BMX: The Modern Era

Twenty-five years after BUMS, BMX was a smaller sport than it had been and a more serious one. Two sanctions left standing. A press that had lost its biggest magazine. A factory pro class you could fit in a couple of vans. And a generation of rider-owned companies — S&M in 1987, Supercross in 1989, Hoffman in 1991 — building the thing back up from underneath.

What happened over the next thirty years runs on four tracks at once: the industry got bought, freestyle got television, racing got the Olympics, and Britain turned up and won.

The bust, and who was left holding it

The crash of 1986 to 1988 didn't end when the sales figures stopped falling. It ended when the ownership of the sport had finished changing hands, and that took another fifteen years.

The pattern repeated brand after brand. A company started by a rider or a welder in a Southern California industrial unit got big, got expensive to run, and got sold to somebody with a balance sheet. Mongoose's parent went to a public company in 1985. Torker had already gone bankrupt in November 1984 and started its long trip through a series of owners. The brands that survived on their own terms mostly survived by staying small.

Distribution went the same way, and it mattered more than most people noticed at the time, because a bike brand without a distributor has no way of reaching the shops. Riteway Distribution of Placentia, California was one of the big independents — a former Riteway executive put the business at around $350 million a year at its peak. GT Bicycles bought it in 1987 and ran it as its own distribution arm. By the summer of 1996, Riteway had accounts at roughly 4,000 of the estimated 6,800 independent bicycle dealers in the United States.

That purchase had a cost somebody else paid. CW Racing had been getting its product to dealers through Riteway, and when GT bought the distributor, CW lost its route to market. CW renamed itself Revcore in 1988, after its own top-of-the-line hub, and kept going for another seven years before closing in 1995. When it went, a bike shop owner named Dennis at El Monte Cycle bought what was left of it.

2001: the Schwinn/GT bankruptcy

GT had gone public on the NASDAQ in October 1995. By some measures it was carrying half the US BMX market. Co-founder Richard Long was killed in a motorcycle accident on July 12, 1996, at 46, and the company he had built with Gary Turner carried on without him.

In 1998, Questor Partners — who owned Schwinn — bought GT. Two of the largest names in American cycling were now under one roof, and the roof did not hold. In June 2001 the combined Schwinn/GT operation filed for bankruptcy. That September, Pacific Cycle bought the brands out of bankruptcy court for $86 million. Dorel Industries bought Pacific Cycle in 2004. In October 2021 Pon Holdings agreed to buy Dorel's entire sports division — GT, Schwinn, Cannondale, Mongoose and Iron Horse together — for $810 million, and that sale closed in January 2022.

Riteway closed in the course of the bankruptcy. That is worth stating plainly rather than as a line on a corporate timeline: a distribution operation that had been shipping to most of the independent bike shops in the country stopped, and the people who worked there had to find something else. One of them, Vince Calvillo, went from picking orders at Riteway to running warehouse operations at KHS.

The trade reshapes itself

While the big brands were changing owners, a quieter reshaping was going on underneath.

Free Agent had started in Buena Park, California in 1984, run by Brad and Yvonne Shoup with their son Brent doing the welding — the same Brent Shoup who welded the first Supercross BMX frame in 1989. KHS Bicycles took on Free Agent distribution in 1994 and bought the brand outright in 1996, and from there Free Agent ran as a KHS division with frames coming through the KHS Taiwan supply chain. It was the bike Kyle Bennett rode from 2003 until his death in 2012.

On May 28, 2026, KHS announced it was closing its United States operations after fifty years. The last business day was reported as May 31. Wen Hsieh, in his eighties, was retiring; so was vice president Wayne D. Gray; a sale process begun in late 2025 had not found a buyer. Free Agent, a KHS USA division, went down with the closure. KHS Taiwan and United Engineering Corporation are separate companies and both continue to operate — the US arm is what shut. Fifty years of jobs ended on a Sunday, and that is the part of a brand history that usually gets left out.

