Nick Craig was riding bikes before a lot of current MTB racers were born and there aren't many riding disciplines he hasn't given a go.
Craig has won eight national titles – three in cyclocross (CX), three in Olympic-distance cross-country (XCO) and two in XC marathon (XCM) – and competed at the 2000 Olympic Games in both the road race and the mountain biking.
The 56-year-old from Stockport is now a brand ambassador for Scott Sports and the man behind Ride For Charlie, set up in memory of his son – himself a promising racer, who sadly passed away in his sleep aged 15 – to support up-and-coming riders.
He started in the 70s
It all began for Nick in the late 1970s, when, in his own words, he “stumbled on bikes”.
“My dad introduced me to cyclocross when I was nine,” Craig recalls.
“That would’ve been ’79. I had a 24in-wheeled Raleigh Arena, trainers, flat pedals, really tight short-shorts, a football shirt and my mum’s gardening gloves. Helmets weren’t worn then.
“I did that winter [season], and that was me hooked. You can imagine riding cyclocross on bald tyres – it was basically learning to slide around corners and try to stay upright!"
Bikepacking provided his training sessions
“By the age of 12, I was doing track, road, cyclocross, criteriums (short closed-circuit road races) – whatever I could get my hands on, really. I was racing a lot.
“Then a friend introduced me to touring – we call it bikepacking now, don’t we? – and I’d go off youth-hostelling in the Lake District or on days out in the Peaks.
“[Those rides] were my training camps – we just rode our bikes, usually with a saddle bag full of sandwiches and a couple of quid for tea at a cafe, and that was cycling to me.”
Cyclocross was the gateway to MTB racing
Nick continued to compete, but developed a strong preference for off-road racing. “I started to win national-level cyclocross races,” he recalls.
“I loved the off-road scene; the summer [road] scene wasn’t doing a lot for me. Then this wonderful sport, mountain biking, sort of appeared.
“I noticed that Tim Gould and David Baker [of Team Peugeot], who were four or five years older than me, were trying this sport out.
“They did it first, and in the winter of 1988, I ended up trying out a mountain bike. We rode around Kinder Reservoir [in Derbyshire] in deep snow, on Muddy Fox Couriers, and we froze and couldn’t feel our fingers.
“We walked these bikes around the reservoir, took them back and went, ‘That’s not for us!’ I think it was the bikes and the conditions.
“The guy at the bike shop in Huddersfield said, ‘I want you to try some other bikes’. So, we took some other bikes out, and we ended up setting up a team, and, in ’89, started racing mountain bikes.
“The sport was developing. There were these big money pots – a £1,000 first prize for a cross-country race – but Tim Gould would normally turn up and take all of them. I was riding these rigid bikes and learning the trade, really.”
He rode in the inaugural UCI World Championships
Nick’s career in mountain biking would include plenty of highlights – one of the earliest of which was flying out to take part in the debut UCI MTB World Championships in Durango, Colorado, in 1990.
“That was absolutely amazing!” he enthuses. “What cycling brought for me was travel, so to make the team to ride the first ever UCI Worlds [was incredible].
“I was a 20-year-old kid. I remember taking this massive double-deck radio-cassette player. I walked into the airport with this [boombox over my shoulder], got to security and there was £10 worth of batteries in there that I had to chuck.
"We were there [in Durango] for three-and-a-half weeks, at altitude, and it started the whole thing."
“I can remember buying some bar-ends from the local bike shop and [RockShox founder] Paul Turner turning up with his forks – I ended up with a set of RS-1s for the race.
“It was really cool [having a suspension fork]. Obviously, it weighed a ton, but that was irrelevant. Instead of bouncing off everything – we used to run 50psi [in the tyres], so we just pinged off everything – this fork absorbed it. You could see it working.”
He's raced downhill, too
Two years later, riding for Peugeot-Look, Craig even dabbled in downhill racing – but not for long.
“The sport was developing and the team I was riding for had a [DH] bike – I could be wrong here, but I believe it was a Fox monocoque prototype bike that nobody really knew where it came from – and I rode the Grundig Cups, all over Europe,” he reminisces.
“Lillehammer [Norway] was the best result – I finished equal fifth. You used to do two runs and they added the times together. There was no uplift – our training was riding back up to the top.
“In September of that year, I rode the World Championships [in Bromont, Québec] and realised I was way out of my depth.
“The likes of Steve Peat came along that year. He was riding full-rigid, I was riding full-suspension, and [I could see] he was going to kick my ass everywhere I went, so I soon hot-footed it back to XC!”
