It can not be denied that most people know how to cycle. Learning to cycle is a growing up process,its universal. Babies learn to walk and cycling is their next natural progression. Parents would buy bicycle even before their babies could walk. Either tricycle or kids bicycle with training wheels were available in every home with kids.
I got my proper bicycle when I was four years old. It was a Raleigh with 20 inch wheels.I rode that bicycle until I was about 12 when puberty set in and I`ve grown too tall for it. It was replaced with a regular gentleman Raleigh with normal sized wheels. I would have bought a mountain bike if it was available but unfortunately MTB was only invented very much later. Even BMX was not introduced yet. My normal bicycle was my MTB cum BMX. I did jumps,pulled long wheelies and trail riding on the bike. When I started secondary school, I met a bunch of new friends who shared the same interest. We used to do stunts on our bikes before and after school. We got really good at it and started some sort of a new craze among the town kids.We began to teach.
One of our classmate who is now a profesor at a local uni used to bring imported magazine to school(cant disclosed the title to protect the innocent).There were many motorcycle advertisement in it. Some of the motorcycle ads shown pictures of motorbikes which were different from what we normally saw on our street. Little did we know that those bikes were called scramblers which were meant to be ridden offroad. It sparked our interest in offroad motorcycles. We did our research and tried to understand this offroad sport the best we could.Imported motorcycle magazines were hard to come during those days. We had no choice but to subscribe motorcycle magazines all the way from UK and USA. Most of our pocket money were spent on magazines and we had not been able to see a scrambler live yet. In the meantime,we perfected our bicycle riding skill,did adventure rides and raced offroad among ourselves.There are many happy memories with regard to cycling in the small town of Kuala Terengganu, the place I came from.Heck, even today, good cycling athletes come from this place. Hmmm....tradition started by us ,maybe!!!
Time moved on, bike movies and television shows further exposed us to dirtbikes. We fully understood the discipline of riding but...how were we to buy a bike?.Scramblers mainly Japanese brands,began to be sold in bike shops but we were only able to watch and daydreaming about pulling stunts on those bikes. We could only immitate riding a scrambler on a Honda C90 which belonged to a mates father. When he was away for haj his bike became our practice machine,courtesy of his good son,naughty us...sorry uncle,may god bless you.
Actually we were more exposed to trials riding rather than Motocross. Magazines that we subscribed were mainly from UK and covered a lot of trials competition and tested a lot of trials bike. It was only natural that we drifted more toward immitating trials rider and we could do trials moves on our bicycles.
We each had a motorcycle in our fourth form but not scramblers. Most of us came from working class background and our parents could not afford new bikes but It was good enough for us. I could still jump and wheelied my Honda Benly 125. We were envious of guys who rode scramblers. Each of us swore to work(study) hard,get a good paying job and fulfill our dreams.
After fifth form, we went off on our ways to continue our studies. I was the first one to have bought a scrambler, a Suzuki RM 125 N(MX actually). I attended a motocross school and started racing. Two of my friends bought scramblers with their scholarship money. Another good friend had a different schedule being in different college but he also bought a bike. We terrorised the small town whenever we could get together. We did mile long wheelies and jumping around at the beach front and the golf course. We were known as The ACRO RIDERS.
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