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

If you want to know where organized BMX racing actually starts, it starts with a 13-year-old kid, a stack of his own motocross trophies, and a quarter a head. Fall of 1970, a dirt lot in Long Beach. That kid was Scot Breithaupt, and the day he charged 35 neighborhood kids a quarter apiece to run a real race is the day the sport got its first set of rules.

BUMS — the sanction he built around that lot — was the first BMX sanctioning body of any kind. Nobody else had put rules around it yet.

Now, BMX itself didn't get invented that day. Kids had been doing this all over Southern California through the late 1960s. Too young for motorcycles, they wanted to ride like their motocross heroes, so they did it on whatever they had — mostly Schwinn Sting-Rays with the fenders and chainguards yanked off. It was happening from San Pedro to San Fernando. Probably in Nebraska and New Jersey too. But somebody had to be the first to organize it. That somebody was the kid in Long Beach.

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

That lot on the corner of 7th and Lew was the first BMX track anybody tried to run as an organized program. The name came from the hobos living in the fields around it — Bicycle United Motocross Society, BUMS for short. A joke. And the joke stuck. Within a year it was on t-shirts.

Where exactly was the lot? Three accounts

Everybody agrees it was Long Beach. Everybody agrees it was a vacant lot with hobos camped in the fields around it. The cross streets are another matter, and this page has carried one version long enough that we owe you the others.

7th and Lew. That's what this page and our History of BMX chapter have said since we published them, and it stays here. What we'll tell you straight is that we haven't been able to run down a second source for it, and Long Beach doesn't appear to have a Lew Avenue anywhere near 7th Street. It may be a corruption of something else that got copied forward. We'd rather flag that than scrub it.

7th and Bellflower. This is the version with the most print behind it. Super BMX, November 1981, gave the corner of 7th and Bellflower as the site, and the accounts that followed use it — the lot locals called Bum Field, which Scot is said to have leased for a dollar a year. It also accounts for a mix-up that's out there in the record: at least one anniversary write-up read the cross street Bellflower as the city of Bellflower, then quoted Scot himself in the same piece saying the track was in Long Beach.

223rd and Alameda, by the Lions Drag Strip. Bill Ryan's records put the primary BUMS venue near 223rd Street and Alameda Street, on ground next to the old Lions Drag Strip, active 1970 to 1972. (Bill Ryan, 2026.) Lions was real and it was right there — 223rd and Alameda in Wilmington, hard against the Long Beach line, running from 1955 until it was torn down at the end of 1972. We haven't found a published source tying BUMS to that ground. We're also not in a position to rule it out, and here's why.

Scot never ran just one track. There was BUMS Track #1, the original lot, and then a BUMS II, which he described as being in fields where the hobos lived — and inside a couple of years he was laying out tracks for the surrounding cities as well. No source we've found gives street addresses for BUMS I versus BUMS II. So it's possible that more than one of the sites above is right, at different times, and that the record has been collapsing them into a single lot for fifty years. That's a possibility, not a conclusion, and we're putting it that way on purpose.

The first race — November 14, 1970

The date the historians point to 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. And it's the date the people who were actually there — the ones on the start line that day — point to when you ask them.

Scot was 13. He kept the points by hand. He handed out trophies he'd pulled off his own shelf at home. A quarter a rider covered the day. No rulebook yet. No association yet. Just 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, and we won't pretend it isn't. Britannica, among others, cites an earlier race organized by Ron Mackler at Palms Park in Santa Monica on July 10, 1969. Other accounts put the first Palms Park races in 1972 or 1973, not 1969. The records from that era are thin and the dates don't line up across sources.

That claim now has its own chapter here: our Palms Park track file lays out Ron Mackler's program in full — the parks man who organized the Sting-Ray kids instead of running them off, the weekly Saturday races, and both of the arguments the record never settled. One is the year. Breithaupt himself, writing corrections into the University of BMX archive years later, said he had no proof of the 1969 date and believed Palms actually started around 1973; the oldest surviving Palms paperwork is a flyer from May 1973. The other is the city — Santa Monica by the Hall of Fame and Britannica, West Los Angeles by city park records, and Lakewood by Bill Ryan's records. Worth reading alongside this page.

The Breithaupt BUMS race on November 14, 1970 is the one with primary-source weight behind it — written records, period press, a sanctioning structure that actually grew out of it, and recognition from both USA BMX and Los Angeles County. That's why we run with it. We note the dispute for the same reason we note every dispute on this site: where the record disagrees, we say so, and we let you weigh it.

What Breithaupt actually built

The race was the easy part. What made BUMS a sanction — what separated Scot from every other kid in every other vacant lot — was everything he wrapped around the race. He'd been racing motorcycles long enough to know what a real sport looked like, and he copied the parts that worked.

Inside that first year he'd written a rulebook. He had classes — beginner, novice, expert — lifted straight from the way motocross split its fields by skill. He ran a season-long points system so racers had something to chase past a single day. Membership cards. T-shirts. Race numbers, sign-up sheets, trophy classes, a calendar, races on a regular schedule instead of whenever the mood struck.

None of that was in BMX before BUMS. Other kids ran races. Scot ran a sanction. And here's the part that matters: every national body that came after — the NBA out of California, the NBL out of Florida, the ABA out of Arizona — built on a version of the same thing. Districts, classes, points, season-end championships. The whole vocabulary of the sport started at a dirt lot in Long Beach.

