Bicycle Dreams

When Jamie was in grad school at USC, he and his best buddy, Garryck Hampton, drafted up their own dream. In order to make their dream a reality, they needed a dream bike. Hampton drew up a concept for a tandem-single in MS Paint. The design was meant to be able to tear up the world’s roughest trails as a single person suspension mountain bike and also have the capability to be converted into a tandem with a few couplers and DaVinci cable splitters. Titanium tubing would make the frame and the four pieces of breakaway tubing extremely strong and light.

“I went to Interbike with this drawing and our logo, and our map of where we wanted to go,” Jamie recalls. Every bike manufacturer turned them down. “The last person we talked to was this guy named James Bleakly who, at the time, did not have Black Sheep Bikes, but was thinking of launching his own company.”

Peace Pedalers found a helicopter manufacturer that would donate the materials needed. “It was just scrap for them—but for us it was critical materials.”

Along with Black Sheep, Peace Pedalers managed to pull in various sponsors to provide top-of-the-line components, clothing and touring gear.

“The whole thing was quite effortless,” Jamie recalls. “We got exactly what we wanted to get and we were able to save all the money we needed to save working really hard for two and a half years.”