Joe Breeze and the Legend of Repack

Adventure flashback to mountain biking’s first
downhill race, Oct 21,
1976

By Will Hangen


Sitting on Joe Breeze’s outdoor deck, which
overlooks the rugged vastness of
Cascade Canyon in Marin County, it’s easy to see
what drew him and the other
early innovators of mountain biking to the wooded
slopes of San Geronimo
Ridge. What’s not so easy to understand is how they
were ever crazy enough, on
October 21, 1976, to race their prototype mountain
bikes down Repack trail; the
first timed mountain bike downhill race ever to
take place. Doubly insane when you
stand at the top of Repack, as I recently did, and
stare down this incredibly steep,
rutted fireroad.

In the early seventies Joe Breeze was one of the
first of about a dozen local Marin
bike-rats to modify their old Schwinn Excelsior
street cruisers by taking off the
fenders and fake fuel tanks, then adding motorcycle
brake levers and other custom
features.

No butt-hugging cycling tights for these
roughriders. The uniform de rigueur
consisted of thick jeans, long sleeve shirts and
leather workman gloves. Most
mountain bikers have seen the photos of Joe Breeze
and Gary Fisher ripping around
Repack’s corners with their 50-pound bikes leaned
over like racing sloops in the
wind. What most haven’t seen are pictures of the
dramatic crashes that frequently
occurred – pictures now casually strewn across Joe
Breeze’s patio table. ‘Vendetti’s
Face’, named for the corner about halfway down
Repack where a Marc Vendetti
scraped off part of his face. ‘Breezer Tree Corner’
where Joe himself wrapped his
bike and torso around an oak tree at twenty miles
an hour. Bike helmets? Hell, they
hadn’t even been invented yet.

The Original Ballooner

In a flashback to the past, Joe Breeze is now
rummaging around in his garage, at my
urging, looking for one of the old 1930’s clunkers
they used to race down Repack.
While brushing off the dust and cobwebs, he said,
“I’ve never liked the term
‘clunker’ but prefered to call them ‘ballooners’,
after the big tires they came with.
Other guys liked to call them fat-tires flyers,
thrashers, cruisers or beaters.”

This same competitive and emotional rivalry was at
the very core of what was later
to become the massive mountain bike industry. Here
was the classic American
foundry of dreams - literally and liberally whetted
with copious amounts of blood
and sweat.

The First Repack Race

Given rugged bikes, a steep mountain and plenty of
youthful testosterone it’s not
too surprising that these young men were drawn to
racing. In 1976 the first Repack
race was informally planned and local bike builder
Charlie Kelly agreed to be
timekeeper. The dozen or so contestants, including
Gary Fisher, Otis Guy, Fred
Wolf and Wende Cragg decided to race down
precipitous Cascade Canyon fireroad.

The nickname Repack came about because the racers
noticed that at the end of
their runs, their old coaster brake equipped hubs
would be smoking hot from
friction. So hot in fact, that the hubs would
sizzle if spat upon. If they did a
‘repack’ without adequately cooling the hubs, the
grease would quickly melt and pour
out, not unlike boiling oil from the fry basket at
the local burger joint.

Alan Bonds won the first two-mile long Repack race
on October 21, 1976, by virtue
of the fact that he was ‘the last man standing’.
Quite literally, the dozen or so
other racers were eliminated by broken equipment or
crashes all the way down the
course. The sound of squealing brakes and spraying
rock filled Cascade Canyon, but
the most unusual thing were the ‘jet contrails’. As
the bike hubs began to heat up
from over-braking, the observers could clearly see
the different lines the racers
took down Repack. In the still morning air, the
smell of sizzling hot grease would
linger for many minutes against the sweet backdrop
of pine needles and live oak.

Bond’s winning time was 5:12 minutes; pretty
amazing for a first run that dropped a
scary 1300 vertical feet. Especially impressive
considering that only about a minute
was shaved off in the next five years. A week
later, on October 30, 1976, Joe
Breeze rode to victory in the third race with a sub-
five minute ride amid a pack of
eleven racers, all on hand modified bikes.

Of the official Repack races from 1976 to 1984
(when the last two races became
NORBA sanctioned), Joe Breeze placed first in 10
out of 24 races. Most of the
races that he won were largely attributed to his
new creation: the handbuilt
Breezer mountain bike. Using cro-moly steel and all
new parts for the first time on
a frame specifically designed for mountain biking,
he could go faster through the
ruts and rocks of Repack. Later Joe went on to
market many variations of this bike,
first in Marin County and later around the world.

The Purist and the Controversy

Stop by any bike shop in Fairfax or Mill Valley and
they will tell you Joe Breeze was
the one that never sold out. Never rode the mega-
corporate wave of the mid-90’s.
You can see his fantastic attention to detail in
every Breezer that came off the
line. Clean welds and paint jobs with crisp detail,
plus inventive touches like the
head badge showing a peaceful idealized Mt. Tam in
the background.

Regarding the later bitter rivalry between this
handful of mountain bike pioneers
and the companies they established, Joe simply
states that all that is behind them.
Joe, downplaying his considerable role, added,
“This wasn’t nuclear physics, we were
just a bunch of guys having fun and any early
achievements were mostly
collaborative in nature.” When asked about the
controversy of who really invented
the ‘first mountain bike’, he flatly states that
that conflict came about when the
PR departments and corporate types used the media
hype to sell more mountain
bikes.

From the deck we watched as Cascade Canyon in the
late afternoon metamorphosed
from live oak green to dusky blue. Tom Breeze,
Joe’s six-year-old son, came out
carrying a plate of organic carrots and Jamaican
ginger ale, then sat on his dad’s lap.
Pretty healthy fare and, not too surprisingly, Joe
Breeze still seems to be nearly as
fit as his Repack days. Fit enough, in fact, to
whip just about anybody’s butt on
Repack - going up or coming down. He stopped
manufacturing Breezers in 2000 and
now has a new career as an ‘alternative
transportation consultant’. Currently he
provides input and resources to several
transportation committees and bike path
projects around the San Francisco Bay area.

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