A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

ABA — American Bicycle Association

The sanction that started in a Chandler, Arizona parking lot in 1977 and ended up as USA BMX.

We're telling this story neutrally. No brand gets elevated. No rider gets shorted. Where the record is contested, we say so.

Where it came from

By the mid-1970s, BMX had two sanctions that mattered. The NBA, founded by Ernie Alexander in 1973, ran California and most of the West. The NBL, founded by George Esser out of Florida in 1974, ran the East. Both were national in name, but in practice each had a coast. Arizona sat in the middle, with full tracks in Phoenix, Tucson, and Chandler, and no sanction the operators and parents trusted.

Two people felt that gap. Merl Mennenga ran a BMX track. Gene Roden was a race promoter. The two sat down, figured out a structure, and on October 13, 1977 incorporated the American Bicycle Association out of Chandler, Arizona. The Chandler track became ABA Track 001. The first ABA-sanctioned race ran September 24, 1977 at Manzanita Raceway in Tucson, even before formal incorporation.

The first national: Azusa, February 1978

The ABA's first national race was held in Azusa, California in February 1978. The first national drew 35 tracks and 3,000 participants. It also said something that the venue was Azusa: home of Richard Long's Azusa Bicycles, the shop that anchored what would become GT Bicycles a year later, and squarely in the NBA's backyard.

The first ABA Grand National ran December 9, 1978 in Las Vegas. The Grandnationals format from the start was simple: one race, winner takes all, at the end of the season. The NBL ran a season-long points chase to crown its champion. The ABA put it all on one weekend.

The transfer system

The single most important thing the ABA brought to BMX wasn't a Grand National or a tracks program. It was a way of running race day.

Before the ABA, BMX races were typically run on a total-points format. A rider entered their class, raced three motos in the morning, accumulated points, and then waited around — sometimes for hours — to see if they made the main event bracket.

The ABA replaced that with the transfer system. Ride your moto. If you finish high enough, you transfer to the next round — quarterfinal, semifinal, main. If you don't, you're out. The brackets are visible. The math is simple. The day moves.

The reasoning the ABA itself gave was a "need for fairness and allowing for the fortunes of luck." A rider who had one mechanical or one bad start couldn't get knocked out of contention. Track operators liked it because it kept the program on time.

Some of the top pros didn't like it. Greg Hill was a public critic of the ABA's pro points and format decisions through the early 1980s, and after the 1982 season the ABA moved the pro class to the same transfer format as the amateurs for 1983.

The transfer system spread. It's still how BMX is run in the United States and at the Olympics.

Growing into the biggest sanction in the country

By 1979 — two years after its founding — the ABA had passed the NBA to become the largest BMX sanctioning body in the country. By the start of 1981 the NBA had run its last independent Grandnationals in Long Beach.

The ABA's run through the early 1980s was not all clean. Insurance costs climbed for every sanction. The ABA's in-house paper, ABA Action, didn't reach enough advertisers, so in 1982 the sanction launched a newsstand magazine, Bicycles and Dirt, with Stu Thomsen on the first cover. It lost money. The ABA shut Bicycles and Dirt down with its September 1984 issue.

On March 5, 1985, Mennenga sold the ABA to track operators Bernie Anderson and Jamie Vargas for $250,000 and resigned. Walt Ehnat was named president. Reported liabilities ran $700,000–$750,000, most of it tied to Bicycles and Dirt. The new owners filed for Chapter 11 protection on November 25, 1985. Clayton John replaced Ehnat and ran the ABA for the next twenty-plus years. The bankruptcy court approved the reorganization plan on September 24, 1987. The 1988 Grand National in Oklahoma City, with 470 pro entries, was reported as the largest BMX race in history to that point.

Living with the NBL

From the late 1970s through 2011, the ABA and the NBL existed alongside each other as the two surviving national sanctions. Sometimes they cooperated. Mostly they competed.

The two organizations also had real structural differences. The NBL was a non-profit, governed by a Competition Congress where member tracks could vote on rules. The ABA was a for-profit company, run top-down out of Arizona. The NBL's non-profit status mattered later, in 1997, when it became the USA Cycling affiliate that put BMX on the road to the Olympics.

