![Joe breeze](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Joe_breeze.jpg)
Joe Breeze (born 1953) is an American bicycle framebuilder, designer and advocate from Marin County, California. An early participant in the sport of
mountain biking
Mountain biking is a sport of riding bicycles off-road, often over rough terrain, usually using specially designed mountain bikes. Mountain bikes share similarities with other bikes but incorporate features designed to enhance durability and pe ...
, Breeze, along with other pioneers including
Gary Fisher
Gary Christopher Fisher (born November 5, 1950) is considered one of the inventors of the modern mountain bike.
Fisher started competing in road and track races at age 12. He was suspended in 1968 because race organizers cited a rule that his ...
,
Charlie Kelly, and
Tom Ritchey
Tom Ritchey (born 1956) is an American bicycle frame builder, Category 1 racer, fabricator, designer, and founder of Ritchey Design. Ritchey is a US pioneer in modern frame building and the first production mountain bike builder/manufacturer i ...
, is known for his central role in developing the mountain bike. Breeze is credited with designing and building the first all-new mountain bikes, which riders colloquially called Breezers.
He built the prototype, known as Breezer #1, in 1977 and completed nine more Series I Breezers by early 1978.
Breezer #1 is now in the collection of the
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...
’s National Museum of American History.
Breeze, a road bike racer through the 1970s, was among the fastest downhill racers at Repack, mountain biking's seminal race held west of Fairfax, California. He won 10 of the 24 Repack races, which took place between 1976 and 1984.
Breeze is a charter member of the
Mountain Bike Hall of Fame
The Mountain Bike Hall of Fame (MBHOF) was founded in 1988 to chronicle the history of mountain biking. Formerly located in Crested Butte, Colorado, it relocated to Fairfax, California in 2014 and became part of the Marin Museum of Bicycling.
Si ...
; he was inducted in 1988.
[“Joe Breeze /Inducted 1988”](_blank)
Mountain Bike Hall of Fame (c.2001-2013)
Breeze developed mountain bike and road-racing bike designs through the 1980s and most of the 1990s, then focused his efforts on advocacy for bicycle transportation.
In the early 2000s he devoted his Breezer brand entirely to transportation, introducing in 2002 a line of bikes for everyday use, equipping them for local trips, errands in town and commuting.
[John Markoff]
''New York Times,'' October 10, 2002.
In 2008, Breeze sold the Breezer brand to
Advanced Sports International
Advanced Sports International (ASI) is an American bicycle company whose flagship brand is Fuji Bikes. It also owns smaller brands including triathlon-focused Kestrel USA, component maker Oval Concepts, Breezer bikes, Tuesday Cycles and BMX maker ...
and since then has worked for the company as Breezer frame designer, designing transportation bikes, road bikes and mountain bikes under the Breezer name.
[“An Interview with Joe Breeze”](_blank)
EcoVelo, August 20, 2010.
Background
Breeze grew up in
Mill Valley, California
Mill Valley is a city in Marin County, California, Marin County, California, United States, located about north of San Francisco via the Golden Gate Bridge and from Napa Valley. The population was 14,231 at the 2020 United States Census, 2020 ...
, at the foot of
Mount Tamalpais
Mount Tamalpais (; ; Miwok: ''Támal Pájiṣ''), known locally as Mount Tam, is a peak in Marin County, California, United States, often considered symbolic of Marin County. Much of Mount Tamalpais is protected within public lands such as Moun ...
, just north of San Francisco. He graduated from
Tamalpais High School
Tamalpais High School (often abbreviated as Tam) is a public secondary school located in Mill Valley, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is named after nearby Mount Tamalpais, which rises almost above Mill Valley.
Tamalpais High Scho ...
, which at the time had extensive technical training facilities. He studied architectural and engineering drafting there for four years. His father, Bill Breeze, was a machinist and owner of the Sports Car Center in
Sausalito, California
Sausalito (Spanish language, Spanish for "small willow grove") is a city in Marin County, California, Marin County, California, United States, located southeast of Marin City, California, Marin City, south-southeast of San Rafael, California ...
.
An avid cyclist at a time when cycling was not a common activity for adults in the US, Bill Breeze sometimes commuted to work by bicycle, and he shared with his son an appreciation for efficient, lightweight vehicles and for the bicycle as king of such vehicles. The two often discussed the properties of metals and technical aspects of bicycle design.
In 1974 Joe Breeze took a course in the art of bicycle framebuilding from
Albert Eisentraut in
Oakland, California
Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...
, and began to build his own custom-tailored road racing frames, using his father's machine shop at their home in Mill Valley. He also studied Machine and Metals Technology at
College of Marin
The College of Marin is a public community college in Marin County, California, with two campuses, one in Kentfield, and the second in Novato. It is the only institution operated by the Marin Community College District.
