Brian "Bogi" Givens

Original Supercross BMX TECH Team Rider, 1989

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

At a glance

Known as "Bogi"
Scene Southern California, late 1980s onward
Shops La Palma Cycle Center (Turnell "Tuni" Henry) · Brackens Bikes (Tommy Brackens)
Known for One of the five original Supercross BMX TECH Racing Team riders Bill Ryan founded the brand to sponsor in 1989

Some riders are remembered for a stack of national plates. Bogi is remembered for something rarer than that. His name is tied to the founding of a brand. He was one of my five original Supercross BMX TECH Team riders — alongside Billy Harrison, Brian Lopes, Glenn Pavlosky, and Kiyomi Waller — and he was on the roster I was looking at the day I decided to build my own frame and start my own bike company.

The Southern California shop scene

To see where Bogi fits, you have to know the network of shops and riders I was moving through in the mid-to-late 1980s. I had left GT Bicycles after the warranty-frame cap and gone to work for Turnell "Tuni" Henry at La Palma Cycle Center. That is the same Tuni who taught me the basics at Harbor BMX Track when I was ten years old. From La Palma, I helped Tommy Brackens design and start Brackens Bikes, Tommy's own brand, off the back of Tommy winning NORA Cup Number One Pro of the Year. Brackens ran a pro program with Kevin Hull as the public face, because Tommy was still under contract to World Class at the time.

That whole shop world is where I met Bogi. La Palma Cycle Center, the Brackens workshop, the apartment where I hand-drew the Brackens graphics with Letraset on a drafting table. He was right there in it, in that period, riding with the same group of guys I would later put on TECH Racing. I remember him from it first-hand.

TECH Racing Pants and the TECH Racing Team

I started TECH out of my bedroom at 6912 Tahiti Drive in Cypress, California, back in 1984. TECH Racing Pants was the lead product, and it ended up supplying Redline, Haro, S&M, Cyclecraft, Diamond Back, and a long list of other brands. The TECH Racing Team was the rider side of the company. It was a small factory program I ran on the side of every other job I held through the 1980s.

By the late 1980s, the TECH roster had five core riders: Billy Harrison, Brian Lopes, Glenn Pavlosky (who I had managed in the Robinson Division at GT), Brian "Bogi" Givens, and Kiyomi Waller. Pete Loncarevich, Eric Carter, and Billy Griggs were riding for me around the same period too, doing gate starts in the back lot I used to test geometry.

The frame problem — and what it forced

The TECH Team needed bikes and none of the factories would supply them. I had already designed the SE Assassin for Mike at the restarted SE Racing in the mid-1980s, meant for the whole TECH team. The Assassin worked. Billy Harrison rode the prototype and loved it. But SE could not build Assassins for everyone, and that left the team stuck.

So I did the only thing left to do. My team — Billy Harrison, Brian Lopes, Glenn Pavlosky, Brian "Bogi" Givens, and Kiyomi Waller — couldn't get a bike sponsor, so I started the brand to sponsor them. You can read the whole thing in the founding story. That decision is the founding of Supercross BMX in 1989. The first Supercross frame was never planned as a consumer product. I built it so my five TECH riders, Bogi included, would have something worth racing.

Lopes — the rider who turned pro the same year

Brian Lopes, one of Bogi's TECH teammates, turned pro the same year Supercross BMX launched. He went on to a 4x UCI Mountain Bike World Championship career and was inducted into both the BMX and mountain biking Halls of Fame in 2008. That is why Lopes's name tends to sit in the foreground of the Supercross founding story. Bogi's story sits quieter. Closer to the shop floor than the podium. But the team Lopes turned pro on was the team Bogi rode on too, and the brand they raced for in 1989 exists because five riders, not one, needed a frame.

The Hi-Tech frame footnote

Bogi later got one of the last Hi-Tech BMX frames I ever built. Hi-Tech was the bedroom-shop brand I ran with Randy Rizzo and Voris Dixon out of 6912 Tahiti Drive in Cypress, back in 1982 and 1983, and it got featured in BMX Plus! in January 1984 when I was 14. Twenty-five Hi-Tech frames were made total before I shut the brand down over a naming conflict. One of them ending up with Bogi years later is a small detail. But it lines up with everything else here. Bogi was inside my tight little rider circle long enough to end up with one of the earliest frames I ever welded.

