A BMXRacingHistory.com chapter · hosted on Legend Bike Co

Centurion Cycles

The Parent of Diamond Back — 1969 to 1990

By Bill Ryan · Founder of Supercross BMX · 37+ years in BMX · Started at SE Racing, 1981

Ask most BMX riders about Centurion and you get a blank look. Now say Diamond Back and everybody nods — one of the biggest names in the sport through the 1980s and on into the '90s. Here is the part nobody tells you. Diamond Back wasn't some company that sprang up on its own. It was a BMX line, started in 1977 by the folks running a successful Japanese-built road-bike import business. That business was Centurion. No Centurion, no Diamond Back. This is the side of the story that got left out.

1969 — Mitchell Weiner, Cozy Yamakoshi, and the start of Western States Imports

Two people put Centurion on the map back in 1969. Mitchell M. Weiner was a Southern California bike guy, and he'd been out selling for Raleigh. Junya "Cozy" Yamakoshi was the other half — the product man. He drew up the frames, picked the parts, worked the build out with the Japanese factories, and got the bikes onto American shores.

How they landed on the name is a good one, and bicycle historian Frank J. Berto wrote it all down. Weiner, still working as Raleigh's sales agent, happened to be reading Joseph Wambaugh's 1971 novel The New Centurions right when a shipment of bikes showed up with no marketing identity attached to it. So he slapped Centurion decals on them and sent them out under that name. They sold. The name stuck, and that was that.

The company underneath the brand began life as Wil-Go Imports, a merger of Weiner's operation and Rick Wilson's Wil-Go out of Santa Clara, California. That outfit then turned into Western States Imports — WSI — set up first in Canoga Park, California, and later in Newbury Park. WSI was the company. Centurion was the brand riding on top of it.

The Japan years — how Centurion got built

The product plan never got complicated. Design and spec it in California. Build it in Japan. Cozy Yamakoshi ran the supply chain, and the first bikes came out of H. Teams Company of Kobe and a handful of other Japanese factories.

And it worked. All through the 1970s, Centurion put together one of the deepest Japanese-import road catalogs you could buy in the States. The Le Mans turned into the brand's calling card and its biggest seller — early ones on hi-tension steel, later ones on Tange Champion tubing. The Pro Tour showed up in the late '70s as a real touring bike, chrome-plated Tange #2 frame, triple crank, the works.

By the 1980s the line had climbed all the way up into the triathlon and time-trial world with the Ironman Dave Scott — built in Japan from 1985 to 1989, named for the six-time Ironman triathlon world champion.

1977 — the BMX boom, and the decision to launch Diamond Back

By the middle of the '70s, BMX had stopped being a little Southern California thing. Kids everywhere were racing beat-up Sting-Rays on dirt, the early sanctions — BUMS, the NBA, the NBL — were signing up members coast to coast, and the first real BMX-only brands like Redline, Webco, SE Racing, Mongoose, Torker and JMC were already out there fighting for it.

Western States Imports had the distribution network, it had Japanese factories that already knew how to weld a frame, and it had the business head to read the room. So in 1977, WSI launched Diamond Back as a BMX sub-brand. It started small. The first frame kits turned up at the tail end of 1976, the early MX model went into real production through 1977 and 1978, and the first bikes ran out of Jere Kirkpatrick's factory in Southern California. By 1979 the whole thing moved to Japan and the Koizumi corporation.

This was no side project. By the early '80s Diamond Back was one of the meanest brands in the country, carrying one of the deepest factory teams anybody had put together. In 1980, Sandy Finkelman of Wheels n' Things helped get a national race team off the ground. The roster ran deep — David Clinton, who'd been a Diamond Back rider from the brand's earliest days, plus Scot Breithaupt-era names like Harry Leary, Doug Davis, Mike Horton and Aaron Stevens, and two riders who'd end up carrying the brand clear through the next decade: Eddy King and Pete Loncarevich.

The riders — Eddy King, Pete Loncarevich, and Matt Hadan

Three names sit at the center of the Diamond Back race story, which makes them central to Centurion's BMX legacy too.

Pete Loncarevich signed with Diamond Back in September 1980 and rode for them through December 1982. He turned pro while he was under that deal. There's a little wrinkle in the Loncarevich-to-Diamond-Back story that's worth keeping on the record. The brand actually wanted Eddy King — who'd come on board at the same time and was two years older — to go pro first, and have Loncarevich hang back a year. The reason was the Team Trophy, the sanctioning-body award that went to the strongest factory team across the national season, and that's what Diamond Back was chasing that year. Pete did eventually turn pro on the brand, and went on to build one of the most decorated careers the sport has ever seen.

Eddy King is the second name. Same window, part of that early-'80s Team Trophy push, and one of the brand's signature race riders. Eddy has his own chapter now — the full story is at Eddy King — King Edward / Silver Bullet.

