After my career as a cyclocross rider, I was offered the opportunity to take over the distribution of the Japanese frame company Centurion as well as a number of accessory manufacturers such as Suntour and Dia Compe. Of course I accepted. After many busy months, I treated myself to a weekend in the mountains in the summer of 1976. I wanted to ride a cross bike through the Karwendel mountains, which was an absolutely foolhardy endeavour. After all, nobody had ever thought of cycling through the Alps before. Or so I thought. As I was then struggling over the gravel passes, I came across a number of locals cycling through the valleys on back-pedal bikes. Cars were forbidden on most of the paths. And it took ages to get there on foot. That's why farmers, hikers and mountaineers travelled bridging distances by bike. They looked at me on my racing bike as if I was from Mars. On this first off-road tour, I immediately realised the weaknesses of a conventional bike on such terrain. I was shaken up, the brakes were weak and the tyres were constantly flat. That was the end of the story for the time being.
In 1981, I flew to America with Hartwig Hofherr to visit various BMX races. I brought BMX to Germany in 1978 via Centurion. I gave lectures, built tracks, organised races and even worked as a BMX specialist for the German Cycling Federation. So we travelled around the country and also visited Centurion's US dealership. There, a certain Hiroshi Kitayama showed me a bike that the Japanese had built especially for the American market. Centurion welded the frame, Suntour had made special parts - it was a mountain bike. A nasty grenade mill with very strange dimensions and angles. Thanks to my cross bike past, I knew a bit about geometry. So I drew a frame on paper with a few strokes and told Centurion: "Go for it. I wanted to show a mountain bike like this at the IFMA trade fair in Cologne and see how it went down. They seemed to sell quite well in America. The difference in my concept, however, was that the bike was designed to be ridden up mountains. The Klunker guys only rolled downhill. The bike arrived just in time for IFMA 1982. Double chainrings, no quick release. And welded, because there were no sockets with such angles. The bike wasn't witchcraft. I had simply taken a lot from the cross bike. Nevertheless, it was a sporty machine. I had it painted green so that mountaineers could ride it into the mountains and then leave it inconspicuously in the bushes. That was the target group I could most easily imagine. The trade fair visitors stared in disbelief. But they didn't really notice the bike. People thought it was a BMX bike for adults. Nobody knew what it was really good for. Riding a bike through the forest seemed completely absurd at the time. Nobody could imagine it. Nevertheless, we sold seventy "Country" bikes, which cost 1,800 marks. That was a lot of money back then.
I myself rode the "Country" on numerous comparison rides against a cross bike in the Magstadt forest. You could actually ride many passages on a mountain bike where you had to dismount on a cross bike. I realised that the new bikes still had a lot of potential. One year later, we had already sold 400 of the successor to the "Country". Of course, in my wildest fantasies at the time, I couldn't have imagined what a wave this bike would cause.
