06/04/2026
From Dan Koeppel ..
Charlie Cunningham, mountain bike pioneer, passed away earlier this week. Here’s a brief remembrance. All this happened a long time ago, so please consider that the lens of time tends to distort and exaggerate…
But that said: early in the days of Mountain Bike magazine - even before Zap came on and basically saved the publication from sh*ttiness - we’d often drive up from Los Angeles to Marin and make the rounds with various manufacturers.
Visiting WTB was always…fascinating. The four partners - Charlie, frame builder Steve Potts, Mark Slate, and business guy Patrick Seidler - were fun to be with, but they were kind of a**l. OK, not “kind of.” They’d try to make us sign what were basically NDAs just to go on a ride with them. They didn’t trust the press at all, yet at the same time were desperate for good press. It made for a tense relationship.
Charlie was always beyond this. He was the pure genius of the quartet, and though he was incredibly - and rightfully - proprietary about his designs, the basic vibe we got from him was one of sheer love: of bikes, of tinkering, of nature, of life. We often thought his bikes were odd and overpriced, but there’s no doubt there was a market for them, and his parts designs were exemplary. It was also nice that he didn’t step too much into the “who invented what” Marin mindset. I think that’s because he didn’t care. Charlie invented what Charlie invented. He knew his worth and his place. In other words, he was an artist.
Except for those damned quick releases. I don’t remember what made them special, but I do remember that they were going to retail for at least $150 (and this was the early 1990s.) True, there were people willing to pay that much for such a product, but that didn’t make the idea any less d***y, or at least potentially d***y, and we were intrigued to find out whether the Cunningham designs were actually worth the money.
WTB sent us a pair to test, and I don’t recall whether we actually wrote about them, but what happened after is where the cringe resides. We mailed the QRs back, as WTB asked us to - we could only have them for a certain amount of time - but they never arrived. This began a series of threatening letters which basically accused us of stealing the prototypes for some nefarious purpose, likely industrial espionage.
So, this Northern California version of stoner paranoia, combined with real-life experience, made it impossible to convince the WTB quartet - and bless Charlie for mostly staying out of it - that we’d actually sent them back, and more importantly, that WE DIDN’T GIVE A S**T ABOUT QUICK RELEASES.
It was just one example of how WTB had zero clue about how to deal with the press (the company was notorious for seeing a good review as a bad review, focusing on one mildly critical sentence - like “we loved the tires, but they’re not the best for mud” - and then sending written rebuttals that were always four or five times as long as the review itself.)
But I loved hanging out with them, and especially Charlie, anyway. They were the real deal when it came to riding bikes. And though I don’t know the finances, I’m hoping that Charlie managed to get a (extra large) cut of the royalties earned when WTB became what it still is today: a major OEM brand (if he didn’t, it’s a massive injustice.)
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate guys like Charlie Cunningham a lot more. He was a weirdo who went his own way, and did so with integrity and conviction. He was also a link to the earliest days of the sport, when geniuses and freaks abounded (sometimes, and all for the best, they were even the same person) and experimentation - for better or worse - was the primary motivator.
Finally, as somebody who has personally had disabling health struggles, a special dose of admiration to Charlie’s partner, Jacquie Phelan, who took care of her husband after his accident - a role that many, many women are forced to undertake for their ailing men, and which once again proves that the female of the species is far tougher and smarter than the dudes. We had a lot of similarly bizarre run-ins with Jacquie back in the day, as well, and she’s proved to be a better person than most of us. Respect.
I still don’t know what happened to those quick releases, however. RIP, Charlie Cunningham.
