About Legend Bike Co. | Eddie Fiola, Pistol Pete Loncaravich & Bill Ryan — Old School BMX Legends
About Legend Bike Co.
Three lifelong friends. Decades of BMX history. One mission — build the bikes you never forgot, with the people who made them legendary.
The story of Legend Bike Co. is really the story of three guys who have been connected to BMX and to each other for most of their lives — Eddie Fiola, Pete Loncaravich, and Bill Ryan. Different corners of the BMX world. Different roles. Same obsession with the sport and the same belief that the bikes and the people behind them deserve to be remembered, celebrated, and if at all possible, ridden.
These three didn't sit down one day and decide to start a bike company. It happened the way most good things in BMX happen — organically, over years of conversations, shared history, and a mutual frustration that the bikes and names that defined a generation were just sort of fading out of the picture. Eddie had geometry in his head that never got fully realized. Pete had a brand name that got taken away from him at the height of his career. And Bill had a shop, a machine, and four decades of knowing how to turn a great idea into something you can actually put a wheel on and ride.
The result is Legend Bike Co. — bikes built to today's specs, carrying the DNA of the pros who originally shaped them, for the riders who grew up on those names and never stopped caring. Whether you want to ride the pump track, session the skatepark, hit the dirt jumps, or just own the coolest bike at your local riding spot, these are your frames. They always were.
Co-Founder & King of the Skateparks
Eddie Fiola
If you grew up with a BMX poster on your wall in the 1980s, there's a good chance Eddie Fiola was on it. Born in Bellflower, California, Eddie turned professional in 1982 and carved a path through Haro and Kuwahara before landing at GT Bicycles in 1983, where he and Bob Morales sat down and designed one of the most iconic BMX frames in history — the GT Pro Performer. That distinctive bent down tube, that geometry, that whole look — Eddie didn't just ride that frame; he helped invent it, and then he proceeded to win every major skatepark competition on the planet while on it.
Five King of the Skateparks titles. Four NORA Cup awards, including the very first one ever handed out by Freestylin' Magazine in 1985. Then in 1986 came the movie that cemented his legend for good — RAD. Hired as the technical advisor and primary stunt double for actor Bill Allen, Eddie performed the vast majority of the BMX sequences in Hal Needham's cult classic. Cru Jones crossed the Helltrack finish line, but it was Eddie Fiola's legs that got him there. The kids who watched that film and begged their parents for a GT Performer are the adults still buying BMX bikes today. Eddie made that happen.
After his competition days, Eddie moved into Hollywood stunt work full time — over 80 film and TV credits, including Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Italian Job, and The Dukes of Hazzard. He never stopped riding. He never stopped touring and doing demos and showing people what BMX was supposed to look like when someone who really understood it got on a bike.
In 2012, Eddie and Bill Ryan sat down and started designing the Former Pro frame — a modern reimagining of the GT Performer geometry Eddie had helped create nearly thirty years earlier. That conversation became the foundation of Legend Bike Co. The Former Pro frame carries Eddie's vision in every tube angle and design detail, built with today's triple-butted cro-mo construction so you can actually ride it the way it was meant to be ridden. Not a replica. An evolution. From the man who defined what the original was supposed to feel like.
There is currently a feature documentary in production about Eddie's life — Effortless: The Eddie Fiola Story — because at this point, the history of BMX freestyle and the history of Eddie Fiola are one and the same story. We're glad he's telling part of it through Legend Bike Co.
Co-Founder & The Pistol
Pete "Pistol Pete" Loncaravich
The nickname came from ABA President Merl Mennenga on the announcer mic at a national in 1984. Pete had just shot out of the starting gate like a bullet — again — and Mennenga called him "The Pistol" on the spot, a nod to his uncanny ability to get the holeshot and a wink at his name's resemblance to NBA legend Pistol Pete Maravich. It stuck immediately because it was simply true. Pete Loncaravich was one of the most explosive starters in BMX history, and he backed it up through the entire length of a race, year after year.
Born April 8, 1966, Pete grew up riding through the amateur ranks with stints at Cook Bros., S&S, TW, and Diamond Back before turning Pro and working his way through sponsorship deals the way he worked a race track — with a precision and confidence that left everyone else looking at his rear wheel. He rode for SE Racing, then he and his father did something almost unheard of for a working Pro: they started their own company. LRP. Loncaravich Racing Products. Titanium seatposts, pedal cage extensions, a clothing line, and a vision for what a rider-owned BMX brand could look like. CW Racing eventually made shutting LRP down a condition of Pete's contract when he signed with them. He took the deal — the money was right and the racing was too good to walk away from — but he never forgot what it felt like to have his own name on a brand.
