It’s Thursday and that means only one thing – nostalgic throw backs to retro mountain bike stuff!
This week … it’s Sprung video, from 1998.
We’re going to spend the next few weeks revisiting some of the classics that make mountain biking what it is today. Stuff from the you-kids-don’t-know-you’re-born, it-wasn’t-like-that-in-my-day golden era of mountain biking. Sure, all the bikes were crap, head angles were over vertical and decent, accessible riding was a gleam in Rowan’s Sorrell’s eye but …. the golden sheen of nostalgia can’t be defeated.
First in the series is the legendary Sprung Video Magazine from 1998 – the video series that launched the pans and zooms generation.
You honestly cannot over egg how important to mountain biking Alex Rankin and Milan Spasic’s films are. They were the first guys to really inject a cool, moto and skate inspired identity into British mountain biking and to show it to the world, with the help of Dirt Magazine.
The videos brought together UK racing, pro-riders (including a young Steve Peat and Rob Warner), hip hop, street and moto in a way that just made mountain biking insanely cool.
It wasn’t the lycra and cheesy table tops that were dominating magazines of the time, the internet didn’t exist in a mainstream way and those guys were real trend setters.
If you were a rider in 1998 you owned a copy of Sprung that was permanently stuck in your VHS player on repeat till it wore out.
Sprung video magazine – we salute you.
