We miss you, Charlie Cunningham!
Charlie Cunningham, the prolific inventor and early mountain bike pioneer, has left us. He was 77 years old.
A brilliant engineer and master fabricator, Charlie is best known for his innovative mountain bikes. Welded from oversized aluminum, they were years ahead of their time. Never content to follow convention, Charlie’s bikes used sloping top tubes before this was fashionable. His bikes featured oversized seatposts. And Charlie used narrow drop handlebars at a time when ‘mountain bike’ was synonymous with flat bars.
The results looked very different from other 1980s mountain bikes, but they worked. Charlie’s partner (and later wife) Jacquie Phelan rode her Cunningham to three NORBA (National Off-Road Bicycle Association) championships. Charlie’s bikes earned the—sometimes grudging—respect of the bike world.
Charlie didn’t stop with innovating frames (and seatposts). He realized that cantilever brakes—used on virtually all mountain bikes at the time—could be improved. He moved the pivots upward to reduce flex. He used a roller cam mechanism to activate the brake, which allowed fine-tuning the mechanical advantage throughout the brake’s travel.
Immediately popular, the Cunningham ‘Roller-Cam’ brakes led to a licensing contract with SunTour, the Japanese component maker and market leader in mountain bike components. Other inventions followed: The GreaseGuard system purged contaminated grease from the bearings of hubs and bottom brackets and injected clean grease. Now you could overhaul your bearings in seconds—even on the trail, if you carried a small grease gun. Charlie, ever the tinkerer, obviously did.
I met Charlie and Jacquie when I asked about including Jacquie’s championship-winning bike, named ‘Otto,’ in our book The Competition Bicycle. Jacquie traveled to Seattle with her bike for the photoshoot, and I got to assemble and test-ride it. Working on the bike, I was awe-struck by all the clever details and modifications to virtually every component. And when I rode it, I found that the bike rode and handled very well. Where most early mountain bikes were based on ‘Klunkers’—old balloon-tire bikes never intended for spirited off-road riding—Charlie’s bikes were light, fast and agile. In effect, they were proto-gravel bikes.
Fascinated by Charlie and his bikes, I did a big interview with him—and another with Jacquie—in 2009. Talking to Charlie, we discovered that we shared a passion for wide-tire road bikes, and for optimizing rim brakes. Charlie’s genius was obvious in the brakes he had developed after the ‘Roller Cam,’ which he considered just a first step in the evolution of his brakes. Sadly, none of these ingenious brakes ever made it into production. Mountain bikes had moved on, first to V-brakes and then discs.
Charlie was realistic about the direction the bike industry was heading: “They have to sell new stuff. How do you do that? You add features, and you add materials, and if you can put a story behind it and make people think that it is better…”
At the same time, Charlie’s passion for bicycles came through in a hopeful statement: “There are a lot of very organic, earth-oriented people who are involved in bikes. There will always be a place for bikes that are relatively simple, efficient and long-lasting.”
In 2015, Charlie suffered from severe head injuries during a bike accident. When Natsuko and I visited Charlie and Jacquie in 2019, he had recovered to the point where he was riding a tandem, with Jacquie captaining. He also enjoyed long solo walks in the Marin foothills. As we ate dinner on the terrace of the treehouse he’d built many years ago, there was light-hearted banter mixed with talk about bikes and tech. Charlie’s infectious smile was the same as it had always been. His creativity and down-to-earth attitude will be missed!
To support Jacquie in this difficult time and help with inevitable expenses, we’re doing a fund-raiser. Donate $25, and we’ll send you one of the last copies of Bicycle Quarterly 29 with 23 (!) pages of interviews with Charlie and Jacquie. The entire proceeds will go to Jacquie. It’s a great opportunity to catch up on one of the most amazing couples in cycling, plus enjoy many other great articles. (BQ 29 also had the results of our ‘rumble strip tests’ that quantified suspension losses.) You can combine the fundraiser with other products.
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Photo credits: Gary Leo (Photo 1); Jean-Pierre Pradères (Photo 2); Gordon Bainbridge (Photo 3); Charlie Cunningham (Photo 4)
