BUMS — Bicycle United Motocross Society

The First BMX Sanction — Long Beach, 1970

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

We're telling this story neutrally. No brand gets elevated. No rider gets shorted. Where the record is contested, we say so.

Where it started

BMX started in vacant lots all over Southern California in the late 1960s. Kids who were too young for motorcycles wanted to do what their motocross heroes did, so they did it on the bikes they had — mostly Schwinn Sting-Rays with the fenders and chainguards stripped off. Nobody invented the sport. It was happening from San Pedro to San Fernando, and probably in Nebraska and New Jersey too. But somebody had to be the first to put rules around it. That was a 13-year-old kid in Long Beach.

Scot Breithaupt was racing motorcycles as a support rider for Yamaha when neighborhood kids started showing up at his Long Beach practice spot to try his jumps on bicycles. One day in the fall of 1970 he went home, grabbed a stack of his motocross trophies, and told the 35 kids who were hanging around that if they each pitched in a quarter, he'd run a race. They did. He did. The next week, 150 kids came back. By the end of the first year, he had 350 members.

That dirt lot on the corner of 7th and Lew in Long Beach was the first BMX track anyone tried to run as an organized program. The sanction Breithaupt built around it — the Bicycle United Motocross Society, BUMS for short — was the first BMX sanctioning body of any kind. The name was a joke about the hobos who lived in the fields surrounding the lot. The joke stuck. Within a year the name was on t-shirts.

The first race — November 14, 1970

The date most BMX historians point to as the first organized BMX race is November 14, 1970, at BUMS in Long Beach. That's the date USA BMX uses in its official history. It's the date bmxultra.com uses. It's the date the County of Los Angeles formally recognized. It's also the date the rest of the sport's own historians — the ones who lived through it and were on the start line — point to when they're asked.

Scot was 13. He kept the points by hand. He handed out the trophies he'd taken off his own shelf at home. He charged a quarter per rider to cover the cost of running the day. There was no rulebook yet. There was no association yet. There was a kid with a clipboard and a lot of other kids who wanted to race. That's the beginning of the sport.

Note on the date — the competing claim

The first-race question is contested. Britannica, among other sources, cites an earlier race organized by Ron Mackler at Palms Park in Santa Monica on July 10, 1969. Other accounts place the first Palms Park races in 1972 or 1973, not 1969. Records from the Palms Park era are thin and the dating is inconsistent across sources.

The Breithaupt BUMS race on November 14, 1970 is the date that has primary-source weight behind it — written records, period press, sustained sanctioning structure that grew out of it, and recognition by both USA BMX and Los Angeles County. We use the November 14, 1970 date for that reason. We note the dispute for the same reason we note every dispute in this history: where the record disagrees, we say so, and let the reader weigh it.

What Breithaupt actually built

The race itself was the easy part. What made BUMS the first sanction — and what separated Breithaupt from every other kid in a vacant lot — was the structure he wrapped around it. He had been racing motorcycles long enough to know what an organized sport looked like. He copied the parts that worked.

Within the first year of BUMS, Scot had written a rulebook. He had a class structure — beginner, novice, and expert — modeled on the way motocross broke up its fields by skill level. He kept a season-long points system so the racers had something to chase beyond a single day. He printed membership cards. He printed t-shirts. He set up race numbers, sign-up sheets, and trophy classes. He set up a calendar. He held races on a regular schedule, not just when he felt like it.

None of that existed in BMX before BUMS. Other kids ran races. Scot ran a sanction. The difference is what the sport eventually borrowed from him: every national body that came after — the NBA out of California, the NBL out of Florida, the ABA out of Arizona — used a version of the same framework. Districts, classes, points, season-end championships. The vocabulary of the sport started in Long Beach.

The first State Championships — 1972

The first BUMS California State Championships were held in 1972. Scot himself entered the 16-and-over Expert class — and won it. By then BUMS had become a real circuit. Riders from outside Long Beach were showing up. Other Southern California tracks were starting to copy the format. The Father's Day race in June 1971 and the Nor-Cal vs. So-Cal race later that year were among the first real competitive events in the sport. They drew the first wave of riders who would later make their names with the national sanctions: Stu Thomsen, Greg Hill, Jeff Utterback, and a long list of others either started at BUMS or showed up at it as the program grew.

