About Legend Bike Co. | Eddie Fiola, Pistol Pete Loncarevich & Bill Ryan — Old School BMX Legends
About Legend Bike Co.
Three friends who've been in BMX their whole lives, building the bikes you never forgot — alongside the people who made them worth remembering.
Legend Bike Co. starts with three guys who've been tangled up in BMX, and in each other's lives, for about as long as any of us can remember — Eddie Fiola, Pete Loncarevich, and me, Bill Ryan. We came up in different corners of the sport, did different jobs in it, but we were all chasing the same thing. And we all hated watching the bikes and the names that meant everything to us quietly slide out of the picture.
Nobody sat down one afternoon and decided to launch a bike company. It came together the way most real things in BMX do — slowly, over a lot of years and a lot of conversations. Eddie had geometry in his head he never got to finish. Pete had a brand name that got pulled out from under him when he was at the top of his game. And I had a shop, a machine, and four decades of figuring out how to take a good idea and turn it into something you can bolt a wheel to and actually ride.
What came out the other end is Legend Bike Co. Bikes built to today's specs, carrying the DNA of the pros who shaped them the first time around, made for the riders who grew up on those names and never stopped caring. Pump track, skatepark, dirt jumps, or just rolling the coolest bike at your local spot — these are your frames. They always were.
Co-Founder & King of the Skateparks
Eddie Fiola
If you had a BMX poster on your wall in the 1980s, odds are good Eddie Fiola was on it somewhere. He's from Bellflower, California, turned pro in 1982, and rode for Haro and Kuwahara before landing at GT Bicycles in 1983. That's where he and Bob Morales sat down and drew up one of the most recognizable frames the sport has ever produced, the GT Pro Performer. The bent down tube, the geometry, the whole look of it — Eddie didn't just ride that frame, he helped build it. Then he went out and won basically every skatepark contest on the planet on top of it.
Five King of the Skateparks titles. Four NORA Cups, the very first one of which Freestylin' Magazine handed out in 1985. Then 1986 brought the movie that locked his legend in for good — RAD. Eddie was the technical advisor and the primary stunt double for Bill Allen, and he rode most of the BMX in Hal Needham's cult classic himself. Cru Jones crossed the Helltrack line, sure, but those were Eddie Fiola's legs doing the work. The kids who saw that film and badgered their parents for a GT Performer are the grown-ups still buying BMX bikes now. That's on Eddie.
When his contest days wound down, Eddie went into Hollywood stunt work full time and stacked up more than 80 film and TV credits — Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Italian Job, The Dukes of Hazzard. He never quit riding. Kept touring, kept doing demos, kept showing people what BMX is supposed to look like when somebody who truly gets it climbs on a bike.
Back in 2012, Eddie and I sat down and started designing the Former Pro frame — a modern take on that GT Performer geometry he'd helped create almost thirty years before. That conversation is where Legend Bike Co. really begins. The Former Pro carries Eddie's vision in every tube angle, built in today's triple-butted cro-mo so you can ride it the way it was always supposed to be ridden. It's not a replica. It's where the original was headed all along, drawn up by the guy who knew best what it was meant to feel like.
There's a feature documentary in the works on Eddie's life right now — Effortless: The Eddie Fiola Story — because at this point you can't really tell the history of BMX freestyle without telling Eddie's. We're proud he's telling a piece of it through Legend Bike Co.
Co-Founder & The Pistol
Pete "Pistol Pete" Loncarevich
The nickname came off the announcer mic. ABA President Merl Mennenga tagged Pete "The Pistol" at a national in 1984, right after Pete had blown out of the gate like a round going off — again — half a nod to how he could grab a holeshot out of nowhere and half a wink at how close his name ran to NBA legend Pistol Pete Maravich. It stuck on the spot because it was just plain accurate. Pete was one of the most explosive starters BMX has ever seen, and he backed it up over the full length of a race, season after season.
He was born April 8, 1966, and came up through the amateur ranks with time at Cook Bros., S&S, TW, and Diamond Back before he turned Pro. He worked sponsorship deals the same way he worked a track, with a kind of precision and nerve that left the rest of the field staring at his rear wheel. He rode for SE Racing, and then he and his dad did something a working Pro almost never did — they started their own company. LRP. Loncarevich Racing Products. Titanium seatposts, pedal cage extensions, a clothing line, the whole idea of what a rider-owned brand could be. CW Racing later made shutting LRP down part of the deal when Pete signed with them. He took it — the money was right and the racing was too good to pass up — but he never forgot what it felt like to have his own name on a brand.