Against all of that, the rider-owned model held. S&M Bikes was founded in Santa Ana in the middle of 1987 by Greg Swingrover and Chris Moeller — S for Scott, M for Moeller — right before the crash, building exactly the kind of equipment the crash made room for. Swingrover left for a job at GT in the summer of 1990 and handed Moeller the company. S&M has never been sold and never moved production offshore; the frames are still built by hand in Santa Ana. Moeller and Robbie Morales started Fit Bike Co. in 1999 as the Taiwan-built companion line, and Morales left in 2010 to start Cult. Every rider-owned BMX brand that came after was running a playbook S&M wrote first.

On the sanction side, the two survivors finally became one. In June 2011 the ABA acquired the NBL, and the combined organization was rebranded USA BMX.

Freestyle builds its own world

Freestyle came out of the crash worse off than racing. The AFA had wound down. FREESTYLIN' had folded. By the start of the 1990s there was no professional contest circuit left to speak of.

Mat Hoffman built one. He had already done the thing everybody remembers — the first 900 in BMX history, on March 25, 1989, at a 2-Hip King of Vert contest in Kitchener, Ontario, at seventeen, a full ten years before Tony Hawk landed his on a skateboard. He left Haro at the end of 1991, started Hoffman Bikes in Oklahoma City because nothing on the market survived his riding, and then started a contest series because there was nowhere to ride one. The first Bicycle Stunt contest ran on January 25 and 26, 1992, at Jeff Phillips Park in Dallas. For several years it was the only real freestyle series anywhere.

In 1995, ESPN partnered with Hoffman Promotions to televise it, and that partnership became the BMX side of the first X Games — staged that year as the ESPN Extreme Games, and renamed inside a year. Hoffman won X Games vert gold in 1995 and again in 1996, and the Hoffman Sports Association went on to run the BMX freestyle side of the X Games and its international qualifiers for years afterward. His Guinness record for the highest air on a BMX bike — 26 feet 6 inches above the deck of a 24-foot quarterpipe, better than fifty feet off the ground — still stands as the number everyone quotes.

Television changed the economics of freestyle the way factory teams had changed racing in 1978. Jamie Bestwick, an engineer from Nottingham who had trained at Rolls-Royce before turning pro, won 14 X Games gold medals — 13 in BMX Vert and one in Vert Best Trick — including nine consecutive vert golds from 2007 through 2014, ending at X Games Austin at the age of 42. He is careful about this himself and so are we: there was no UCI world championship in BMX freestyle during his career, and none of those golds is one.

The other American series was the Dew Tour, which ran a season-long points title called the Dew Cup rather than settling everything on a single weekend. Stephen Murray, from Newcastle, won BMX Dirt gold at the Summer X Games in 2001 and back-to-back Gravity Games dirt golds in 2001 and 2002, and he landed the first double backflip in competition. On Friday, June 22, 2007, in the BMX Dirt final at the Dew Action Sports Tour stop in Baltimore, his foot came off the pedal partway through a double backflip and he crashed on the landing, sustaining a spinal cord injury in his neck. He was twenty-seven. He did not compete again. The Stay Strong name started as two words riders put on T-shirts in the weeks afterward and became a working BMX brand with its own teams and product.

The international thread in freestyle runs back further than the X Games. Craig Campbell, from Essex, was signed by Bob Haro in 1983 after Haro watched him ride a contest at Harrow Skate Park — the first non-American rider on full Haro sponsorship. He took the UK King of the Skatepark in 1984 and the UKBFA British Pro Freestyle Championship in 1985, and finished fourth at the King of the Skateparks at Pipeline in California in 1985 behind Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther and Mike Dominguez. He quit in January 1991 and became a DJ.

