Cheri Elliott

Skyway's Three-Time ABA No. 1 Girl Who Became a Two-Time Hall of Famer

A Legend Bike Co. rider page · researched from Wikipedia's sourced rider record (citing period BMX Plus!, BMX Action, and Super BMX coverage), the United States Bicycling Hall of Fame, and BMXmuseum.com

At a glance

Born April 17, 1970, Citrus Heights, California
BMX career 1980–1986, with a brief 1989–1990 comeback
Teams JR Racing · Boss Racing Frames · Skyway Recreations (1983–1985)
Known for Three straight ABA National No. 1 Girl titles (1983–1985), first woman in the ABA BMX Hall of Fame, then a second career as a Hall of Fame downhill and dual slalom mountain bike racer

Cheri Elliott raced BMX for six years and never turned pro — she wasn't old enough by the time she walked away. That is close to the entire case against her being one of the most accomplished racers, of either sex, the sport produced in the 1980s. It is also the only case there is. She won three consecutive ABA National No. 1 Girl titles, something no other girl racer has matched before or since, regularly lined up against — and beat — the boys' Expert class, and then, nine years after quitting BMX for good, walked onto a mountain bike for the first time and became a national champion in her first season. She is one of a small handful of BMX racers with a plaque in two different Halls of Fame.

Beating the Boys

Elliott started racing in March 1980 at nine years old and won her first race, in the 9 & Over Girls class at Prairie City, California. It did not take long for her to outgrow the class built for her. Racing rules in that era, particularly under the American Bicycle Association, did not let girls into the boys' Expert ranks until 1984, so for years Elliott's fastest path forward was the Trophy Dash — the exhibition race run after the mains, open to class winners across age and skill groups — and the boys' Open class, where girls were free to race whoever showed up. She won there too, regularly making the boys' Main.

Under the looser rules of the United Bicycle Racers Association, which did let girls race the boys' Expert class, Elliott raced 11 Expert against the boys outright and complained the girls' class was "too slow." At a 1981 UBR National at Laguna Seca, California, she entered the 14-and-over girls' bracket at eleven years old, reasoning the 12-to-13 group was too easy. In January 1983, at the ABA Cajun Nationals in Shreveport, Louisiana, she won the 11–12 Trophy Dash outright, beating 12 Expert winner Jason Griggs — the only girl anyone could recall ever winning an ABA national Trophy Dash. She could also do things the boys' field mostly couldn't: Elliott was known for clearing quarter pipes and pulling table tops, laying the bike flat in the air and righting it before landing, at a time almost no girls in the sport were doing tricks like that.

The Skyway Years — Three in a Row

Elliott signed with Skyway Recreations for the 1983 season and stayed through 1985, the factory team that also fielded Perry Kramer, Richie Anderson, and Denny Davidow on the boys' side. It was the best run of her career. She took the ABA National No. 1 Girl plate in 1983, 1984, and 1985 — becoming the first girl to win two consecutive national No. 1 titles, then the only one ever to make it three. Along the way she picked up ABA U.S. Gold Cup titles, IBMXF Murray World Cup wins, and a 14–15 Girls World Championship in 1985. BMX Plus!'s 1984 survey of the "25 Hottest Amateurs in BMX," judged by racers and team officials across the sport, ranked her seventh — not seventh among girls, seventh overall. In 1985 she also became the only girl BMX Action's staff ever put on its list of suggested nominees for the magazine's NORA Cup, the sport's top racer-of-the-year honor.

Walking Away on Top

Elliott retired from twenty-inch BMX racing early in the 1986 season, right after the ABA Supernationals that January. She was fifteen. "I did all I wanted to do," she said at the time. "I wanted to quit last year, but I thought about getting ABA No. 1 two years in a row. And I did it — that was my goal." (She undercounted her own streak in that quote — it was three years running, not two.) She also wanted her senior year of high school back: she'd go on to be named MVP in both basketball and volleyball, and to play basketball as a college freshman at the University of the Pacific. Skyway dropped its BMX racing program after the 1985 season as part of a wider industry pullback — 1986 became known among racers as "the year of no sponsorships," the year Torker and JMC folded and Diamond Back and Redline both cut back their teams — so by BMX Action's account, Elliott left "while on top" rather than go shop for a new ride.