College of Marin has been ...
from 1974 to 1976.
Breeze had taken up cycling seriously as a teenager in the late 1960s, sometimes going on rides of a few hundred miles. He so enjoyed cycling and saw such value in the bicycle as a vehicle, he wanted to spread the word. In 1970 he took up road-bike racing, figuring that publicity about races could show people how fast and far a bicycle could go. Breeze also studied bicycle history and while traveling for races he searched for early bicycles. He hoped to promote cycling by restoring and displaying examples from the 1890s, the high point of bicycle technology.
Development of the mountain bike
Joe Breeze raced road bikes throughout the 1970s, eventually racing in the top category.
[
]
“Joe Breeze /Inducted 1988”
Mountain Bike Hall of Fame
The Mountain Bike Hall of Fame (MBHOF) was founded in 1988 to chronicle the history of mountain biking. Formerly located in Crested Butte, Colorado, it relocated to Fairfax, California in 2014 and became part of the Marin Museum of Bicycling.
Si ...
(c.2001-2013)
By 1972 Breeze was also competing in
cyclocross races and often rode on the trails of
Mount Tamalpais
Mount Tamalpais (; ; Miwok: ''Támal Pájiṣ''), known locally as Mount Tam, is a peak in Marin County, California, United States, often considered symbolic of Marin County. Much of Mount Tamalpais is protected within public lands such as Moun ...
.
In 1973, he and
Velo Club Tamalpais teammate Marc Vendetti were looking for fine early bikes and found a less elegant relic: a 1941 Schwinn-built balloon-tire bike. Vendetti had a few years earlier ridden similar 1930s-40s “paper boy” bikes on Tamalpais at the periphery of the mountain's seminal group of off-road riders, the Larkspur Canyon Gang. Encouraged by Vendetti, Breeze bought the old fat-tire bike for $5, stripped off its extraneous parts and rode it down Mount Tamalpais. He loved it.
Breeze, Vendetti and Velo Club Tamalpais teammate Otis Guy were soon riding Mount Tamalpais trails together regularly. They and other teammates including
Gary Fisher
Gary Christopher Fisher (born November 5, 1950) is considered one of the inventors of the modern mountain bike.
Fisher started competing in road and track races at age 12. He was suspended in 1968 because race organizers cited a rule that his ...
, and other enthusiasts from Marin located old fat-tire “ballooner” bikes of many makes, used them off-road and settled on Schwinns built between 1937 and 1944 as the best. They would remove extraneous parts from the bikes, strip them down to their original paint and ride them on Marin's rugged fire roads and trails.
Some, including Gary Fisher, added parts such as gears and derailleurs to their ballooners.
[
]
In 1976 Breeze began to compete in Repack races. A downhill time trial on fire roads in the hills west of
Fairfax, California, Repack brought together riders from around Mount Tamalpais who stripped down older bikes for off-road use and fitted rugged parts to them. Repack served as a testing ground for off-road bikes.
The heavy old fat-tire bike frames, made of mild steel, were not standing up to the rigors of mountain biking. Breeze was asked by
Charlie Kelly to build a mountain bike frame and in early 1977 Breeze agreed to do so.
[
]
While working on the design for the mountain bike, Breeze took orders to make mountain bikes for several other Marin County off-road cycling enthusiasts. He completed the prototype (Breezer #1) in Fall 1977 and rode it to victory at Repack.
Breeze finished nine more Breezer mountain bikes by June 1978. He built up the bikes with all-new parts, which he sourced from around the world.
Those ten Breezer Series 1 bikes, made of chrome-moly alloy steel, are widely considered the first modern mountain bikes.
[
]
The first ten Breezer mountain bikes can be recognized by their twin lateral tubes, which Breeze included to stiffen the long frames for high-speed tracking.
Breeze revised his designs shortly after, and shared his ideas for the next generation of mountain bikes with other framebuilders, including
Tom Ritchey
Tom Ritchey (born 1956) is an American bicycle frame builder, Category 1 racer, fabricator, designer, and founder of Ritchey Design. Ritchey is a US pioneer in modern frame building and the first production mountain bike builder/manufacturer i ...
(of
Palo Alto
Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
The city was estab ...
, 50 miles south of Marin) who built his first mountain bike frames in 1979.
Ritchey became the frame supplier to the
Marin County
Marin County is a county located in the northwestern part of the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 262,231. Its county seat and largest city is San Rafael. Marin County is acros ...
company MountainBikes, founded in 1979 by Gary Fisher and Charlie Kelly.