At CW, Pete won the ABA #1 Pro title in 1985. Then Haro offered more money and he moved there, won BMX Plus! Racer of the Year in 1986 with 35% of all votes cast — a landslide in any era — and continued to be one of the faces of professional BMX through the early 1990s. He was the rider kids tried to emulate, the name sponsors fought to have on their bikes, the guy at the front of the gate that everyone else was chasing.
At Legend Bike Co., Pete is back where he always belonged — as an owner and a namesake, with a frame line that carries the LRP name that the industry took from him four decades ago. He didn't get to keep it then. He's got it back now. The LRP frame series is his, built for the riders who know what that name means and for a new generation learning what it should mean. If you ever wanted to ride a Pete Loncaravich bike, now you can. And this time nobody's going to take it away.
Pete and Bill Ryan have been friends since the early days of the SoCal BMX scene — the Orange Y, the local tracks, the kind of friendship that forms when you share a passion and a community for long enough that it becomes part of who you are. That friendship is the reason Legend Bike Co. exists as more than just a good idea on a napkin.
Co-Founder & The Guy Who Knows How to Build It
Bill Ryan
Bill Ryan has been in the BMX industry since he was thirteen years old. That's not a figure of speech — Scot Breithaupt, the founder of SE Racing, knew Bill's situation at home and gave him a job stickering frames and sweeping floors at the SE shop in Paramount, California. From there Bill worked his way up to packing orders, driving the van to the heat treaters and powdercoaters, and eventually getting on the phones to handle sales. SE was his BMX family long before it was his employer.
When GT bought SE's equipment and SE went under for the first time, Bill went to work at GT — around employee number ten. He helped run the Robinson division, had input on frame design and team programs, and built relationships with riders and industry people that have lasted his entire career. He also worked on the SE Assassin frame during the period when Mike Devitt was trying to restart SE, which was the direct predecessor to the gate-start testing sessions that led to Bill designing the first Supercross frame in 1989.
Supercross BMX has been Bill's life for over 35 years. Eight Golden Cranks. A Scandium frame that was the lightest production BMX frame in the world. The Envy carbon series ridden by two-time Olympic gold medalist Maris Strombergs — who turned down more money from other brands to ride what he wanted to ride. The Vision F1 monocoque carbon chassis. The Vision F1x, built with the same Toray fiber used in Formula 1 race cars, launched in 2026. All of it designed, engineered, and built by a guy who started out sweeping floors because someone gave him a chance.
Bill and Eddie Fiola sat down together in 2012 and designed the first Former Pro prototype. Bill drew it up, had it built, got it into Eddie's hands. That prototype became the EF Proformer in 2013 — a limited run of 250 — and then became the foundation of Legend Bike Co. when the three of them decided it was time to do this properly. Bill is the engineering backbone of the operation. The person who takes what Eddie has in his head about how the bike should look and what Pete knows about how a race bike should feel, and turns it into something you can actually put your name on and sell with pride.
Bill has known both Eddie and Pete through the shared world of SoCal BMX for most of his adult life. These are not business partners who met at a trade show. They are friends who have been orbiting the same sport and the same community for decades, and who finally decided the time had come to do something together that none of them could have done alone.
Three Friends. One Mission.
Legend Bike Co. is not a nostalgia project. It is not a museum. It is not a limited run of replicas for collectors to keep in boxes. It is a working bike company run by people who love BMX, who have dedicated their lives to it in different ways, and who refuse to watch the history of the sport quietly disappear while they're still around to do something about it.
Every frame that comes out of Legend Bike Co. carries a real story — a real career, a real moment in BMX history, a real person who helped shape what this sport is. Eddie's Former Pro frames carry the geometry and spirit of the GT Performer that 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 brand that a contract clause tried to erase, and that nobody ever quite forgot. And Bill makes sure every single one of them is built to a standard that all three of them can be proud of — because anything less doesn't go out the door.
We are also committed to preserving the history of BMX through BMXracinghistory.com. The pioneers of this sport are getting older, and their stories — if we don't document them now — will be lost. A portion of every sale goes toward keeping that archive alive and growing. Because 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 a BMX poster on your wall and a bike in your 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 build it first.