Through the 1990s and 2000s both sanctions kept growing the program. Greg Hill, Stu Thomsen, Pete Loncaravich, Eric Rupe, Richie Anderson, Gary Ellis, Brian Foster, and others raced both circuits. Loncaravich took the ABA No. 1 Pro plate four times — 1984, 1986, 1991, 1992. Riders running CW, Redline, GT, Haro, Mongoose, and Torker made up the factory teams.

The Lévêque controversy: 1995

On November 26, 1995, France's Christophe Lévêque finished the ABA season with the most points in the pro class. By the standings, he had earned the No. 1 Pro plate for 1996. He didn't get it. An ABA rulebook clause at the time required the No. 1 Pro to be a U.S. citizen. Lévêque was not awarded the title or the automobile that came with it. Gary Ellis, who finished behind him in points, was awarded the title.

The citizenship rule was changed for the next season. Lévêque won the ABA National No. 1 Pro title outright in 1998 and 1999, back to back — the first non-American pro champion the sanction recognized.

The Olympic on-ramp

By the early 2000s BMX was on its way to the Olympics. The IBMXF had been absorbed by the UCI in 1993. USA Cycling chose the NBL as its U.S. affiliate in 1997. When U.S. racers took three medals at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, most of them had spent their amateur years on ABA. USA Cycling and the U.S. Olympic Committee both ended up working with the ABA to build amateur and elite training tracks, regardless of which sanction held the USA Cycling affiliation on paper.

The 2011 merger

By 2011 the NBL had run into financial trouble. The ABA approached the NBL with an offer. The NBL board approved a letter of agreement on May 17, 2011. Final documents were signed June 18. The combined organization was rebranded USA BMX, run out of the existing ABA operation in Arizona. Bernie Anderson stayed on as chairman. At the time of the merger the ABA had roughly 60,000 members and 250 tracks; the NBL had roughly 10,000 members and 100 tracks. The combined sanction covered over 350 tracks and over 70,000 members.

What ABA is today

The ABA is the legal and operational organization that became USA BMX. In 2022 USA BMX opened a new headquarters and event campus in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the Grands have been held since. Every USA BMX rulebook today still carries the format the ABA invented. The transfer system runs the program from the local Tuesday-night points race to the World Cup heats at the Olympics. The Grandnationals — one race, end of year, winner takes all — is still the marquee event. The track-numbering system that started with Chandler as Track 001 still numbers USA BMX tracks today.

Why this matters to Legend Bike Co.

Pete Loncaravich, one of the three Legend Bike Co. founders, won the ABA No. 1 Pro plate four times — 1984, 1986, 1991, 1992. Scot Breithaupt, the godfather of the sport and the person who taught Bill Ryan the trade at SE Racing in 1981, came up through the NBA and BUMS but raced ABA nationals through the early 1980s. Bill Ryan raced ABA, vendored TECH Racing Pants at ABA nationals, and sponsored riders on both the ABA pro and amateur circuits for decades. The ABA's history is the history Legend Bike Co. is built on.

Sources

Wikipedia, "American Bicycle Association" — drawing on Bicycle Motocross News (1977), Bicycle Motocross Action (1979, 1980), Super BMX & Freestyle (1986, 1988), BMX Plus! (1983, 1985, 1988, 1989), American BMXer (1986).

USA BMX official history. BMX Canada official history. Wikipedia, "National Bicycle League," "National Bicycle Association," "Christophe Lévêque," "Gary Ellis," and "BMX racing."

Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, "ABA, NBL Join Forces for BMX Racing," June 25, 2011, and "Under One Banner BMX May See New Heyday," August 1, 2011.

ESPN, "BMX pros bid farewell to the NBL following the 2011 NBL Grands." BMXNews.com timeline. bmxultra.com — interviews including Scot Breithaupt's recollections.

Where sources conflict on the ABA's founding date — Wikipedia lists August 30, 1977 and a first sanctioned race on September 24, 1977; USA BMX's own history and the Legend Bike Co. History of BMX page use October 13, 1977 — we've followed the date used by USA BMX itself.