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 four original Supercross BMX TECH Racing Team riders Bill Ryan founded the brand to sponsor in 1989

Brian "Bogi" Givens belongs to the small group of riders whose names are tied to the founding of a brand rather than to a stack of national plates. He was one of the four original Supercross BMX TECH Team riders — alongside Billy Harrison, Brian Lopes, and Glenn Pavlosky — and he was on the roster Bill Ryan was looking at when Bill made the call to build his own frame and start his own bike company.

The Southern California shop scene

To understand where Bogi fits, you have to understand the network of shops and riders Bill Ryan was moving through in the mid-to-late 1980s. Bill had left GT Bicycles after the warranty-frame cap and gone to work for Turnell "Tuni" Henry at La Palma Cycle Center — the same Tuni who had taught Bill the basics at Harbor BMX Track when Bill was ten. From La Palma, Bill 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 Brackens Bikes pro program with Kevin Hull as the public face, because Tommy was still under contract to World Class at the time.

That shop world — La Palma Cycle Center, the Brackens workshop, the apartment where Bill hand-drew the Brackens graphics with Letraset on a drafting table — is where Bill met Bogi. Bill's first-hand recollection places him squarely in that scene, in that period, riding with the same group of riders Bill would later put on TECH Racing.

TECH Racing Pants and the TECH Racing Team

Bill started TECH out of his bedroom at 6912 Tahiti Drive in Cypress, California, 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 — a small factory program Bill ran on the side of every other job he held through the 1980s.

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

The frame problem — and what it forced

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

Bill's response, in his own words from the founding story: his team — Billy Harrison, Brian Lopes, Glenn Pavlosky, and Brian "Bogi" Givens — couldn't get a bike sponsor, so Bill started the brand to sponsor them. That decision is the founding of Supercross BMX in 1989. The first Supercross frame was not planned as a consumer product. It was built so the four 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. Lopes's trajectory often sits in the foreground of the Supercross founding story for that reason. Bogi's story sits quieter — closer to the shop floor than the podium — but the team Lopes turned pro on was the team that Bogi rode on too, and the brand they raced for in 1989 exists because four riders, not one, needed a frame.

The Hi-Tech frame footnote

Bogi later received one of the last Hi-Tech BMX frames Bill ever built — the bedroom-shop brand Bill ran with Randy Rizzo and Voris Dixon out of 6912 Tahiti Drive, Cypress, in 1982 and 1983, featured in BMX Plus! in January 1984 when Bill was 14. Twenty-five Hi-Tech frames were made total before the brand was shut down over a naming conflict. That one of them ended up with Bogi years later is a small detail, but it lines up with the rest of the picture: Bogi was inside Bill's small, tight rider circle long enough to end up with one of the earliest frames Bill ever welded.

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 contemporaneous magazine archives. He is not in the USA BMX Hall of Fame. The strongest verifiable thread to him is the role he played inside Supercross BMX's founding moment.

That gap is part of why this page exists. The founding story of Supercross BMX gets told most often through Brian Lopes's name because Lopes's career arc was the loudest one. But four riders made that team a team, and Bogi was one of them. A page on him is a page on what the founding of a 37-year-old American BMX brand actually looked like 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.

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.