The tracks Breithaupt designed

Running BUMS turned Scot into a track builder. Once city governments and youth groups in the surrounding cities saw what was happening in Long Beach, they started asking him to design tracks for them. He was a teenager doing the job a paid municipal contractor would do today.

The tracks Breithaupt designed or laid out in the years after BUMS started include:

• Saddleback Park (Orange County) — the BMX course inside the larger motocross facility.
• Westminster BMX.
• City of Walnut BMX.
• Signal Hill BMX.
• Escape Country.
• La Palma Youth Village BMX — built in partnership with the city of La Palma.
• Fountain Valley Boys and Girls Club Track.

Some of these tracks were one-off design jobs. Others ran for years. A few — Saddleback Park in particular — became cornerstone venues that hosted national-level races later in the decade. The first NBA national held at Saddleback in 1979 was won by Stu Thomsen, then on the SE Racing team. By that point Breithaupt had moved on from running BUMS himself and was building the company that became SE — but the track he laid out at Saddleback was still where the race was held.

The riders who came through BUMS

BUMS was a Long Beach program, not a national one. Its membership lived inside Southern California. But because Southern California was where BMX's first generation grew up, the BUMS member rolls and rider lists read like an early Hall of Fame ballot.

Stu Thomsen raced at BUMS as a kid before he turned into one of the dominant riders of the late 1970s. Greg Hill rode through BUMS on his way to becoming the first BMX World Champion in 1982. Jeff Utterback — later the namesake of SE Racing's first frame, the JU-6, and later the founder of GJS Bicycles — was a BUMS regular. Perry Kramer, who would put his name on the PK Ripper at SE in 1978, came through. So did a long list of riders whose names show up later in the racing magazines: Eddie King, Mark Pippin, Randy Olsen, and others.

Bob Haro — who would later design the first freestyle-specific frame and become the founder of Haro Designs — was one of the riders Scot took on the road in 1977 as part of the touring Scot Enterprises team, the same year Scot was building the structure that would become SE Racing. The line between BUMS members, the SE touring crew, and the first generation of BMX pros was not a hard line. It was the same group of kids, growing up through the sport at the same time.

Why BUMS didn't become a national sanction

BUMS was never built to scale. That is not a criticism. It is the fact of the thing. Scot was 13 when he started it and 17 when the first national sanction — Ernie Alexander's NBA, founded 1973 — appeared in the same region. By the time the NBL launched out of Florida in January 1974 and the ABA launched out of Arizona in October 1977, BMX had three bodies actively building districts, issuing national numbers, and chasing membership across the country. BUMS stayed regional because Scot's attention was already moving in a different direction: he was racing nationally on the NBA circuit, he was managing a team for Dan Gurney All American BMX, then for FMF, and by 1977 he was registering Scot Enterprises and starting what became SE Racing.

Members of BUMS naturally rolled into the national sanctions as those sanctions stood up in California. The NBA's first district structure in California absorbed riders who had been racing at BUMS-affiliated tracks for years. By the end of the 1970s, BUMS as an organized program had wound down. The structures it pioneered — the class system, the points chase, the season-end championships — were now standard across every national sanction in the country.

That is how BUMS finished. Not in a bankruptcy and not in a feud. It worked its way into the sport it had started, and the sport kept going.

What came next for Breithaupt

Scot did not stop. By 1976 he was the NBA's first National No. 1 Pro. In 1977 he registered the company that became SE Racing and started building the brand-building version of what BUMS had been: take the sport seriously, build real product for it, hire real riders. The first SE frame, the JU-6, came out in 1978 and was named after Jeff Utterback, who had finished the 1977 NBA season as the number-six rider in the country. The PK Ripper, named after Perry Kramer, followed the same year and became the first commercially successful aluminum BMX frame. The Quadangle came next.

The full SE story — the JU-6, the PK Ripper, the Quadangle, the Floval tubing, the Landing Gear fork, the camo school bus, the bankruptcy, the Advanced Sports acquisition, and the BikeCo era — is told in our SE Racing chapter. What matters for the BUMS story is the line from one to the other. The 13-year-old who put a points system together at a Long Beach dirt lot in 1970 was the same person who, seven years later, put the first successful aluminum BMX race frame on the market. The two acts were the same act done at different scale.