The first State Championships — 1972

The first BUMS California State Championships ran in 1972. Scot entered the 16-and-over Expert class himself, and he won it. By then BUMS was a real circuit. Riders were coming in from outside Long Beach. Other Southern California tracks were copying 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 the sport had, and they pulled in the first wave of riders who'd go on to make their names with the national sanctions — Stu Thomsen, Greg Hill, Jeff Utterback, and plenty more either started at BUMS or turned up at it as the thing grew.

The tracks Breithaupt designed

Running BUMS turned Scot into a track builder. Once the surrounding cities and youth groups saw what was going on in Long Beach, they started asking him to design tracks for them. A teenager doing the job you'd pay a municipal contractor to 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 were one-off design jobs. Others ran for years. A few — Saddleback Park especially — turned into 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 riding for SE Racing. By that point Scot had handed off the running of BUMS and was building the company that became SE — but the track the race was held on was still the one he'd laid out.

The riders who came through BUMS

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

Stu Thomsen raced at BUMS as a kid before he became one of the dominant riders of the late 1970s. Greg Hill came through BUMS on his way to the first BMX World Championship 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 regular. Perry Kramer, who'd put his name on the PK Ripper at SE in 1978, came through too. And a long list of riders whose names show up later in the racing magazines: Eddy King, Mark Pippin, Randy Olsen, others.

Bob Haro — who'd later design the first freestyle-specific frame and found Haro Designs — was one of the riders Scot took on the road in 1977 with the touring Scot Enterprises team, the same year Scot was putting together the structure that became SE Racing. The line between BUMS members, the SE touring crew, and the first generation of BMX pros was never a hard line. 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's not a knock. It's just the fact of it. Scot was 13 when he started it and 17 when the first national sanction — Ernie Alexander's NBA, founded 1973 — showed up in the same region. By the time the NBL launched out of Florida in January 1974 and the ABA out of Arizona in October 1977, BMX had three bodies building districts, issuing national numbers, and chasing membership coast to coast. BUMS stayed regional because Scot's attention had already moved on. He was racing nationally on the NBA circuit, 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.

BUMS members rolled into the national sanctions naturally as those sanctions stood up in California. The NBA's first district structure here absorbed riders who'd been racing BUMS-affiliated tracks for years. By the end of the 1970s, BUMS as an organized program had wound down. The things it pioneered — the class system, the points chase, the season-end championships — were standard everywhere by then.

That's how BUMS finished. No bankruptcy, no feud. It worked its way into the sport it had started, and the sport kept going.

What came next for Breithaupt

Scot didn't 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 grown-up 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, named after Jeff Utterback, who'd finished the 1977 NBA season as the number-six rider in the country. The PK Ripper, named after Perry Kramer, followed that same year and became the first commercially successful aluminum BMX frame. The Quadangle came after that.

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 here 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 race frame on the market. Same act, done at a different scale.

The brands and riders that came out of the BUMS scene

The early Southern California scene was small enough that everybody who'd end up mattering 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 kids turning up at BUMS races. Mongoose's BMX Products launched in 1974 in the San Fernando Valley with the Sting-Ray-replacement bike a whole 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 loaded with riders who'd come up through the BUMS-era circuit.

Two of the riders most tied to 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 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, enshrined as the founding father of organized BMX racing. He kept working in the sport in different ways 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, consulting on product. In 2005 he signed a contract to race cruiser for SE Bikes — the same company he'd founded in 1977 — for the first time in years.

He was found dead in a vacant lot in Indio, California in July 2015, at 57. The exact date gets recorded differently across sources: Wikipedia lists July 4, the press coverage that followed dated the discovery to July 6. He'd 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 — the sport itself now treats as its birthday.

Why this page exists

BUMS was the first sanction. It's the structural starting point for every rider page, every brand chapter, and every track article we're 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. Start the story anywhere other than 7th and Lew in Long Beach in November 1970 and you're starting it 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 straight out of BUMS is told in the SE Racing chapter. The track that has the other claim on the sport's first organized racing gets its own chapter too: Palms Park. 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), and Breithaupt's own account of BUMS I and BUMS II.

Super BMX, November 1981 (Vol. 8, No. 11), cited in the Scot Breithaupt biographical record — the corner of 7th and Bellflower as the site of the original BUMS lot.

University of BMX (Gerrit Does) — Scot Breithaupt's published corrections, including the BUMS I and BUMS II distinction and his dispute of the July 10, 1969 Palms Park date.

Wikipedia: Lions Drag Strip — the 223rd Street and Alameda Street location in Wilmington and the 1955 to December 1972 operating span.

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.

Bill Ryan, 2026 — the 223rd and Alameda venue near the Lions Drag Strip, the 1970 to 1972 active window, BUMS Track #1, and the rulebook and membership card detail, carried here as given.

Legend Bike Co., The History of BMX, Palms Park and SE Racing chapter — cross-reference for the sanction founding sequence, the competing first-race claim, and the SE Racing timeline.

Where sources conflict — most of all on the date of the "first" BMX race, the exact cross streets of the original BUMS lot, 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, laid out every location account we have rather than picking one, and flagged the variance on the 2015 date.