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A founder of Cannondale, he was among the first in the U.S. to mass-produce bikes frames out of
large-diameter aluminum tubes, replacing heavier steel.
By Jeré Longman
Published Jan. 18, 2026 Updated Jan. 20, 2026
Joe Montgomery, who founded Cannondale and transformed the cycling industry with bikes built of lightweight
aluminum instead of heavier steel, sometimes walked around the company’s headquarters in Connecticut jingling coins in
his pocket when the mood needed lifting.
“You know what that is?” he would say, Murray Washburn, Cannondale’s director of product marketing, recalled in an
interview. “That’s change. Change is good. We like change.”
It was an overt display of his philosophy of embracing innovation and dismissing the status quo.
Mr. Montgomery died of complications of a heart-related illness on Jan. 2 at his home in Vero Beach, Fla., his daughter,
Lauren Edinger, said. He was 86.
At Cannondale, which Mr. Montgomery founded in 1971 with three partners, he and his team of designers and engineers
changed the build, weight and feel of upscale, high-tech bicycles. The company was among the first in the United States
to mass-produce bikes with frames made of large-diameter aluminum tubes.
“I don’t have a college degree, but I’ve always been a seat-of-the-pants engineer type,” Mr. Montgomery said in 1993 in
an interview with The New York Times, which called Cannondale the “Lamborghini of mountain bikes” with shock-
absorber systems “that are more sophisticated than some people’s first cars.”
A Cannondale road bike photographed in Manhattan in 2007. By 1993, the company was
generating $100 million a year and had 800 employees worldwide.
The company’s oft-told origin story is that Mr. Montgomery spotted a cyclist struggling up a hill in Wilton, Conn., under
the weight of a heavy backpack. His idea of lightening the load was to build a trailer, known as the Bugger, that would be
towed behind the bike.
Cannondale opened its first office in a loft above a pickle factory in Wilton, in Fairfield County. Needing a phone line for
the new venture, an employee, Peter Meyers, walked outside to a pay phone and placed an order. When asked what the
company was called, Mr. Meyers is said to have peered at the name of a nearby neighborhood train station and said,
“Cannondale.”
In the 1970s, the company continued making biking accessories and apparel, tents and sleeping bags, along with dog beds
for L.L. Bean. Then, in 1983, it produced its first bicycle, the ST-500, a touring model that sold for $495 (the equivalent
of more than $1,600 today). It featured an oversize aluminum frame that became a Cannondale hallmark — lightweight
but stiff, strong and responsive.
By 1993, The Times reported, the company was generating $100 million a year and had 800 employees worldwide. As
Cannondale battled top competitors like Specialized, Trek and Giant, the company became known for numerous other
innovations, including a single-legged fork, which provided a smooth ride; a carbon-fiber shell integrated with an
aluminum spine; and SmartSense, a safety feature that employed lights, sensors and rear-facing radar.
Its first mountain bike, produced in 1984, featured a 26-inch front wheel and a 24-inch rear wheel to help the rider roll
over rocks and roots. It was dismissed by some critics as cycling’s version of a mullet haircut.
Left, an advertisement for one of Cannondale’s early products, a bicycle trailer called the
Bugger. Right, an ad promoting the benefits of a lightwieght mountain bike with an
aluminum frame.
But by the 1990s, enhanced Cannondale mountain bikes were winning multiple medals at world championships and the
Olympics. At the 1999 Tour de France, the Italian sprinter Mario Cipollini won four consecutive stages aboard a
Cannondale racing bike.
The company also experimented with one-off concepts in the 1990s, like a bike that replaced a traditional front wheel
with Rollerblade wheels for maximal aerodynamics. And there was the so-called Pong bike, which was made of
aluminum that was cut and shaped by a computerized process and which resembled a futuristic can opener.
“Cannondale started out with a kooky streak, and they never lost it,” Zapata Espinoza, a leading cycling journalist, wrote
in an appraisal of Mr. Montgomery, extolling his passion for “trying to be different.”
In 1990, Cannondale designed a bike that the adventurer Kevin Foster audaciously rode more than 1,500 miles along the
Great Wall of China. The prototype had a seat that doubled as a tire pump and featured an automatic transmission that
changed gears according to pedal pressure.
“It felt like I was putting on a tailored suit,” Mr. Foster posted in an online remembrance of Mr. Montgomery. “I was the
engine, the bike, the machine.”
Joseph Stephen Montgomery was born on Dec. 11, 1939, in Coshocton, Ohio, about 110 miles south of Cleveland. His
father, Edward Montgomery, was an entrepreneur who developed a process for coating cotton gloves with a rubberized
compound. His mother, Frances (Bingenheimer) Montgomery, ran the family fruit farm.
Mr. Montgomery in 1980. “I don’t have a college degree, but
I’ve always been a seat-of-the-pants engineer type,” he told The
New York Times.
Joe, too, was an inveterate tinkerer with bikes and farm equipment. He told The Times that as a boy, he built a small jeep,
scavenging the transmission from a junkyard.
He was 12 at the time, Ms. Edinger, his daughter, said in an interview, saying that her father’s ardor for barreling down a
hill was overwhelmed one day by his inability to avoid crashing into the front doors of a church.
“I think that’s how he ended up in boarding school,” she said.
Mr. Montgomery’s devotion to college ended after fits and starts — “He was just not going to do what everybody wanted
him to do,” Ms. Edinger said — and, in his 20s, he found a more suitable pursuit in the Caribbean, working on the crews
of racing sailboats.
The sturdiness of the masts gave him an appreciation for the strength-to-weight aspect of aluminum, Ms. Edinger said, as
did an accident that reportedly left him and four others clinging to an overturned aluminum hull while waiting to be
rescued.
After stints in finance and running a bar/restaurant in New York City, Mr. Montgomery founded Cannondale. He
reshaped the business with aluminum frames on the suggestion, in a letter, of an engineer, David Graham, who worked
for a Connecticut company that built submarines for the Navy; Cannondale promptly hired him.
The website BikeRadar, to whom Mr. Washburn first told the coin-jingling story, called Mr. Montgomery “one of
cycling’s greatest minds.”
He wore jeans and sweatpants; favored conversations over emails; and opened offices in Europe and Japan but kept his
manufacturing base in Bedford, Pa., which he visited twice weekly on flights aboard a corporate jet that he piloted.
He regularly brought along bike shop owners to the factory to promote the Cannondale brand and make dealers feel like
true partners, Dave Cote, a former graphic designer at the company, said.
“It would be like taking batting practice at Fenway Park,” he added.
Cannondale eventually became overextended and underfinanced when it ventured into the motocross motorcycle and all-
terrain vehicle businesses. In 2003, it filed for bankruptcy. In “a roundabout way,” Mr. Espinoza wrote, it was Mr.
Montgomery’s “confidence in himself and his employees that created the motorcycle debacle that lost him his company.”
The company is now owned by Pon Holdings, a Dutch conglomerate. Mr. Montgomery later founded a software
company to handle billing and medical records.
In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife of 43 years, Celia (Congdon) Montgomery, and their sons Michael,
Lucas and John. He is also survived by a son from a previous marriage that ended in divorce, Scott, who was a longtime
Cannondale executive; and three grandchildren.
His father, Scott Montgomery said, “would have rather pushed the envelope on technology, and lead and crash and burn,
than to be timid and afraid.”
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