulting in a broken lower back that required more surgery, plates, screws and the fusing of L2, L3 and L4. Once my injuries healed, I went back to downhill racing, but I had a few more big get-offs and subsequent shoulder and elbow surgeries. I decided that motocross was a lot safer.”
Motocross is one of the few sports where being smaller might be an advantage, since the rider’s lighter weight can allow the bike to accelerate faster. The same rule applies to horse racers in the Kentucky Derby, where the top jockeys often weigh less than 120 pounds.
Here’s an article that Jack Phinn wrote for Motocross Action Magazine a few years ago, showing him with one of the motorcycles he was testing for that magazine, and talking about his mountain biking, too:
Here’s a photo of Jack with that KTM 350 SXF motorcycle in 2020:
As MXA said in the caption to the photo: “The KTM 350SXF isn’t tall, Jack Phinn is short.”
Jack is now 64. He was an electrical contractor before he retired from full-time work. He did the electrical contracting for Troy Lee’s headquarters years ago, as well as many other motocross businesses, in addition to lots of other businesses and people. He still does occasional electrical contracting jobs for his friends even after his retirement, and he still rides both mountain bikes and motocross bikes.
Jack appeared on the cover of Mountain Bike Action a few times when he was a test rider for us.