Tom Ritchey - Early Years

Early Years

Tom Ritchey began building custom steel racing frames in the early 1970s, bringing many innovations to the craft such as oversized tubing, made possible through Ritchey's preference for fillet brazing. Ritchey built his first frame out of his parent's garage in 1972. In the early 1980s, he started building mountain bike frames as a partner with Gary Fisher and Charlie Kelly in MountainBikes. In 1983, the partnership dissolved and MountainBikes was sold to Fisher, who renamed the company Fisher Mountain Bikes. Ritchey began building mountain bikes and other frames for his own company, Ritchey Design, expanding into bicycle components. Ritchey is an early innovator of parts designed or optimized for mountain bikes, including clipless pedals and threadless headsets, and has also designed a large assortment of road and cyclocross components. Ritchey components have been raced to victory in some of the biggest cycling competitions in the world including the UCI World Championships, the Tour De France and the Olympic XC Mountain Bike race. Ritchey is well-known for his mountain bikes, but he has also produced road and cyclo-cross frames, usually of butted chromoly steel tubing. He has produced frames made using titanium alloys, along with composite frames using carbon fiber and titanium tubes. In 1988, Ritchey was inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame. In 2012, Tom Ritchey was inducted to the United States Bicycle Hall of Fame in Davis, California.