The brands and riders that came out of the BUMS scene

The early Southern California BMX scene was small enough that everyone who became important to the sport was at the same tracks at the same time. Webco, one of the first companies to build a purpose-built BMX frame, was selling to the same Long Beach and Orange County riders who were turning up at BUMS races. Mongoose's BMX Products launched in 1974 in the San Fernando Valley with the Sting-Ray-replacement bike that an entire generation of those riders rode. Redline's MX-II — often called the first BMX bike built from the ground up for the sport — was also a 1974 product, and Redline's factory team in the late 70s and early 80s was stacked with riders who had come up through the BUMS-era circuit.

Two of the riders most associated with the next chapter of the sport — Mike "Hollywood" Miranda and Tommy "The Human Dragster" Brackens — came up in the years just after BUMS itself wound down. They raced under the national sanctions that BUMS had pointed the way toward. The whole shape of the era, from the BUMS first race in 1970 to the first NBA Grandnationals in March 1975 to the first ABA national in February 1978, was built by people who knew each other and had ridden the same tracks together as kids.

Scot Breithaupt — the last chapter

Scot Breithaupt was inducted into the ABA BMX Hall of Fame in 1990 and is enshrined as the founding father of organized BMX racing. He kept working in the sport in different capacities through the 1990s and 2000s — producing television and video for BMX, mountain biking, skateboarding, and other extreme sports through his Scot Enterprises media operation, racing cruiser class on and off, and consulting on product. In 2005 he signed a contract to race for SE Bikes in the cruiser class — the same company he had founded in 1977 — for the first time in years.

He was found dead in a vacant lot in Indio, California in July 2015, at age 57. The exact date is recorded differently across sources: Wikipedia lists July 4, the press coverage that followed dated the discovery to July 6. He had spent the last stretch of his life struggling with addiction. He is remembered, with all of that, as the person who built the first BMX sanction with his own hands, at his own track, on a date — November 14, 1970 — that the sport itself now treats as its birthday.

Why this page exists

BUMS was the first sanction. It is the structural starting point for every rider page, every brand chapter, and every track article we are building out on this site. Most of the names that turn up later in BMX racing — riders, founders, magazine editors, track promoters — were either at BUMS or in the small circle of Southern California kids around it. If you start the story anywhere other than 7th and Lew in Long Beach in November 1970, you are starting the story in the middle.

The bigger arc — the NBA, the NBL, the ABA, the IBMXF, the UCI, the path to the 2008 Beijing Olympics — is told in our History of BMX chapter. The brand history that grew directly out of BUMS is told in the SE Racing chapter. This page is the joint between them.

Sources

USA BMX official history (usabmx.com/about/bmx-history) — first organized BMX race date of November 14, 1970, and Scot Breithaupt's place in the early sanction record.

Wikipedia: Scot Breithaupt — biography, BUMS founding, the tracks Breithaupt designed, the 1972 California State Championship, the 1976 NBA National No. 1 title, the cruiser class invention, and the July 2015 death.

Wikipedia: SE Racing, National Bicycle Association, National Bicycle League, American Bicycle Association — sanction founding dates and structural context.

bmxultra.com — multipart interview with Scot Breithaupt, including "The History of BMX" and "The History of SE Racing" (Mike Bird / bmxultra.com, originally published 2003).

Britannica — entry on the sport of BMX, cited as the source for the disputed earlier first-race claim at Palms Park in Santa Monica, July 10, 1969.

The Desert Sun (Palm Springs) and Press-Telegram (Long Beach) — coverage of Scot Breithaupt's death, July 2015.

Legend Bike Co., The History of BMX and SE Racing chapter — cross-reference for the sanction founding sequence and the SE Racing timeline.

Where sources conflict — most of all on the date of the "first" BMX race and the exact date of Scot Breithaupt's death — we have followed the USA BMX and Los Angeles County–recognized date of November 14, 1970 for the first race, and flagged the variance on the 2015 date.