Model year 2003 | ZR 9000 D.B. Al | XT
I remember the arrival of 29ers only vaguely. It was the start of the new millennium when the first two models appeared in Gary Fisher’s catalogue. We received the idea of increasing the wheel diameter by three inches with very lukewarm enthusiasm. Not for a second would it have occurred to us that this vision of the father of mountain biking would grind our 26ers into the ground. But it wasn’t free, and it didn’t happen overnight.
Zdeněk, the ringmaster of the Urbanvelo Unlimited Facebook circus, wrote to me about it: “I remember when Gary came up with it. It didn’t inspire much confidence in me. At first, 29ers created their own dualsport category on the border between MTB and trekking, and they weren’t an outright sales hit. To their detriment, the optimization of 26ers was peaking. The triple chainring and a nine-speed cassette worked perfectly, and you could get a decent bike with an 80 mm air fork for up to 30,000 for a hardtail and 60,000 for a full-suspension.”
Why change what works? Well, that’s exactly what Gary Fisher didn’t think.
By 2022, this format had steamrolled absolutely everything. On the way back from the gravel event Nova Eroica Prosecco Hills, it occurred to me, after a long time, to scroll through my RSS reader hooked up to bazos.cz. Just to kill the boredom for a moment. In the flood of junk for under two thousand crowns, I spotted an ad for some uglily thrown-together something with the headline “Gary Fisher cross bike.” I’d rather not put the photo on the website. You’ll have to imagine it.
A trekking bike from Gary Fisher struck me as odd, which is probably why the ad caught my eye. From the lousy marketplace photo I managed to decipher the lettering on the top tube: X-Caliber. I typed the keyword into Google and nothing. In the catalogues saved on Retrobike, at first, nothing but emptiness. In the end, luck smiled on me in the 2003 catalogue. Someone skipped the page with the product photo when scanning it. But the spec chart at the end spoke clearly: X-Caliber isn’t trekking, but one of the first 29ers. A quality frame, weaker components. Bingo.
For two thousand crowns, it was worth a try. Within three days I picked it up a little past Jablonec nad Nisou. The brief was clear: turn ugly into a rocket for as little money as possible. I had it stripped down and rebuilt, using my stash of drawer parts, within a week. That’s how much the prospect of my first ride on a 29er motivated me.
I kept the bike’s foundation: a light aluminium ZR 9000 alloy frame with Genesis geometry, Bontrager Superstock wheels, and an almost two-and-a-half-kilo Marzocchi MX Comp suspension fork with 80 mm of travel. Everything else came off. The X-Caliber got a Ritchey WCS headset, a Shimano Deore XT drivetrain, Avid Single Digit brakes, and a Selle Italia SLR saddle. From my old marathon rocket, a Gary Fisher Mt. Tam, I used a stubby 90 mm Bontrager Race stem flipped negative. So the only investment was a chain and a pair of Hutchinson Gila 29 x 2.1 tyres.
The summary? The bike rode for one season to my satisfaction. I even raced the Malevil Cup on it in June 2022, my (so far) last marathon of my life. I enjoyed the geometry, which felt like an inflated 26er. No major shenanigans with tube bends and angles going twenty years back. Gary just pulled the rear wheel as close to the seat tube as possible in an effort to keep the wheelbase reasonable.
In the end, what proved fatal for the X-Caliber in my collection was an attempt at a period-correct upgrade. After the season, purely by chance, I found a 29er air fork, Marzocchi Marathon SL, and gave Tom Bílek an unusual request. The original silver MX Comp had better lowers, stanchions, and crown. In the interest of lightening it, Tom swapped the springs for the air internals from the Marathon. The second part of the plan was to replace the wheelset with a lighter one, but that never happened. The energy ran out, and the frameset went to a collector of Gary Fishers and Treks in South Bohemia. The End.