Eddie Fiola

Before most people in this country had even heard the word "freestyle," Eddie was out there doing it on a Torker. I don't mean that as a figure of speech. The bike under him at one of the most photographed moments of his early career was a Torker LP. Bob Haro nearly signed him. Haro flew Eddie out, handed him a full kit, shot a six-page spread with photographer John Ker for BMX Plus — and then took the bike back the next morning. Eddie wound up on the cover of BMX Action in head-to-toe Haro gear, riding a Torker. The cover ran anyway. Eventually he landed at GT, and that's where he and Gary Turner co-designed the original GT Performer in 1983.

The Performer changed what a BMX frame could be. The geometry, the way the tubes came together, the way it handled in a park — Eddie and Gary built something the freestyle world flat-out hadn't seen. BMXmuseum.com has its place in the history on file.

The NORA Cup was the biggest award freestyle had — voted on by the riders, the industry, the media. Eddie won it four times. And he won it first, before anybody else in the sport had one. Nobody else gets to say that, because there was only ever one first NORA Cup, and it went to him.

RAD — 1986

In 1986 a Hollywood crew needed somebody to double the lead in a BMX movie. The character was Cru Jones. The guy doing the riding was Eddie. RAD turned into the BMX movie of the era, and most of what the audience watched Cru Jones do, they were really watching Eddie do. BMXmuseum.com has documented what that film meant to BMX, and Eddie sits right at the center of it.

The Former Pro — 2012

In 2012 Eddie and I sat down to draw up a frame from nothing. Not a reissue of some old thing — a real modern chromoly frame that rode like his best bikes always had. That turned into the Legend Former Pro. I'd called it the Pro Former first. GT sent over a cease-and-desist. So I flipped the two words around — Former Pro. Eddie tells the whole thing in his own words over at How the Former Pro Got Its Name.

Pistol Pete Loncaravich

Four ABA #1 Pro National Championships. 1984. 1986. 1991. 1992. Nobody else in BMX has won the #1 Pro plate across a span like that — close to a decade between his first one and his last. Pete didn't get a window. He got a career. BMXmuseum.com carries the full record of his results.

What gets me about those four titles is the timeline. The 1984 and 1986 plates came when Pete was in his prime and the ABA circuit was about as deep as it ever got. Then he came back in 1991 and 1992 and did it again — against a whole generation of younger kids who'd grown up watching him win. That second run is not some guy coasting on his name. That's a rider who knew exactly how to race a BMX bike and just kept doing it at the top.

LRP — Pete and His Dad Built It from Scratch

LRP didn't start out as a frame company. Pete and his dad started Loncaravich Racing Products as a little parts shop while Pete was still riding for Diamond Back — seatposts, pedal cages, hubs. Real BMX parts, made by a family that knew what racers needed, because one of them was out there racing every single weekend.

Then Diamond Back let Pete go. He wanted to turn pro and they already had two pros on the team, so the math just didn't work for him. He rode for SE for one race. One. Then he and his dad made the call: quit riding somebody else's bike and build their own. They took the geometry of the TW — one of Pete's first sponsors back when he was 12 — as the starting point, and drew everything from there. Pete rolled into the AA Pro class on that frame, one of the youngest guys out there, and right away he was running with the fastest racers in the country. People noticed.

CW, Shadow, and the Title Run

That's when CW came calling. They signed Pete to ride for Shadow, a little CW subsidiary — but the deal meant shutting LRP down. Pete agreed, and then he did what he always did. He won. He took the Pro Class apart so completely that CW bumped him straight up to Factory CW. Four ABA #1 Pro National Championships followed. The frame company he and his dad built got buried. The racing career it launched turned into one of the most decorated in BMX history.

The Modern LRP — Under the Legend Banner

Pete and I have been friends since we were 14 years old, racing out of the Orange Y in Southern California. That never stopped. These last few years Pete's been back on a bike — racing again for the fun of it, on Supercross BMX geometry, the platform I've been working on for decades. He likes the way it races. So the two of us put LRP back together under the Legend Bike Co. banner. The modern LRP frame rides on the Supercross geometry Pete's been racing, dressed in the look of the original LRP frames CW made him walk away from forty years ago. It's not a tribute. It's a celebration of what could have been — and finally is.

Bill Ryan

I started in BMX at 12 years old. My first job in the industry was at SE Racing — sweeping floors, stickering frames, figuring out how a BMX company worked from the bottom up. That was 1981. I've been in the sport 45 years now, and building things in it for most of them.

I worked customer service and sales over at GT Bicycles — the same company making the Performer that Eddie helped design. I got to see up close how the brands that built this sport actually ran, what they nailed, and what they left sitting on the table. In 1989 I took what I'd learned and started Supercross BMX. That company's been going for more than 35 years and put out frames that carried riders to Olympic medals.

Why Legend Exists

Legend started over a conversation with Eddie. We sat down in 2012 and talked about what a frame built around the way Eddie rides would actually be — not a reissue, not a nostalgia piece, a real modern chromoly frame. The Former Pro came out of that. I brought the manufacturing side. Eddie brought the geometry. Pete came in as a co-founder because when you're building bikes tied to BMX's real history, you want a guy whose four #1 Pro plates say he knows exactly what that history is.

I founded Legend and gave shares to Eddie and Pete. Not as endorsers. As co-founders. There's a difference, and you can feel it in the product.