Before gravel there was the ‘Jobst ride’. During the 1970s in America, Jobst Brandt led the way in taking bikes where they weren’t supposed to go, and inspired a generation of adventurers and framebuilders. This is his story
Words MAX LEONARD
California. The Santa Cruz Mountains, south of San Francisco. A logging track through the majestic redwoods. It’s a quiet Sunday morning in the mid-1970s. Suddenly the peace is broken by the sound of tyres in the dirt and four… six… eight cyclists burst onto the scene, chasing a giant charging up the hill on a red road bike the size of a barn door.
As quickly as they arrive, shouting and breathing hard, they are gone. Minutes later, a final cyclist trudges into view, bike slung over his shoulder. Its buckled, punctured front wheel is jammed against the fork. It’s going to be a long way home.
Welcome to the ‘Jobst ride’. The man being chased is Jobst Brandt – opinionated, sometimes obnoxious, often inspiring. A 6ft 5in powerhouse who broke Campagnolo cranks and axles for fun as he took his steel Cinelli Supercorsa frame to places entirely unsuitable for the skinny tyres and racing geometry of a classic road bike.
On Jobst rides you went where Brandt decided. You stopped when he stopped, drank when he drank (he didn’t carry bidons and drank only from streams). You would take on dirt roads, forest tracks, landslides, and then eight or nine hours later you dropped back into town, completely shelled, covered in mud, but happy.
Among the initiated, Jobst rides were infamous. Forget gravel bikes – these were mountain bike rides before mountain bikes had even been dreamed up. And the riders were among the state’s best racers, which meant the country’s best. Names like Tom Ritchey, Gary Fisher and Eric Heiden. The Bay Area at this time was a place where small seeds grew into large trees. Brandt, his rides and his friends had an outsized influence on cycling.
So who was he?
A life on two wheels
Jobst Brandt was born in 1935 and grew up in Palo Alto, California. Now at the heart of Silicon Valley, home to global titans such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Tesla, it was then a sleepy ranch town surrounded by orchards and bordered by Stanford University. He was the son of a German professor who had escaped the Nazis and fled to the US in the 1930s. Post-war, the family spent a year in Switzerland