2008: BMX becomes an Olympic sport

The paperwork took thirty years. The IBMXF, founded in 1981 by Gerrit Does and NBL founder George Esser, was absorbed into the UCI's structure in 1993. The NBL joined USA Cycling in 1997, chosen over the ABA because it was a non-profit with the longer international record. The IOC voted BMX racing onto the Olympic program in 2003, for a 2008 debut. Mike King — three-time ABA national No. 1 and the 1993 UCI mountain bike downhill world champion — was USA Cycling's BMX program director and ran Team USA at Beijing and again at London.

The racing happened at the Laoshan venue on August 22, 2008. The starting hill looked an awful lot like the Helltrack ramp out of RAD.

Māris Štrombergs of Latvia won the men's final in about 36 seconds and took the first Olympic BMX gold medal ever awarded. He had come in as the reigning UCI world champion, having won that title earlier the same year, and he won the UCI title again in 2010 — separate honors from the Olympic golds, and worth keeping separate. At London 2012 he won the Olympic final again in 37.576, the first rider to take two Olympic BMX golds.

Mike Day took silver in that first final, and Donny Robinson bronze. Earlier the same day, Jill Kintner won bronze in the women's final. Three American medals out of the sport's first Olympic appearance.

Kyle Bennett was the first American named to an Olympic BMX team, clinching an automatic spot on May 10, 2008 as the highest-ranked American in USA Cycling's year-long qualifying series. He was a three-time UCI elite men's world champion — 2002 at Paulínia, 2003 at Perth, and 2007. In Beijing he finished sixth in his semi-final heat and did not reach the final. He died in a single-vehicle crash near his hometown of Conroe, Texas on October 14, 2012, at 33. In June that year, the National BMX Hall of Fame had inducted all four members of that first Olympic team together.

Two more people from BMX were at those Games in roles that don't show up in the results. Erma Miller was there as secretary commissaire for BMX — one of the officials who enforce the rules, verify the results, and certify that what happened on the track is what goes into the record. And Jamie Staff, from Ashford in Kent, won Olympic gold in Beijing in the men's team sprint on the track, riding the opening lap for Great Britain ahead of Jason Kenny and Chris Hoy, in a world record. Staff had come from BMX: he won the UCI BMX World Championship in 1996 in the Elite Cruiser class, the 24-inch class, at Brighton, and switched to the track at the end of 2001 precisely because BMX was not yet an Olympic sport. He joined USA Cycling in 2010 and has been coaching there since.

The modern Olympic era

Britain had spent the 1980s catching BMX secondhand off American magazines. Twenty-five years later it was winning.

Shanaze Reade got there first and came away with the hardest record in the section. She won three UCI elite BMX world titles — 2007 at Victoria, 2008 at Taiyuan, 2010 at Pietermaritzburg — and two world titles on the track, both in the women's team sprint with Victoria Pendleton, in 2007 and 2008. Five world titles across two disciplines. She rode two Olympic Games and did not medal at either: in the first Olympic women's BMX final at Beijing she crashed on the last berm going for the win, and at London 2012 she finished sixth.

Then came Tokyo — held in 2021, still titled Tokyo 2020 — and the best half hour British BMX has ever had. On July 30, 2021, at the Ariake Urban Sports Park, Bethany Shriever led the women's final gate to line to win gold, beating the two-time Olympic champion Mariana Pajón. About half an hour later Kye Whyte took silver in the men's final, 0.116 behind Niek Kimmann. Whyte carried Shriever across the line afterward. They were Britain's first two Olympic BMX medals, and they arrived within the same morning.

Shriever's route there is part of the story. After the 2016 Games, UK Sport's review stipulated that only male BMX riders would be funded for the Tokyo cycle, on the reasoning that no British rider had ever won an Olympic BMX medal. She left the national set-up, worked part-time as a teaching assistant in a nursery, took money from her parents, and ran a public crowdfunding appeal in 2019. She reckoned a full qualification campaign at about £50,000; the crowdfunding page itself took just under £5,000. Later in 2019, British Cycling's performance director Stephen Park got UK Sport to allow funding to be re-allocated, and she moved to Manchester and returned full-time.