The third is Matt Hadan, and his Diamond Back run came a few years down the road. Hadan rode for the brand from December 1987 to early February 1991, turning pro under that contract. The Hadan years were the late-boom version of Diamond Back, the one that came after Loncarevich — deeper product, fatter team budget, full color magazine spreads.

That whole run — Loncarevich, King, Hadan, and the supporting cast across the decade — was the race resume Western States Imports built underneath the Centurion umbrella. The road bikes paid the bills. The Diamond Back race program built the name.

The mid-1980s — Diamond Back grows past the parent

Somewhere in the middle of the '80s, the BMX side of the company got bigger than the road side. Diamond Back was pulling magazine covers, signing factory contracts, and taking up shelf space at independent shops all over the country. Centurion was still moving plenty of Le Mans, Pro Tour and Ironman frames, sure. But the energy had clearly shifted onto the BMX line.

1989 to 1990 — the China Bicycle Company acquisition and the consolidation

The corporate shuffle came at the end of the decade. China Bicycle Company (CBC) bought Western States Industries in a deal that took effect in late 1989, for the 1990 model year. CBC looked at the two brands it had just picked up and made a call: instead of running Centurion on the road side and Diamond Back on the BMX and mountain bike side, it would fold everything under one roof.

The name they kept was Diamond Back. So starting in 1990, the company began pulling the Centurion road bikes over under the Diamond Back banner. For one transitional year the road models wore both names — that "Diamondback Centurion" badging on bikes like the Centurion Master TG. Then in 1991 Centurion got dropped from the road names completely. The US Centurion brand was finished.

1991 — the Centurion name goes to Germany

The name didn't die, though. It moved. In 1991 the rights to Centurion outside North America got sold to Wolfgang Renner over in Germany. Renner had been importing Centurion into Germany since 1976, so this was no stranger. His company — running today as Merida & Centurion Germany GmbH, based in Magstadt — has carried Centurion forward as a German bike brand ever since. In September 2024 Merida bought a controlling share of Renner's company for around $19 million. Centurion, in 2026, is still shipping product in Europe.

What happened to Western States Imports

WSI itself shut down in 2000, ten years after the brands got merged. Diamond Back kept rolling under the corporate chain that came next: in 1999 it was bought by the Derby Cycle Corporation, which also owned the Raleigh Bicycle Company at the time.

What Centurion actually was, for BMX

For BMX, Centurion was the parent that made Diamond Back possible. Western States Imports had the distribution, the Japanese factory relationships, the marketing money, and the nerve to back a second brand. In 1977, that's the mix that put a Diamond Back MX on a dealer floor for the first time. By the early '80s, that's the mix that paid for a factory team deep enough to sign Loncarevich, King and the rest. By the late '80s, that's the mix that carried Matt Hadan from amateur all the way to pro on the brand.

And then Diamond Back outgrew its own parent. You almost never see that in the bike business — the BMX side beating the road side at the corporate level — but that's exactly what went down. The 1990 consolidation just made it official.

Sources

Wikipedia: Centurion (bicycle company); Diamondback Bicycles; Pete Loncarevich; Matt Hadan. Sheldon Brown's "Centurion Bicycles From WSI" reference page (sheldonbrown.com/centurion.html). Classic Japanese Bicycles — Centurion brand entry. VintageCenturion.com — Centurion models by year reference. BMXmuseum.com — Centurion and Diamond Back brand galleries; Diamond Back Team brand page. Diamondback Bicycles — "A Lookback At Diamondback History." dbbmx.wordpress.com — "Diamond Back BMX — The Early days, 1977-1981." 23mag.com BMX company history — Diamondback BMX. Bicycle Retailer and Industry News — "Merida buys shares in German distributor for $19 million," September 18, 2024. CapoVelo.com — "Centurion Bike Brand is Up for Grabs in the USA." Period magazine cross-references via oldschoolmags.com on the Diamond Back factory team coverage 1981-1990.

About this page. See also: The History of BMX, Diamond Back, SE Racing, GT, JMC, Redline, Mongoose, Haro, Torker, Schwinn, CW Racing, Hutch, Skyway, Hoffman Bikes, S&M Bikes, Webco, TW BMX, California Racing Designs, Bottema Forks, Hustler, Voris Dixon Bikes, Hyper Bikes, Hi-Tech BMX, Panda Racing Products, Robinson Racing, Free Agent, White Bear, Rebel Racing, Titan BMX, Brian Scura / BS Bikeworks. Sanctions: BUMS, NBA, NBL, ABA, IBMXF, USA BMX. Riders: Scot Breithaupt, Perry Kramer, Stu Thomsen, Greg Hill, Mike Miranda, Eddie Fiola, Tommy Brackens, Pete Loncarevich, Matt Hadan, R.L. Osborn, Todd Anderson, Denny Davidow, Clint Miller, Jeff Bottema, Damian Fulton, Billy Griggs, Darwin Griffin, Brian Bogi Givens, Todd Steen, Martin Aparijo.