Alan Foster

Delaware amateur to AA Pro, and the guy who helped put full-face helmets back on a BMX start gate

A Legend Bike Co. rider page · primary source: Bill Ryan

At a glance

Scene Delaware and Maryland as an amateur, Southern California as a pro
Era Raced from April 1981; turned pro September 1988; strongest years roughly 1992 to 1999; retired August 2003
Sponsors JF&S Plumbing, Wheel Power Bike Shop, Huntington Valley Schwinn, Slam Designs, a Southern California factory team, TNT Racing, Airwalk, Schwinn/Airwalk, Airwalk/XS, Airwalk/Free Agent, Felt Bicycles
Known for Grinding his way up to AA Pro the hard way, the Airwalk and Schwinn years, dirt jumping, and helping bring the full-face helmet back to BMX racing in 1996

Where he came from

Alan David Foster was born in Wilmington, Delaware on January 18, 1970. He started racing in April 1981 at the Lums Pond BMX track in Newark, Delaware, under the National Bicycle League, and won his first race in 11 Beginner. His first sponsor was JF&S Plumbing, a local deal that ran 1982 into 1983. After that came Wheel Power Bike Shop, which carried him for six years and was still his sponsor when he turned pro in September 1988.

Everybody called him AF. It was just his initials, and it stuck.

Turning pro, and the long climb

His first pro race was fourth in B Pro at the NBL War of the Stars national in Memphis on October 15, 1988. He took home forty dollars. His first pro win came five months later, March 25, 1989, again at an NBL War of the Stars, this one in Orlando, and that one paid three hundred.

What happened next is the part most rider pages skip. He moved up to the senior pro class in the summer of 1989 and could not make mains. Reports from the time put it at seven weeks and fifteen races without transferring. He dropped back down to junior pro in July 1990, climbed back up around July 1991, struggled again, and dropped back again at the NBL Grand National in Louisville that September. By his own count in a 1993 BMX Plus! interview, he had made exactly five senior pro mains across that whole stretch.

He went back up for good at the ABA Gold Cup finals in Reno in October 1992, and this time it took. His first senior pro win came on January 23, 1993, in AA Pro at the ABA So. Cal. Nationals in Del Mar. That is four and a half years of getting beaten before it clicked. Anybody who has raced a season and wanted to quit should read that paragraph twice.

The sponsor run

After Wheel Power dropped its team following the 1989 NBL Grand Nationals, Foster went to Huntington Valley Schwinn, then briefly to Slam Designs in late 1990, then to a Southern California factory team from December 1990 through November 1992. TNT Racing picked him up that November. Airwalk, the skate shoe company, signed him in May 1993, and that turned into the run he is best remembered for: Schwinn/Airwalk from the middle of 1994 through December 1997, then Airwalk/XS through 1998, then Airwalk/Free Agent from December 1998 into 2002.

Airwalk put out a Foster Bros. signature shoe in 1996. A shoe company making a BMX racer's signature model was not normal at the time, and it says something about where he sat in the sport right then.

In February 2003 Felt Bicycles hired him as team manager and racer. He retired from racing that August, last race the downhill class at the X Games, and said plainly that he had lost the desire for it. In September 2006 Felt named him assistant product manager for their BMX line. So he went from racing bikes to picking what got built, which is a good ending for a racer.

The full-face helmet

Full-face helmets fell out of fashion in BMX racing in the mid 1980s. In the summer of 1996, Foster, John Purse and Brian Lopes started wearing them again at the front of the pro class, and the rest of the sport followed. Neither the ABA nor the NBL made them mandatory at the time. It did not matter — riders copied what the fast guys wore. If you look at a start gate today, amateur or pro, that is where it came from.

Foster paid for the sport in the usual currency. Broken collarbone at the NBL South Park national in Pittsburgh in 1986, then broken again six weeks later. Ruptured spleen in January 1989 at the Magnolia jumps in Huntington Beach. Days in the hospital after a crash with Steve Veltman at a 1996 ABA Gold Cup in York, Pennsylvania. Two broken ribs at the NBL Indianapolis nationals in June 1997. And long after he quit racing, in April 2009, he crushed a vertebra and broke two more plus two ribs landing face first at Sheep Hills in Costa Mesa.

The TECH BMX racewear connection

I started TECH BMX Pants in 1984, when I was fifteen, in my bedroom at 6912 Tahiti Drive in Cypress, California. TECH BMX made racewear for Alan Foster during his factory-team years.