Pete won his first ABA #1 Pro title in 1984. Then Haro put more money on the table and he made the jump, took BMX Plus! Racer of the Year in 1986 with 35% of every vote cast — a landslide in any decade — and stayed one of the faces of pro BMX deep into the early '90s, picking up the ABA #1 Pro plate again in 1986, 1991, and 1992. He was the rider kids copied, the name sponsors fought over, the guy out front of the gate that everybody else was chasing down.
At Legend Bike Co. Pete's back where he was always meant to be — an owner and a namesake, with a frame line that carries the LRP name the industry took off him four decades ago. He didn't get to hang onto it then. He's got it back now. The LRP frame series is his, made for the riders who already know what that name means and for a new crowd about to find out. If you ever wanted to ride a Pete Loncarevich bike, here it is. And this time nobody gets to take it away.
Pete and I go back to the early SoCal BMX days — the Orange Y, the local tracks, the kind of friendship you only get from sharing a sport and a community long enough that it turns into part of who you are. That friendship is the whole reason Legend Bike Co. is more than a good idea scribbled on a napkin.
Co-Founder & The Guy Who Knows How to Build It
Bill Ryan
I've been in the BMX industry since I was thirteen. That's not a turn of phrase. Scot Breithaupt, who founded SE Racing, knew what my situation at home was and put me to work stickering frames and sweeping floors at the SE shop in Paramount, California. From there I worked up to packing orders, driving the van out to the heat treaters and powdercoaters, and eventually getting on the phones to handle sales. SE was my BMX family a long time before it was my employer.
When GT bought up SE's equipment and SE folded the first time, I went to work at GT, somewhere around employee number ten. I helped run the Robinson division, had a hand in frame design and team programs, and built relationships with riders and industry folks that have stuck with me my whole career. I also worked on the SE Assassin frame back when Mike Devitt was trying to get SE going again — which is what led straight into the gate-start testing that had me designing the first Supercross frame in 1989.
Supercross BMX has been my life for over 35 years now. Eight Golden Cranks. A Scandium frame that was the lightest production BMX frame in the world. The Envy carbon series that two-time Olympic gold medalist Maris Strombergs rode — and he turned down bigger money elsewhere to ride what he actually wanted under him. The Vision F1 monocoque carbon chassis. The Vision F1x, built with the same Toray fiber they use in Formula 1 race cars, out in 2026. All of it drawn up and built by a kid who got his start sweeping floors because somebody handed him a chance.
Eddie and I sat down together in 2012 and designed the first Former Pro prototype. I drew it up, had it built, got it into Eddie's hands. That prototype turned into the EF Proformer in 2013 — a limited run of 250 — and then into the bones of Legend Bike Co. once the three of us decided it was time to do this for real. I'm the engineering end of the operation. I take what Eddie's got in his head about how the bike should look, and what Pete knows about how a race bike should feel, and turn it into something you can put your name on and sell without flinching.
I've known both Eddie and Pete through the same SoCal BMX world for most of my adult life. We're not business partners who shook hands at a trade show. We're friends who've been circling the same sport and the same community for decades, and who finally figured the time had come to build something together none of us could've pulled off on our own.
Three Friends. One Mission.
Legend Bike Co. isn't a nostalgia project. It's not a museum, and it's sure not a batch of replicas for collectors to leave in the box. It's a working bike company run by people who love BMX, who've given their lives to it in their own ways, and who flat-out refuse to stand around watching the history of this sport disappear while we're still here to do something about it.
Every frame that leaves here carries a real story behind it — a real career, a real moment in BMX, a real person who helped make the sport what it is. Eddie's Former Pro frames carry the geometry and the spirit of the GT Performer he helped design and rode to five King of the Skateparks titles. Pete's LRP frames carry the name and the legacy of the brand his family built, the one a contract clause tried to wipe out, the one nobody ever really forgot. And I make sure every one of them is built to a standard all three of us can stand behind — because anything short of that doesn't go out the door.
We're also putting our weight behind preserving BMX history through BMXracinghistory.com. The pioneers of this sport are getting up there in years, and their stories will be gone if we don't get them down now. A piece of every sale goes toward keeping that archive alive and growing. This sport deserves a record, and the people who built it deserve to be remembered.
If you grew up on a GT Performer, an LRP, a CW, a Haro — if Eddie Fiola or Pistol Pete was your hero — if you had the poster on the wall and the bike in the garage and a track you called home — this brand is for you. It was always going to find its way back to you. We just had to go build it first.