Diamond Back BMX — The Story of Western States Imports (1977 to Today)

Diamond Back BMX — The Story of Western States Imports (1977 to Today)

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

We're telling this story the same way we told the origin piece and the SE Racing chapter: neutrally. No brand gets elevated. No rider gets shorted. Where the record is contested, we say so.

Where it started

Diamond Back did not start as a bike company. It started as a product line inside an import business.

In 1977, Western States Imports (WSI) was already in the bicycle trade out of Newbury Park, California. WSI was the American importer for the Centurion road and touring brand, which had been around since 1969 under Mitchell Weiner and Junya "Cozy" Yamakoshi. When BMX began turning into a real sport on the back of Scot Breithaupt's BUMS races and the early NBA and NBL nationals, WSI started a BMX brand. The name was Diamond Back. Two words, then one.

The early MX frames were built in Southern California in Jere Kirkpatrick's shop in 1977 and 1978. Simple BMX frames built to the standard of the day.

Japan — the Koizumi years and the Black and Silver era

By 1979, production moved to Japan. The factory was Koizumi, and the program manager on the Japanese side was Cozy Yamakoshi himself — the same person whose name was already on Centurion. That move took Diamond Back out of contract-shop BMX and into a build that was, frame for frame, as well-made as anything coming out of the early 1980s.

The first Japanese-built bike was the Large Pro in 1979, followed by the Pro Kit range in 1981 — Senior Pro, Medium Pro, Mini Pro — covering the rider sizes the sanctions raced.

The look people now remember Diamond Back for showed up in 1981, when Sandy Finkelman of Wheels n' Things came over to run the race team. The team uniforms were chrome and black. The bikes were chrome and black. Diamond Back collectors call this stretch the Black and Silver period, and they argue — fairly — that the 1981 through 1984 Koizumi bikes are the high-water mark of the brand's quality.

The Silver Streak — 1981

The Silver Streak landed in 1981 with a chromed frame, chromed forks, chromed bars, and black components. The name came from the factory team itself: the riders were known as "The Silver Streaks," for the color of their race kits and the speed they were running. At $265 retail, the Silver Streak was within reach of a working family, and it sold in the thousands.

The factory team takes shape

The 1981 national team that Finkelman put together included David Clinton, who was already a known DB rider, plus Harry Leary, Doug Davis, Mike Horton, Aaron Stevens, Eddy King, and Pete Loncaravich. (Site spelling note: the Legend Bike Co. rider page uses "Loncarevich"; the correct spelling is Loncaravich.)

Harry Leary became the marquee pro. His nickname inside the team was "Turbo," for his speed. Eddy King — older brother of Mike King — ran alongside him as the other factory pro. They were called the Dynamic Duo. Leary went into the BMX Hall of Fame in 1986; Eddy King followed in 1989.

Pete Loncaravich on Diamond Back — September 1980 to December 1982

Pete Loncaravich's first national sponsor was Diamond Back, not CW. He rode for DB from September 1980 to December 1982, and turned pro while wearing the chrome-and-black kit. Diamond Back did not think he was ready for pro and wanted him to stay amateur long enough to help them win Team Trophy. Pete turned pro anyway, took second in "A" Pro at the 1982 ABA Jag World Championship in his pro debut, and Diamond Back released him from his contract at the end of the year. From there Pete went to LRP, a single weekend at SE, a short stop at Shadow Racing, then on to CW Racing, where he took the 1985 ABA #1 Pro title.

The Harry Leary Turbo, the Turbo Lite, and the Formula 1

By 1982, the team's biggest pro had a signature bike: the Harry Leary Turbo, or HLT. Built at Koizumi. The Turbo Lite arrived the same window, a stripped, lighter-spec version aimed at riders who wanted the geometry without the full pro build.

Late in 1983, Koizumi built the Formula 1. The Formula 1 was sized down for the 10-to-14 age group and built so light that a complete bike came in around 21 pounds — which, for a kid's race bike in 1983, was a real number. It used a stick-tail rear end with each stay made of two tubes, and a distinctive "bat wing" rear brake bridge. The Formula 1 and the Harry Leary Turbo were among the last Diamond Back frames Koizumi built. By 1984, the Plaza Accord had moved the Japanese yen against the US dollar hard enough that almost every American importer had to look elsewhere to protect margin.

Taiwan — Fairly Bicycle and the second wave

The answer was Taiwan. Starting in 1983, Diamond Back moved its lower-spec range to the Fairly Bicycle company. Koizumi continued building the high-end Harry Leary Turbo and Formula 1 for a year of overlap, but the volume of the brand — the entry-level bikes that put kids on Diamond Backs at every track in the country — shifted to Fairly.

