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by Tuyet Nguyen

This is how the MASH trailer opens: a cast of mostly male cyclists racing past cars, splitting gridlocked traffic, climbing up hills, skidding down them, bailing on asphalt, and generally looking like Thrasher magazine exploded all over the San Francisco track bike scene. It is a minute-and-a-half of internet video legend.

The clip circulated for years before the actual full-length was released, inspiring both followers and haters among factions of track and fixed-gear bike riders. Amateur videographers—with easy access to cheap cameras, user-friendly editing programs, and, of course, YouTube—were able to put out their own video responses within weeks of seeing the preview.

Some were neighborhood kids on shitty conversions filming themselves doing track-stands; others were chancy helmet-cam montages; and a few were direct parodies of the original trailer. “Back then, you had to scour everything just for fucking pictures,” Justin Godfrey, co-founder of Denver-based CycleJerks.com, says. “No one even started filming [track bikes] until the MASH thing started happening. I think they were the real pioneers of it. Everyone was like, ‘Wait a second, that’s fucking lame! I can do that!’”

If imitation equals flattery, then MASH is one good-looking bitch. One of the most mocked scenes in the trailer is of a guy doing a no-handed skid while lighting a cigarette. It was this two-second clip that helped to set the tone for the entire video—that inimitable mix of coolness and arrogance.

“It was just hard to get this thing out,” Gabe Morford, one of MASH’s producers, says, “and then there’s people instantaneously poking fun at you when you spend three years making something. That kind of burns at first. But, you know, it’s just like, okay, let’s just get this thing out and let it be what it is.”

Certainly MASH was not the first cycling video, nor was it even the first to feature track bikes. But there was something distinct about it, something that cried for attention. It had a slick urban skyline, a hip soundtrack, and throes of energetic well-dressed youth. MASH gave track bikes a look and an attitude. And it was a pivotal turning point in a subculture just about to bloom.

The history of the track bike goes back a hundred years. The original intention of the rigid frame and single-speed hub was for racing on specially-built banked tracks in sprints and in grueling endurance trials. While the last half of the century has seen a decline in the mainstream popularity of these velodrome races, the bikes themselves have garnered their own cult of devotees. Some of whom rely on the them for a paycheck.

Many ascribe bike messengers to be the initial wave of city kids to pick up track bikes for everyday use. Which, in all respects, is entirely plausible. Every person that rides fixed has a story about it—the first encounter, the first frame, the first time rolling down a hill with no brakes—and often seeing a random courier on a single-speed is footnoted as the first influence.

“[Messengers] hate it,” Dustin Klein, producer/founder of Fast Friday, both the movie and the monthly Seattle track bike event, says. Klein, a former bike courier himself, knows what it means to watch a hobby grow into a trend. “Messengers are so crazy protective of what they have, you know? It’s like stealing their identity. But the more and more and more it grows, and you get to the point that there are so many people involved, you can’t be mad at it anymore. It’s just too big.”

The ever-building momentum of the subculture leads to varied speculation about its future. Many make the parallel between track bikes now and what skateboarding and BMX communities were like in the 1980s; how fanzines contributed to those scenes in the same way that internet videos today push track bike enthusiasm. “We didn’t have the internet then,” Burd Phillips comments. Phillips, producer of The Bootleg Sessions, Vol. I & II, like many others comes from the crossover between skaters and bikers. “The only way to figure out what was going on in the underground and what wasn’t being sold to you by corporations through the big magazines was to scrape up any zines you could find. That’s how you knew what was really happening.

“With the [Bootleg Sessions],” he adds, “we wanted to capture that sense. Something that wasn’t being sold to them by any large company and that they could get an idea of what was going on with this whole fixed-gear thing.”
The scary part, of course, is that if skateboarding and BMX are any indication of where track bikes are heading, then it’s a slippery slope to X-Games: The Fixed-Gear Years. Some, like Klein, are already weary of this.
“Anything that goes too fast,” he says, “that goes up too quick, dies. Nothing goes up super fast and then just stays the hottest shit forever. Nothing. It’s an unhealthy growth.”

“Referencing the history of BMX or skateboarding, as much as I don’t want to,” Klein continues, “I can see [track bikes] getting big and popping and then getting really low. And then it will come out of that and be at its plateau. [But] sponsorship [also] elevates skill level, it elevates technical growth with products and things like that—it’s very double-edged. But to live and survive off this thing we love, it’s necessary.”

This meta-perspective could just be the thing to save the sport from imploding on itself. At this point, there is not a huge industry feeding track bike culture. There are no corporate sponsorships for riding, no glossy magazine cover stories—honestly, it’s going to be a long time before K-Mart starts carrying fixies.
“This is, like, the best moment for it,” Phillips says, “at least from what I’ve experienced. It’s right at the right level now. We do sort of have this expectation that it’s going to go one way or the other, [but] why can’t it stay where it is? Does it really have to blow up or die away?”

Not at all. Many see the scene as being able to come into its own. And expectations for it to rival the monster success of its four-wheeled cousin is just excess baggage. “I keep telling people [that track bikes] are not an alternative to skateboarding,” Morford says. “It’s an alternative to a car and transportation, but as far as an alternative to doing tricks on a skateboard? I don’t think it is.”

Others, like Klein, know that track bikes are built for longevity. “There are three elements to track bike culture that makes me think it’ll be around for awhile,” he explains. “You can do tricks on them; you can commute; and you can race on them. This is really multi-dimensional [and] is an equation for something really strong.”

In this digital age of constant convergence, it seems natural to be drawn to a bike that multitasks. There's a right time for everything and the rise of the modern track bike could prove to be the new model for how a community is built. The line that once separated the underground from everybody else is becoming blurred with the advent of rapid-fire information exchange and global access. Fringe culture used to take decades to develop into an industry. Now, all it takes is a really good YouTube video.