Downhill bikes looked a lot different then
While going through some back issues recently, we came upon a two-page spread showing Canadian Cindy Devine’s Klein Rascal bike that she rode to win the first UCI Downhill World Championship in 1990.
Cindy raced both downhill and cross-country in those days. She rode the same bike, shown above, in both the Senior Women’s Downhill and Senior Women’s Cross-Country categories in the 1990 World Championships in Durango, Colorado.
Cindy and the rest of the Klein team had found that Rock Shox suspension forks improved the ride of the bikes so much that they all put Rock Shox forks on their bikes, which reportedly didn’t fit in the head tubes of the Klein cross-country bikes.
Klein insisted that their race team members had to cover up the Rock Shox decals on their forks, so Cindy covered her Rock Shox stickers with Klein stickers.
Below you can see a photo of Cindy that appeared in our coverage of the 1990 UCI World Championships, showing Cindy racing cross-country on the same bike that she rode two days earlier to win the Senior Women’s Downhill title.