The mountain bike's progression from local
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...
builders to the larger industry was complete in Fall 1981, when
Specialized Bicycle Components
Specialized Bicycle Components, Inc., colloquially known as and stylized as SPECIALIZED, is an American company which designs, manufactures and markets bicycles, bicycle components and related products under the brand name "Specialized", as wel ...
introduced a lower-priced production mountain bike, the
Specialized Stumpjumper
The Specialized Stumpjumper is a mountain bike produced by Specialized Bicycle Components. When it was first produced in 1981, the Stumpjumper was the first mass-production mountain bike. The Stumpjumper is still in production, although its design ...
, built in
Japan
Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...
and based on the Ritchey-built bikes sold by Fisher and Kelly.
Early mountain bike racing, events
Joe Breeze raced in 19 of the 24 Repack races, winning 10 times.
Twenty-two of the Repack races, downhill time trials organized and promoted by Charlie Kelly, were held from 1976 to 1979. Repack is known as mountain biking's first recorded competition. The last Repack race in 1979 was filmed by a TV crew for a San Francisco Bay Area news program, KPIX Evening Magazine.
That filmed account aired nationally, spreading the word about mountain biking to a larger audience. The Repack race was revived for two more runs, in 1983 and 1984, becoming the first officially sanctioned downhill mountain bike race.
A mosaic tribute to Repack was installed in downtown Fairfax in 2013.
In 1978, Joe Breeze was one of five riders from Marin County to travel to Crested Butte, Colorado, to participate in the Pearl Pass Tour, a two-day, off-road ride from Crested Butte to Aspen, over 12,700 foot Pearl Pass. Joe Breeze, Charlie Kelly, and Wende Cragg rode their 1977 and 1978 Breezers, while the other participants, including Gary Fisher and Michael Castelli of Marin County and several Crested Butte residents, rode modified Schwinns from the 1930s to 1950s.
Crested Butte became an important destination for mountain biking; the Pearl Pass Tour, founded in 1976, is the sport's longest running annual two-day event.
In 1983, Breeze and several others founded NORBA (National Off-Road Bicycle Association), the first sanctioning organization for off-road bicycle racing. Breeze designed the NORBA logo
and championed the rule requiring that racers do their own repairs during races. He maintained that a self-sufficiency rule for racing would ensure that manufacturers would keep their focus on durable bikes for all riders.
NORBA is now part of
USA Cycling
USA Cycling or USAC, based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, is the national governing body for bicycle racing in the United States. It covers the disciplines of road, track, mountain bike, cyclo-cross, and BMX across all ages and ability leve ...
.
Breezer mountain and road bikes in 1980s and 1990s
In 1980-81 Breeze built a second series of Breezer mountain bikes with oversize tubing in a diamond frame, and in 1982 to 1985 he built a third series. Breeze continued to develop and refine his mountain bike designs in the 1980s and 1990s.
[“Breezer Timeline”](_blank)
Museum of Mountain Bike Art & Technology. Retrieved 1 March 2013.
In 1986 he designed the American Breezer, an aluminum mountain bike built in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
In the 1990s he designed a line of steel and aluminum Breezer bikes sold worldwide. Mountain bike models included the Breezer Lightning, Jet Stream, Thunder, Storm, Beamer, Twister, and Tornado.
The 1993 Breezer Venturi, a road bike, featured compact geometry,
which later became standard in the industry.
Bicycle transportation
Breeze's long-term interest has been to see more people using bicycles in everyday life and not only for recreation.
On a cycling trip in Europe in 1971 he saw excellent bicycle infrastructure in the Netherlands, and people of all ages using bikes for daily transportation; this suggested possibilities for the United States that continued to inspire him through the mountain bike boom of the 1980s and 1990s.
Breeze has said that the mountain bike, being easy to ride and thus appealing to non-cyclists,
"got more Americans onto bikes than any other bike since the 1890s."
He observed in the 1990s, however, that as high-end mountain bike design (including his own) was geared increasingly toward race bikes, lower-priced mountain bikes followed suit and thus the bikes became less accessible to the masses. "The mountain bike opened cycling up to a lot of people by being friendlier than road bikes," Breeze wrote in 1997. "Maybe it's time for another bike to do that again."
[Joe Breeze, “A Bike for the Masses” ''Bicycle Guide,'' May 1997, page 90.]
His 1996 Breezer Ignaz X cruiser was the first bike he designed for town use.
(The bike's name was a tribute to Ignaz Schwinn, the Schwinn Bicycle Company founder who popularized modern "balloon" tires in the 1930s, and also to the Schwinn Excelsior X bike that was the inspiration for much of Breeze's early off-road riding.)