That detail checks out from outside this page, too. In a separate write-up I posted to BMXmuseum.com's own Hi-Tech BMX archive, describing the two batches of 25 frames Voris and I built in "Long" and "Short" versions, I noted that I gave one of the last of the Short frames to Bogi Givens, and one of the last Longs — the black one — to Brian Moses of MXR Hub fame. Same story, told on a different site, years apart. That kind of cross-check is rare for a rider with as thin a paper trail as Bogi has, so it's worth pointing out.

After TECH: S&M, Schwinn, and staying in it

Bogi's racing life didn't stop when the TECH Team wound down. The clearest trace of what came next shows up in rider-kept BMX archives rather than magazine title lists. Community recollections posted to BMXmuseum.com describe him as a strong amateur who turned single-A pro during a run riding for S&M and later for Schwinn. A separate BMXmuseum.com forum thread built around a 1997 Schwinn Pro Modified 2 places Bogi on Schwinn's roster of that era alongside Brian Foster, Alan Foster, Matt Pohlkamp, and Tim Strzyzewski. We were not able to pull the full text of that thread directly — the forum page did not load cleanly for us — so we're citing it as a lead worth chasing rather than a confirmed fact, and we're flagging it the same way we flag everything else on this page that comes from community memory instead of a magazine masthead.

Taken together, it's a consistent picture: Bogi kept riding, kept getting factory support, and kept showing up in other people's bike stories for at least another decade after 1989. It just never got written down the way Lopes's career did.

Where the public record runs thin

National race coverage on Bogi is thin. He does not show up as a major NBL, ABA, or NBA national title holder in the magazine archives from back then. He is not in the USA BMX Hall of Fame. The strongest thread you can verify is the role he played inside Supercross BMX's founding moment, plus the S&M and Schwinn sponsor trail above.

That gap is part of why this page exists. People tell the founding story of Supercross BMX through Brian Lopes's name because Lopes's career was the loudest one. But five riders made that team a team, and Bogi was one of the five. A page on him is a page on what the founding of a 37-year-old American BMX brand actually looked like down at the rider level.

Where Brian "Bogi" Givens fits in the bigger story

Riders: Scot Breithaupt, Eddie Fiola, Greg Hill, Mike Miranda, Perry Kramer, Pete Loncarevich, R.L. Osborn, Stu Thomsen, Todd Anderson, Denny Davidow, Clint Miller, Jeff Bottema, Damian Fulton, Tommy Brackens, Billy Griggs. Brands: Torker, GT, SE Racing, Hi-Tech BMX. Sanctions: BUMS, NBA, NBL, ABA, IBMXF, USA BMX. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX — first-hand recollection of the TECH Racing Team roster, the La Palma Cycle Center and Brackens Bikes years, and the founding of Supercross BMX in 1989 (primary source). Supercross BMX — "History of Supercross BMX" and "The History of the Supercross BMX Race Team," supercrossbmx.com. BMXultra.com — "Interview with Bill Ryan: 30 Years of Supercross BMX." BMXmuseum.com — Hi-Tech BMX reference page and forum threads. BMXmuseum.com — "1981 High Tech" bike archive page, posted by Bill Ryan under the SupercrossBMX account (independent confirmation of the Hi-Tech frame given to Bogi Givens). BMXmuseum.com forums — "1997 Schwinn Pro Modified 2" thread (community-sourced reference to Bogi Givens on Schwinn's mid-1990s team, alongside Brian Foster, Alan Foster, Matt Pohlkamp, and Tim Strzyzewski; not independently re-verified). Legend Bike Co — "How the Former Pro Got Its Name" and "Supercross BMX" pages (cross-checked for consistency on the TECH Team roster and the Brackens/La Palma Cycle Center connection).

Notes on uncertainty. Brian "Bogi" Givens's full given name spelling, birth year, hometown, and national-race results are not on record in the public sources checked for this page. Community BMX archives add sponsor-era detail — an S&M run and a Schwinn team spot in the 1990s — but we have not found a magazine results sheet or an official title list that confirms his pro record beyond what's noted here.