She came out of retirement for two races in October 1989, at the ABA's Fall National in Yorba Linda, California — timed, it seems, around her ABA Hall of Fame induction that November. She dominated her class in qualifying both days and then crashed out of the Main both times. She raced once or twice more into early 1990, then retired from BMX for good.

First Woman in the Hall

In November 1989, Cheri Elliott became the first woman ever inducted into the ABA BMX Hall of Fame. It was not a symbolic honor tacked on for being a pioneer — her results carried it on their own. The United States Bicycling Hall of Fame calls her simply "the Greatest Female BMXer of all time," crediting her with four BMX World Championships, four National Championships, and three U.S. Gold Cups across a six-year career, and notes she remains the only woman to have won Nationals and Trophy Dashes against the men's field.

From BMX to Downhill — a Second Hall of Fame Career

Elliott finished a Bachelor of Science in business, with honors, in 1994, the same year she picked up mountain bike racing for the first time — nine years after her last serious BMX season. She did not need a learning curve. In her first year racing mountain bikes she became the NORBA (National Off-Road Bicycle Association) national dual slalom champion. It was the first of a run that eventually totaled fourteen major national and world titles: four NORBA National Championships (dual slalom in 1994, 1995, and 1998; downhill in 1997), two ESPN X Games gold medals, three X Games silver medals, and a Guinness World Record for most medals won in snow mountain biking. In 1998 she took the bronze medal in Women's Downhill at the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships.

That second career is why the answer to whether Elliott is a "dual Hall of Famer" is yes, but with a precise shape worth stating plainly: she holds two separate Hall of Fame inductions — the ABA BMX Hall of Fame (1989, as its first woman) and the United States Bicycling Hall of Fame (2008, as the first female BMX racer inducted, an honor that folds in her mountain bike record alongside her BMX one). There is no separate, standalone mountain bike hall of fame induction on the record — her off-road career sits inside the 2008 US Bicycling Hall of Fame honor rather than as a third, distinct plaque.

The Crash That Ended It

A bad crash at Mammoth Mountain, California, in 2001 ended her competitive career. She walked away from it, then discovered a few days later that she'd broken her back — a spinal cord annular tear with partial paralysis developing in her right leg. Months of physical therapy followed, without surgery. She was 31. "I felt I dodged a bullet, and I didn't want to dodge any more," she said afterward. She became a Realtor in California, branding herself "The Broker on a Bike," and co-founded a sports management company, JED Sports Management. A few years later she quietly considered a BMX comeback for BMX's 2008 Olympic debut in Beijing, training in secret at Roseville BMX and consulting with Mike King — but her spine wasn't up for it, and she let the idea go.

Where Cheri Elliott fits in the bigger story

Teammates: Perry Kramer, Richie Anderson, Denny Davidow. Brand: Skyway. Sanctions: ABA, NBL, IBMXF. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

Wikipedia, "Cheri Elliott" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheri_Elliott) — a heavily footnoted rider record citing period BMX Plus!, BMX Action, Super BMX, and Bicycles and Dirt coverage from 1982 through 1990, several issues hosted as scanned PDFs on oldschoolmags.com; used here for the amateur record, the boys'-class results, the retirement and comeback timeline, and the mountain bike career. United States Bicycling Hall of Fame — "Cheri Elliott" (usbhof.org/inductee/cheri-elliott), 2008 induction biography. BMXmuseum.com Reference — "Cheri Elliott" (bmxmuseum.com/reference/4067), for the two-time Hall of Fame framing and career title counts. oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were searched directly for independent Elliott coverage; no material beyond what's cited above and through Wikipedia's own oldschoolmags.com-hosted footnotes was found at the time of research. Legend Bike Co.'s own Skyway history page, cross-checked for the Skyway factory team roster and dates.

← The History of BMX