That was the whole business model, really. I was a kid with a sewing setup and a list of riders who needed gear that fit and held up. The customer list ran through S&S, S&M, Redline, Haro, Diamond Back, Cyclecraft, the L&S team, the Boss team, and some Peddlepower riders. Foster was one of the factory riders we cut and sewed for. The full story of that operation is on the TECH BMX Pants page.

The Schwinn roster lead

An existing chapter on this site, Brian "Bogi" Givens, cites a BMXmuseum.com forum thread about a 1997 Schwinn Pro Modified 2 that places Alan Foster on Schwinn's mid-1990s roster alongside Brian Foster, Matt Pohlkamp, Tim Strzyzewski, and Givens himself. We have not independently re-verified that thread, so treat it as community-sourced. It lines up with the published Schwinn/Airwalk dates, which is why we are repeating it, but a forum post is a forum post. More on the brand is on the Schwinn page.

Where the public record runs thin

The published record on Foster is unusual: the race-by-race detail from 1988 through 1993 is heavily documented, and then the title record is close to empty. No NBL, ABA, NBA or UCI number-one pro title appears in any source we checked. That may be accurate — plenty of good pros never took a national number one — but it may also just be a gap in what got transcribed. We have not found a year-by-year national plate history, and we are not going to invent one.

We also do not have a clean sequence for his dirt jumping results. He is described consistently as a dirt jumper as well as a racer, and he finished his career in the X Games downhill class, but the contest placings are not laid out anywhere we could confirm. And the 1997 BMX Plus! note crediting him, Purse and Lopes with the full-face revival is a magazine's read of what happened, not a documented first.

On Alan Foster and Brian Foster. This library has previously treated the relation between Alan Foster and Brian Foster as unestablished. Published sources do establish it, and we are citing them here rather than leaving it open: Wikipedia's entries for both riders name them as brothers, and contemporary coverage did the same — the "Foster Bros." feature in Go, August 1991, ran two separate interviews with Alan and his brother Brian, and "The Foster Files" in BMX Plus!, March 1993, was a joint interview with his brother. Airwalk's 1996 signature shoe was sold as the Foster Bros. model. That is period coverage plus reference sources agreeing, and it is enough to state. What we have not done is verify a birth or family record ourselves, so if you want it held to that standard, hold it as reported rather than proven.

Where Alan Foster fits in the bigger story

Foster is the useful counterexample to the way BMX history usually gets told. He was not a prodigy and he did not win a national title, and he still ended up on a factory Schwinn program, on a signature shoe, and changing what every rider on the gate wears on their head. His run maps straight across the sanctioning bodies of his era — the NBL that made him, the ABA where he broke through, and the USA BMX that came after. He raced the same tracks and the same mains as Brian Lopes, John Purse and Brian Foster, and he wore gear I cut in my parents' house. That overlap is the whole reason this library exists. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

Bill Ryan, firsthand, September 2026 — TECH BMX Pants customer list and factory-rider racewear. Wikipedia, "Alan Foster (BMX rider)" and "Brian Foster (BMX rider)", which in turn cite BMX Plus! (February 1989, July 1989, December 1989, June 1991, December 1991, March 1993, January 1997), Go (November 1990, August 1991, November 1991), Snap BMX Magazine (March/April 1996, March/April 1997, September/October 1997, May 1999, September 1999, June 2000), Ride BMX (September 2001), the archived Bmxmania.com Alan Foster interview, the December 2003 Ride BMX retirement interview, fatbmx.com (August 31, 2006), and Transworld BMX (April 12, 2009). BMXmuseum.com forum thread on a 1997 Schwinn Pro Modified 2, by way of our own Brian "Bogi" Givens chapter — community-sourced, not re-verified.

Notes on uncertainty. The dates and race results here come mostly from one reference compilation that cites period magazines we have not held in our hands. Where that compilation disagrees with itself — his listed height and weight differ between two spots on the same page, for example — we have left the detail out rather than pick one. No national title is claimed because none is documented. The Schwinn roster listing is a forum thread and is labeled as such. The relation to Brian Foster is stated on the strength of period magazine coverage and reference sources, not a record we verified ourselves. If you raced with him, worked with him, or have a magazine on your shelf that settles any of this, we want to hear from you and we will correct the page.