In the late 1990s Breeze devoted himself full-time to advocating for bicycle transportation, working with government agencies to make streets more
bicycle-friendly
Bicycle-friendly policies and practices help some people feel more comfortable about traveling by bicycle with other traffic. The level of bicycle-friendliness of an environment can be influenced by many factors including town planning and cyclin ...
and with grass-roots organizations to promote the bicycle as a practical mode of transportation. Transportation cycling, he said, addresses many issues at once: obesity, oil dependence, traffic congestion, global warming, lack of time for exercise.
He and other Marin County bicycle advocates visited Washington, DC to advocate for better
cycling infrastructure
Cycling infrastructure is all infrastructure cyclists are allowed to use. Bikeways include bike paths, bike lanes, cycle tracks, rail trails and, where permitted, sidewalks. Roads used by motorists are also cycling infrastructure, except whe ...
and a national Safe Routes to School program.
For the Marin County Bicycle Coalition, he created in 1998 and periodically revises a detailed map of Marin's current and potential bicycle routes.
Through the latter half of the 1990s, Breeze had been urging the U.S. bicycle industry to start producing bikes that non-athletes could use to get places in daily life.
In 2001, still seeing a need in the United States for bikes fully equipped for errands and commutes, Breeze devoted his own Breezer brand to transportation. He introduced in 2002 a line of bikes designed for everyday, practical use that integrated fenders, racks, and generator lights.
With model names like Uptown, Villager, Citizen, Liberty and Greenway, these Breezer bikes were similar to European utility bikes in being fully equipped, but Breeze designed them to be lighter and more ergonomically efficient.
Since then the bicycle transportation sector, long a staple in other parts of the world, has become an important bicycle market in the United States.
In 2008, Breeze sold his Breezer brand to Advanced Sports International of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
and since then has worked for the company as Breezer frame designer. The arrangement allowed him to concentrate on design and product development and create more bikes for a wide range of purposes.
The company introduced Joe Breeze's new line of Breezer mountain bikes in 2010. Breeze's current designs include transportation bikes, road bikes and mountain bikes.
Film; museum collections and exhibits
Joe Breeze, along with many others involved in the early history of mountain bikes, was featured in the 2007 documentary film ''
Klunkerz: A Film About Mountain Bikes''.
![Joe at Marin Museum of Bicycling](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Joe_at_Marin_Museum_of_Bicycling.jpg)
Breezer #1 (1977) was on display at the Oakland Museum, Cowell Hall of California History,
from 1985 to 2011.
In 2012 it became part of the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History
in Washington, DC. Breezer #2 (1978), which Joe Breeze built for MountainBikes co-founder Charlie Kelly, is on display at the
Mountain Bike Hall of Fame
The Mountain Bike Hall of Fame (MBHOF) was founded in 1988 to chronicle the history of mountain biking. Formerly located in Crested Butte, Colorado, it relocated to Fairfax, California in 2014 and became part of the Marin Museum of Bicycling.
Si ...
, part of the
Marin Museum of Bicycling in Fairfax, California.
Breezer #9 is on display at Shimano's Bicycle Museum Cycle Center in Sakai City, Japan.
Several Breezer bikes from the 1980s and 1990s are in the collection of The Museum of Mountain Bike Art & Technology in Statesville, NC.
Breeze's own 1982 (Series 3) Breezer mountain bike is on display at the US Bicycling Hall of Fame in Davis, California.
A major exhibition on the history of the mountain bike in Northern California, at San Francisco International Airport's SFO Museum (July 2012 to February 2013),
displayed 27 bikes and many related artifacts. The show was called "From Repack to Rwanda: The Origins, Evolution, and Global Reach of the Mountain Bike." Included were Joe Breeze's 1941 Schwinn-built BF Goodrich
modified by Breeze in 1973 for off-road riding, and Breezer #6,
built by Joe Breeze in 1977-78 for rider-photographer Wende Cragg.
Joe Breeze, Otis Guy, Marc Vendetti and others are co-founders of the
Marin Museum of Bicycling in Fairfax, California, which opened to the public in June 2015. Joe Breeze is Curator of the museum, which displays bicycles from the late 1860s to the present and functions as a cycling cultural center.
External links
Breezer BikesJoe's page on the MTB Hall of FameFat Tire Flyer, a book about the first mountain bikes by Charlie KellyMarin Museum of BicyclingRepack History by Joe Breeze
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Breeze, Joe
1953 births
Living people
Cycle designers
Folding bicycles
Mountain bike innovators
Sportspeople from the San Francisco Bay Area
Cycling in the San Francisco Bay Area
People from Mill Valley, California
Tamalpais High School alumni