A Brief History Lesson with Hans Rey – Video
From short stems to dropper posts Hans walks us through all the things we now can't live without
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We’ve all seen photos of what our sport was like 20 or 30 years ago, and they feel like ancient history. But for other sports, that’s the blink of an eye. Mountain biking has evolved at a blinding pace since the early ’90s, and it’s entirely thanks to boundary-pushing riders like Hans Rey. He’s not only lived through every trend in modern mountain biking, he’s probably got an artifact to prove it in his Laguna Beach, California garage. In this video, produced by Shimano, Hans uses his personal treasure trove as a timeline for some of the most important steps forward in what we ride and how we ride. Our history lesson starts with Hans’s preference for taller, wider handlebars, and ends with his (relatively) newfound love affair with e-bikes. Skeptics, take note. The times, they are a’ changing.