Both Whyte brothers came out of Peckham BMX Club, formed in 2004 on wasteground on Naylor Road after Southwark Council and Edwards bike shop approached Michael Pusey — CK Flash — about taking the site on. He cleared it by hand and it opened with four children. Nigel Whyte, father of Tre, Daniel and Kye, co-founded it and coached; their mother was club secretary. For years the members bailed floodwater off a homemade track and rode a table-top jump built out of a discarded refrigerator, and in 2010 they won the National BMX Championships doing it. The £1.1 million Burgess Park track opened in August 2013. Eight Peckham riders have reached the Great Britain Cycling Team; Kye was the eighth.

Tre Whyte, the oldest of the three brothers, has the highest Worlds finish of any of them. At the 2014 UCI BMX World Championships in Rotterdam, aged 20, he was not selected by British Cycling, paid his own entry — which the rules then allowed — and took bronze in the elite men's final, finishing ahead of both selected British riders. He won back-to-back British national titles in 2015 and 2016, was left out of the 2016 Worlds squad that fed Rio qualification, and by then was no longer permitted to self-fund. He retired from competition in 2020, the year before his brother's medal.

The section is still being written in real time. Ross Cullen, out of Preston Pirates BMX Club, won his first UCI World Cup round in the Netherlands in June 2025 and took silver in the elite men's class at the 2026 UCI BMX Racing World Championships in Brisbane — a strange medal, awarded on lap times from the last completed rounds after extreme wind stopped the meeting before the final, but a Worlds silver in the open elite class all the same. He has twice been named Olympic travelling reserve, at Tokyo and at Paris, both times behind Kye Whyte, and has never started an Olympic race.

The full British story — the Raleigh Burner, the two sanctions, the magazines, the trade — has its own section hub: BMX in the United Kingdom.

Where the chapters disagree

This page is a summary of other pages, and some of those pages do not agree with each other. We are not going to resolve those disputes on a summary page. We are going to name them.

Bethany Shriever's elite world title count. Her own chapter records three elite UCI world titles and its record ends in August 2025. The Ross Cullen chapter and the British section hub both state she took a fourth at Brisbane in July 2026. That is why no number appears above.

The size of the first US Olympic team. The Donny Robinson and Kyle Bennett chapters both give a four-rider roster: Day, Robinson, Bennett and Jill Kintner. The Mike Day chapter names only three and does not mention Kintner. Jill Kintner does not yet have a chapter of her own, which is a gap in this library, not a comment on her.

Mat Hoffman's world title count. The Hoffman Bikes chapter calls him a ten-time vert world champion. The Mat Hoffman chapter declines to state a number at all, on the grounds that the count depends on which sanction you're counting. Neither figure refers to a UCI world championship. No number appears above.

When CW Racing started, and how it ended. The CW chapter says 1980 and describes a bankruptcy in 1995. The Revcore chapter says the early 1980s and says the reason for the 1995 closure is not documented. Both pages flag the disagreement themselves.

When Riteway actually closed. The Riteway chapter says the closing happened in the course of the 2001 bankruptcy but is open about not having a date, softening elsewhere to "around 2001." The KHS chapter states it as settled. We have used the year and not a date.

This is a living document

The library is still being built. Chapters go up as we can write them and as we can check them, and this page will get longer as they do. There are names that belong in this era and don't have a chapter yet — Jill Kintner and Connor Fields on the racing side, Dave Mirra and Charlotte Worthington and Declan Brooks on the freestyle side, and a long list of others.

A good deal of what's on these pages was corrected by the people who were actually there — riders, families, mechanics, team managers, shop owners — writing in to tell us we had it wrong. That is the fastest way this gets better. If you were there and something here is off, or you have a magazine, a results sheet, a photograph, or a memory that settles one of the disagreements listed above, tell us and we'll fix it and say we fixed it.