Our March 1991 issue featured a photo by Aspen, Colorado’s Gregg Adams. We didn’t include the rider’s name in our “On the cover” credit line, and we don’t recall now who the rider was, but if any of our readers know who it is, send an email to [email protected] and we’ll share that information with our readers.
Our March 1991 issue took a look at the bikes of the racers who had won the 1990 UCI World Championships held in Durango, Colorado.
The most famous of those 1990 World Champions were Ned Overend and Juli Furtado, who won the men’s and women’s XC titles on their hardtail Specialized and Yeti bikes, respectively.
Another legend of the sport, Greg Herbold won the men’s downhill title on his hardtail Miyata bike with a Rock Shox suspension fork.
Juli Furtado used a Manitou suspension fork on her Yeti C-26 hardtail race bike.
Canada’s Cindy Devine won the women’s downhill title on a hardtail Klein Rascal with a Rock Shox fork that had a Klein sticker covering the Rock Shox logo. According to our article in the above issue of the magazine, neither Specialized nor Klein would let their team riders race in the 1990 World Championships with the Rock Shox logos showing on their forks. Ned’s Rock Shox logo on his fork was blacked out for the 1990 Worlds.
The women’s downhill winner, Cindy Devine, also raced in the women’s cross-country race at that 1990 UCI World Championship, but she’d already won the downhill gold medal two days earlier, which may have lessened some of her competitive drive in the XC event.
John Tomac used to win both cross-country and downhill World Cup events in his prime, but he never won both of them at the same event.
Many of the top downhill and cross-country riders used to race both XC and DH in those days, before rear suspension caught on among downhill racers. The use of rear suspension in downhill racing led to a lot more specialization among the racers, since it was too much trouble for most of the racers to travel with two separate bikes for the downhill and cross-country events. Back in 1990, Greg Herbold used to race cross-country, too.
Before rear suspension caught on among downhill riders, the riders who could climb the hills the fastest tended to be the riders who put in the most time on their bikes, and they’d also have to ride down the mountains as much as they rode up them, giving them lots of practice at both climbing and descending.