Minus Ten Review- 9

Since I didn't post any pictures this week ten years ago you get another look at this animal excavation.

Ten years ago this week I didn't post any pictures for the week. I know.....I know! I said that would be rare going forward. It will be. I promise.....

Anyway, ten years ago I was going on about a few things. Trans Iowa, of course, Jan Ullrich's retirement from Pro cycling, and I was ranting about the icy Winter storms we were getting then. But one thing I made some prognostications about concerned an image seen on the web forums of Travis Brown piloting a strange beast of a bike, As it turned out, it was a 29 inch wheeled front/26 inch wheeled rear bicycle which Trek eventually produced and dubbed a "69er".

One thing I did get right from that image was that Trek was experimenting with offsets for forks. In fact, they already had what they were going to do figured out. Later in the Summer Trek would release the bombshell that they had an exclusive one year deal with Fox Shox and that the new offset would be 51mm which was part of what Trek dubbed "G2 Geometry". Many folks only remember the fork offsets, but there was more to G2 than just that.

G2 geometry pretty much opened the door for what we now see as "normal" trail bike geometry. Slacker head tube angles matched up with longer fork offsets were the first step. Longer front-centers and wider bars set up with stubby stems were the next step. Matched up with the short rear-centers, these geometries and angles all are pretty much the culmination of a vision Gary Fisher had in 1999 for 29"ers.