The sport did attract a different crowd back then.
Not one of the regulars that rode and raced back then that I knew still mountain bikes today. The few that ride at all are these days have become roadies (or worse, triathletes !), but most just returned to their other passions, after 10-15 or so years MTBing. Every time I run into one of them, I ask why they quit, and it's always the same answer. They didn't like the lack of respect that grew with the sport, both in regard to the land and each other.
There was a strong sense of brotherhood and camaraderie back then, stemming from MTBing having being recently started by a bunch of screwball hippies, and populated shortly thereafter mostly by silent sports people like cross country skiiers, endurance runners, backcountry hikers, canoe racers, etc... most of those people were nature lovers, and regardless of politics, conservationists and tree huggers both went out and made good work of MTBing.
So what happened? Well, mountain biking was marketed to the masses by Mountain Bike Action, who was used to marketing the sport of Motocross, with Motocross Action. They applied the same formula, and appealed to the same type of people. They stopped depicting the sport as being healthy exercise, and pitched it as being all about big air, looking moto, and acting like a hardass. This caught on, appealed to the disposable-income laiden kiddies looking for an image to cling to, and was largely successful at providing a new direction for an explosion in sales for advertisers. Racing was hard, and selling it on TV was harder. Dowhnill & Dual Slalom looked flashy, didn't require superhuman athletics, and could be filmed and photographed easily. In the big (failed) effort to take MTB to prime time, Freeride was born. The push behind these three disiplines ushered in a new kind of mountain biker. Gone was the endurance athlete & naturalist. In came the motorsports, snowboarders, and finally a wave of bmx converts. And they brought their attitudes with them. We wound up with a whole generation of what turned out to be essentially motocross wannabes who love to emulate magazine shoots, buy kit like crazy, and have no respect for anything but their own good time. Perfect consumers. We shopped everything out to china on the cheap, doubled our (too low) margins, and they didn't even flinch at the quality hit. They didn't care about keeping a sport born of american innovation based in america, they only cared about their money. It turned out to be very profitable, even if concerns loomed over the fact that we were taking the sport in an unsustainable direction. That's where there the liberty bell is cracked. Hit them with a little background on trail access, and you'll get a "it's all good, as long as I'm having a good time with my friends". Existing MTBers didn't like the bad attitudes, big egos, and lack of respect to the environment or each other shown by the hordes of Mountain Dew commercial watching newcomers, and after a while, with the camaraderie all but gone, just got out, & MTB became a job. The pride died. The divide between roadies and MTBers grew to, not shrank as expected, and at this point, MTB has a presence that, to everyone outside its own ridership, that more closely resembles the unathletic, beer-swilling, trash-talking country-bumpkin cousin come (late) to dinner.
I don't necessarily agree with all the opinions in the above, but I've been listening for a long time to fellow industry leaders and vet racers opinions of the direction of the sport, as it was part of my job, and this seems to be more or less the general consensus among them. It's usually with a resigned sigh and a "well, those days are long gone" that they recall the golden age of our sport.
Personally, I think that the sport has just evened out in its mass appeal, cutting a wider swath of Americans. If mountain bikers are more selfish and less personable or environmentally conscious these days, it's because they more accurately represent the modern day social and political climate in general. People are grumpy in general. I let as much of that just slide off as I can, with the old smile and brake-finger salute. I don't care if they respond or not. The old guys always do, and that's good enough for me.
It's just changed. Not necessarily all for the better, but there are (loose) safeguards in place to make sure it doesn't get stuck in a feedback loop and kill itself off.
Or, yet another reason to ride alone.
