Long Slack Low
Where it came from
TECH TALK
1/9/20263 min read
Where it came from.
Mountain biking loves a reinvention story.
Every few years, brands roll out the same narrative: this changes everything. Longer. Lower. Slacker. As if stability and control were somehow impossible until a marketing department coined “modern geometry.”
But the industry didn’t invent modern geometry.
It resisted it until it couldn’t anymore.
The Outliers Who Were Already There
Long before “progressive geometry” became a selling point, a handful of riders and brands were already building bikes that looked a lot like what we ride today.
Not slightly similar. Fundamentally the same.
Geometron — A Decade Ahead
When Geometron (developed alongside Nicolai) started putting out bikes in the early 2010s, they looked absurd by mainstream standards.
Head angles pushing ~63–64°
Extremely long reach numbers
Wheelbases far beyond anything on the market
Steep seat angles paired with ultra-long front centres
At the time, these bikes were written off as extreme, niche, even “wrong.”
Now? That geometry wouldn’t raise an eyebrow on a modern enduro bike.
Geometron wasn’t guessing. They were working with data, suspension theory, and real-world testing at a level most brands simply weren’t engaging with.
Mondraker — “Forward Geometry” Before It Was Cool
Back in 2013, Mondraker launched what they called Forward Geometry.
At the time, it looked radical:
Longer reach paired with very short stems
Slacker head angles than competitors
Increased wheelbase for stability
The industry response? Skepticism.
The riding response? Quiet validation.
Because riders who tried it realised something important:
the bike felt more stable, more controlled, and—crucially—more capable at speed.
Sound familiar?
Nicolai — Engineering Over Marketing
Nicolai has long taken a different approach—engineering-first, trends second.
Their bikes, particularly when aligned with the Geometron philosophy, pushed:
Long front centres
Slack head angles
Size-specific geometry logic
Radical proportional scaling
While mainstream brands were still selling 68° trail bikes, Nicolai was quietly building machines that matched how aggressive riders were actually riding.
Meanwhile, the Mainstream Lagged Behind
While these brands were pushing boundaries, most of the industry stayed conservative well into the mid-2010s.
Typical trail bikes looked like this:
68–71° head angles
Short reach
Narrow bars
Long stems
Not because it worked better but because it was easier to sell.
The result? A generation of bikes that were twitchy at speed and unforgiving on technical terrain… just as riders were starting to demand the opposite.
And oh yes! coil shocks were dead on trail bikes because air shocks were everything that coils could provide and more.
Many Riders Were Rewriting the Rules Anyway
Well before brands embraced it, people were:
Fitting 760–800mm handlebars when 680mm was standard
Running 35–50mm stems instead of 90–120mm
Seeking out the slackest frames they could find
Modifying bikes to get longer, lower, and more stable
Adding head angle adapting headsets to add slacker head angles to current bikes.
Fitting off-set bushings to adjust frame geometry
Riding coil shock on trail bikes.
And crucially many were doing this on bikes that weren’t even designed for it.
You had riders on “trail bikes” with geometry that, by today’s standards, was closer to modern Enduro Bikes because they forced it there.
It’s easy to point to suspension as the big technological leap and yes, it improved.
But ride back to back on a pair of supposedly out dated open bath forks or a 15 year old coil shock against the best mainstream suspension the modern Era has to offer and you might get a big surprise.
What the industry tells you and what is actually real are two very different things.
Suspension didn’t suddenly unlock modern riding. It just delayed the need for better geometry.
For years, brands compensated for unstable geometry by adding:
More travel
Softer setups
More damping complexity
Instead of addressing the core issue: the bike’s shape.
Meanwhile, riders on more progressive geometry often found they didn’t need as much travel to go just as fast or faster.
The “Revolution” That Wasn’t
By the late 2010s, the shift finally happened.
Suddenly:
65° head angles became normal
Reach numbers grew dramatically
Short stems and wide bars became standard
Stability was prioritised over twitchy handling
Coils were back in fashion
The industry called it innovation.
But look closely, and you’ll see something else:
These weren’t new ideas.
They were validated ideas that had just finally been adopted at scale.
Why It Took So Long
The delay most likely wasn’t technical it was more likely to be cultural.
Racing (especially XC) dictated conservative design
Marketing favoured incremental, sellable changes
Radical geometry risked alienating average riders
Big brands moved slower than small innovators
So the ideas stayed on the fringes until they became impossible to ignore.
Where We Are Now
Modern bikes are better. No question.
But not because the industry suddenly got smarter.
They’re better because:
Riders pushed harder
Smaller brands proved what worked
And eventually, the mainstream followed
The real story of modern geometry isn’t innovation.
It’s adoption.
If you were riding a long, slack, wide-bar bike more than 10 years ago, you weren’t probably weren't ahead of your time. You were just paying attention to what worked.
This concept still applies today. There are many new bikes, many new concepts and many new standards, but the true mechanics of mountain biking is what works for you.
Don't let anyone dictate how you set your bike up and always be open to defining your own standards because that is how we got to where we are.
