Brent Patterson

1980 ABA National No.1 Pro — The Elder Half of BMX's Only Sibling No.1/No.2 Season

A Legend Bike Co. rider page · part of the Patterson family story

At a glance

Level AA Pro
Scene Hayward, California, and the national ABA/NBL circuit, late 1970s–mid 1980s
Team Patterson Racing Products, 1977–1986 (Speedo Racing Products before that)
Known for 1980 ABA National No.1 Pro; first rider to win a National No.1 plate three years running in any sanctioning body (NBL Pro Cruiser, 1981–1983)

Brent Hathaway Patterson is the elder half of the only pair of brothers to each hold a National No.1 Pro plate in a major BMX sanctioning body. He got there first — the 1980 ABA National No.1 Pro title — two years before his younger brother Brian matched him. Both of them raced for the brand their father, Vance Patterson, built specifically to put them on a bike worth riding: Patterson Racing.

Hayward, and a first win by accident

Brent Patterson was born April 9, 1963, in Hayward, California. He started racing in early 1976 at fourteen, drawn in through friends in his neighborhood. Classes at the time were sorted by size and weight rather than proficiency, and Brent, big for his age, landed in the 14 Expert class for his first race — and won it, the start of a three-race winning streak. His first sponsor was Cyclepath, in 1976.

Turning pro at sixteen

Brent turned pro in late 1977, at sixteen, and rode briefly for Speedo Racing Products, the company his father Vance had originally invested in hoping it would build a BMX frame. His first professional win came November 6, 1977, at the National Bicycle Association's Arizona State Fair race in Phoenix. Days later, his father started Patterson Racing Products from scratch after Speedo failed to deliver a frame — and Brent, along with Brian and the rest of the old Speedo team, moved over to ride for it.

1980 — National No.1 Pro, on a broken leg

Brent won the ABA National No.1 Pro title in 1980 — while recovering from a broken leg. He'd broken it in November 1979 racing Motorcycle Motocross qualifying for an amateur supercross event: his throttle stuck open, launching him more than thirty feet off a jump, and he snapped his leg on the landing. He was laid up for four and a half months, into April 1981, yet still won the 1980 ABA No.1 title. Bicycle Motocross Action gave him its Number One Racer Award (NORA Cup) for the 1980 season, with 433 of 1,622 votes cast (26.7 percent) and a $500 prize.

Three years running — a record nobody else had set

Between 1981 and 1983, Brent took the NBL National No.1 Pro Cruiser plate three years in a row — the first rider, amateur or professional, to win a National No.1 plate three consecutive times in the same class in any sanctioning body. He added NBL Pro Cruiser Grandnational titles in 1981 and a double in 1982 (Pro Cruiser and Pro Trophy), an IBMXF Pro Cruiser world title in 1982, and a non-sanctioned Jag Pro World Championship in 1983. He was inducted into the ABA BMX Hall of Fame in 1988.

1982 — the season he finished at No.2, behind his own brother

In 1982, Brent finished the ABA season as National No.2 Pro — behind Brian, who took No.1 that year. It's the only time in BMX history a pair of siblings has held a major sanctioning body's top two national pro plates in the same season, and it happened with both of them riding for their father's company.

Injuries that shaped his career

Brent broke his ankle in a pickup football game in late 1978. The November 1979 motocross leg break kept him out for over four months. A shoulder injury in late 1980 cost him the NBA Grand National that year. On July 15, 1984, he injured his knee at an NBL race in Howell, New Jersey — the same race where his brother Brian broke his arm — and was out roughly six weeks, returning for the 1984 NBL Grandnational on September 1.

Retirement and Motocross

Brent retired from the senior pro BMX circuit in the summer of 1986, after not making the main at that year's World Cup. Like his brother, he raced occasionally through 1987 for the bigger purses, and both entered the 1991 ABA Spring Nationals without making a main. After BMX, Brent moved into professional Motorcycle Motocross, the sport a broken leg from a motocross jump had briefly threatened to sideline him from a decade earlier.

Where Brent Patterson fits in the bigger story

Family: Patterson Racing, Brian Patterson. Brands: GT, AERO Racing Products, which put Brent's name on its own signature rider T-shirt. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

Wikipedia — Brent Patterson, citing period Bicycle Motocross Action, BMX Plus!, and Bicycle Motocross News issues throughout for race dates, results, and injury details. Legend Bike Co.'s own AERO Racing Products page, sourced to period AERO ads archived at oldschoolmags.com, independently confirms Brent Patterson had his own signature rider T-shirt in AERO's product line, separate from GT rider Andy Patterson — a different, unrelated racer despite the shared surname. oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were checked for independent period coverage; a bmxsociety.com community forum discussion of the Patterson brothers (JS-rendered page; content drawn from search-result snippets, disclosed as such) describes the brothers as having "dominated BMX racing up to late 1984."