The first bike built at Fairly was the Viper in late 1983. The Viper looked like the Silver Streak it was sitting next to in the catalog and cost less. The Pacer 500 followed. Super Viper and Super Streak came in 1984. The Fairly era is where Diamond Back went from a specialty race brand into a brand you could find in shop after shop.

The freestyle side — Mike Dominguez, Woody Itson, and the Strike Zone

By the mid-1980s, freestyle had split off from racing as its own discipline. Diamond Back went in.

The first signing was Mike Dominguez. Diamond Back built the original Strike Zone in 1986-87 as Dominguez's signature frame: 100% chromoly, with geometry and brake mounts specific to freestyle. Alongside it was the Hot Streak — almost identical, in tri-moly tubing, with four small spikes welded onto the rear frame platform for foot grip. Strike Zone, no spikes. Hot Streak, spikes. Same bike, different feet.

Not long after signing Dominguez, Diamond Back approached Woody Itson. Itson had been one of the defining flatland riders of the era at Hutch, where he designed and rode the Hutch Trick Star. When his time at Hutch was up, Diamond Back and Schwinn were both after him. He chose Diamond Back, and part of the deal was that he would design his own version of the Strike Zone. The 1988 Woody Itson Strike Zone shared the Dominguez frame's basic geometry but was tuned for flatland.

For a stretch in the late 1980s, the Diamond Back Freestyle Team was Mr. Air and Mr. Flatland — Dominguez on vert and Itson on flat — and the brand had as serious a freestyle program as anyone outside of Haro or GT.

The Bandits movie and the mainstream push

In 1983, the Australian film BMX Bandits put a Diamond Back Senior Pro on screen under one of the lead characters. Combine that with a national team that was winning at the ABA and NBL nationals and a price ladder that ran from the Viper at the bottom up to the Harry Leary Turbo at the top, and Diamond Back was, by the mid-1980s, one of the dominant BMX brands in the United States — in the same conversation as Mongoose, Redline, GT, Haro, Torker, and Schwinn.

The Ridge Runner — and the slow move toward mountain bikes

In 1982, the company released the Ridge Runner. It was one of the world's first production mountain bikes. Diamond Back was, at that point, still primarily a BMX brand, but the Ridge Runner is the seed of the company that exists today. By 1990, with US BMX sales in the post-boom slump, Western States Imports consolidated its road and touring lines under the Diamondback name. The brand stopped being BMX-with-some-mountain-bikes and became mountain-bikes-with-some-BMX.

The ownership chain — Derby, Raleigh, Accell, Regent

From 1977 to 1999, Diamond Back lived inside Western States Imports. In 1999, Diamondback was bought by the Derby Cycle Corporation, which also owned Raleigh America. In 2001, Derby sold Raleigh and Diamondback. Through the 2000s and into the 2010s, the brand sat under Raleigh America, eventually owned by the Dutch group Accell.

In August 2019, Accell sold Diamondback — along with Redline and IZIP — to Regent, L.P., a Beverly Hills private equity firm. Regent has owned the brand since. Today Diamondback is headquartered in Kent, Washington and sells mountain, road, gravel, hybrid, and youth bikes. The BMX line still exists, but the BMX side of the business is a small fraction of what it was during the Black and Silver era.

Where Diamondback stands today

Diamondback today is a mid-tier full-line bicycle brand. The BMX side is quieter than it was. There are still BMX bikes in the Diamondback catalog, but the race team, the Koizumi-built signature frames, the chrome-and-black factory program, the Dominguez and Itson freestyle era — those belong to a specific window between 1981 and roughly 1989. That window made Diamond Back one of the brands that defined BMX in America.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

Sources

Wikipedia: Diamondback Bicycles; Pete Loncarevich; Harry Leary; Centurion (bicycle company); Accell; Regent LP; Plaza Accord. Diamondback official brand history. Old School BMX UK — Diamond Back models reference pages. BMXmuseum.com — Diamond Back brand and team galleries. Bicycle Retailer and Industry News — "Accell Group sells Diamondback, Redline and IZIP to Regent LP" (August 2019); "BMX Hall of Famer Harry Leary dies at 65" (September 2024). USA BMX Hall of Fame inductee records (Harry Leary, Eddy King). Brian Tunney on Medium — "Woody Itson: The Move from Hutch to Diamond Back." SplendidBMX.com — Mike Dominguez profile. Magazine archives at oldschoolmags.com.