Ceppie Maes

The CW Racing Flatlander Who Rode Stunts for E.T. Before Freestyle Made Him Famous

A Legend Bike Co. rider page · cross-referenced with our CW Racing and Freestylin' Magazine chapters

At a glance

Real name Greg Maes
Discipline Flatland / freestyle BMX
Team CW Racing (Custom Works), Brea, California
Known for Riding uncredited BMX stunts in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), then joining CW's freestyle crew and appearing on the July 1986 cover of Super BMX & Freestyle
Today Runs a custom picture-framing business in Oakland, California

Ceppie Maes was doing stunt work for Steven Spielberg before most of the riders he'd later tour with had a magazine credit to their name. By the time Freestylin' and CW Racing made freestyle into its own culture in the mid-1980s, Maes was already a few years into a BMX career that started on a movie set. He never became one of the sport's headline names — but he shows up, consistently and specifically, at some of freestyle's most-cited moments.

Uncredited in E.T., 1982

In 1982, Maes was one of eight BMX riders hired as stunt doubles for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, working the film's iconic bicycle-chase sequences alongside Robert Cardoza, Bob Haro, David Lee, Grant Meyers, Chris Taylor, Duke Britton, and Steve Williby. According to a detailed account published by Narratively in 2013, Maes was one of three riders — with Cardoza and Lee — who arrived five minutes late to a private cast-and-crew screening at Culver Studios months before the film's public release, and got caught up in the commotion of Drew Barrymore's mother trying to talk her way past a locked gate. None of the eight stunt riders, Maes included, were credited in the film's final release. The Narratively piece is paywalled beyond its opening scene, so we're citing what's publicly readable rather than claiming access to its full reporting.

Into the CW Crew

By the mid-1980s, Maes was riding for CW Racing, Roger Worsham's Brea, California brand best known for the zigzag Phaze 1 Z-Frame. Freestylin' II: The Book, the 1987 Wizard Publications trick manual by Mark Lewman and Craig "Gork" Barrette, names Maes in its front-matter special-thanks list and places him in the middle of one of the book's better oral-history threads: the spread of the "Mega Trick," a move John "Dizz" Hicks premiered at a Venice Beach AFA contest in the summer of 1984. By the following year's AFA San Diego contest, the book says, around twenty riders had picked it up, and it credits the CW Racing crew — Hicks, Maes, Mike "Buff," Martin Aparijo, and Dave Nourie — with performing back-wheel hops at the Vans/Knott's Berry Farm Easter shows of that era, under Vans promo man Everett Rosecrans.

CW's own chapter in this library notes that the brand's confirmed team roster is thin for its peak 1982–1987 run, with only its early Coast Wheels-era lineup (Chris Blackburn, Chris Scott, Tony Swain, Henry Moreno) and its best-known race pros (Mike "Hollywood" Miranda, Tracer Finn, Billy Griggs, Pistol Pete Loncarevich) documented by name. Maes and the freestyle side of that same team fill in part of that gap. Outside search indexing puts his arrival on CW's freestyle program at summer 1985, after which he reportedly toured for roughly two years alongside Gary Pollak and Dizz Hicks — a claim we're presenting at the search-snippet level, since the underlying page could not be loaded directly to confirm it in full.

Magazine Cover and the Road Show

Maes appeared on the cover of the July 1986 issue of Super BMX & Freestyle magazine, credited as a CW team pro. A surviving video from a 1986 CW freestyle team demo at Haack's Cycle in Madison, Wisconsin — one stop on what looks to have been a genuine touring schedule — shows Maes riding alongside Dizz Hicks and Gary Pollak, and was later republished by the flatland site Flat Matters Online in a 2018 "Old School Sundays" feature. Decades on, Maes returned to the sport's stage in a different role: on September 15, 2011, he served as a presenter for the Ramp category at the 15th Annual NORA Cup, held at The Palms Pearl Theatre in Las Vegas.

Where the public record runs thin

We could not confirm the claim that Maes went on to become a noted BMX or skate photographer. The closest matching result is a print titled "Ceppie Maes" sold on photographer Windy Osborn's own site — a photograph of Maes, taken by Osborn, not a credit for Maes as a photographer himself — which may be the root of that idea if it circulated secondhand. What is documented is that Maes currently runs a custom picture-framing business in Oakland, California, and appears in current stunt-performer listings under a production company called johndoughnut productions, which is a different line of work than magazine or skate photography. We also could not pin down exact birth details, a start date for his BMX riding career before the 1982 E.T. shoot, or a documented end date for his time with CW.

Where Ceppie Maes fits in the bigger story

Brand: CW Racing. Magazine: Freestylin' Magazine. Riders: Martin Aparijo · Dave Nourie · Mike "Hollywood" Miranda · Bob Haro. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

Emon Hassan, "The BMX Boys of E.T.," Narratively (narratively.com, May 16, 2013; republished on Substack) — the eight-rider stunt roster and the Culver Studios screening story, cited at the level readable before its paywall. theweek.com, "The BMX boys of E.T." — corroborating summary of the same story. Freestylin' II: The Book, Mark Lewman and Craig "Gork" Barrette, Wizard Publications, 1987 — the special-thanks listing and the "Mega Trick" origin story naming Maes as part of the CW Racing crew, per this library's own book-mining review of the title. bmxsociety.com, "Ceppie Maes in Hot Rod Magazine" and related forum threads — his CW team era and July 1986 Super BMX & Freestyle cover, cited at the forum-snippet level. flatmattersonline.com, "Old School Sundays with Dizz Hicks, Ceppie Maes and Gary Pollak" (February 4, 2018) — the 1986 Haack's Cycle demo footage. Coverage of the 2011 NORA Cup (15th Annual, September 15, 2011, Las Vegas) crediting Maes as a Ramp-category presenter. windyosborn.com — product listing for a photographic print titled "Ceppie Maes," checked to verify (and rule out) the photographer claim. Legend Bike Co. — CW Racing chapter, cross-referenced for consistency on CW's team roster gaps. oldschoolmags.com was checked first, per this library's research standard, but returned no page-level results specific to Maes.