TOMAC TUESDAY
35 years ago
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, John Tomac was the equivalent of Nino Schurter and Greg Minnaar today.
Tomac was considered the G.O.A.T. of mountain biking. He won multiple national titles in the U.S. in both XC and downhill, and he would also go on to win multiple World Cup races in both the cross-country and downhill categories.
In 1991, Johnny T won the UCI’s XC World Cup title and also the UCI’s XC World Championship. That same year, he also placed second in the ’91 UCI Downhill World Championship, doing so in the same weekend that he won the XC title. A few years later he took second place in the Downhill World Championships for a second time.
Sponsors loved to be associated with Tomac, which led to his tire sponsor, Tioga, putting him in two half-page tire advertisements that appeared in different places in the same issue of Mountain Bike Action. Tomac’s face was so familiar to mountain bikers in 1988 and ’89, that his full name only appears at the bottom of the first ad shown below, barely readable over Tomac’s overalls and shirt.
If you look closely, you’ll see the year 1988 at the bottom right corner of the top ad. That’s when the ad was produced.
These two ads appeared in the March 1989 issue of MBA.
By the way, John Tomac and his wife Kathy now own a farm in Colorado. Their son Eli has been one of the top motocross and supercross racers in the world for the past 14 years.