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

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

In 1977 there was no Diamond Back bike company. There was an import outfit in Newbury Park already moving road bikes, and somebody there looked at how fast BMX was catching and decided to start a line. Two years later that little line was building frames in a Japanese factory as good as anything on the planet — chrome and black, fast as the riders who wore the colors. Here's how it happened.

Where it started

Diamond Back didn't start as a bike company. It started as a line of product sitting inside an import business. Funny how a lot of the good ones did.

Back in 1977, Western States Imports — WSI — was already in the bike trade out of Newbury Park, California. They were the American importer for Centurion, the road and touring brand that had been going since 1969 under Mitchell Weiner and Junya "Cozy" Yamakoshi. Then BMX caught fire. Scot Breithaupt and his BUMS races, the early NBA and NBL nationals, the whole thing turning into a real sport in front of everybody. So WSI started a BMX brand. They called it Diamond Back. Two words back then. One word later.

The first MX frames got built right there in Southern California, in Jere Kirkpatrick's shop, 1977 and 1978. Simple frames, built to the standard of the day. Nothing fancy. Nobody was making art yet.

Japan — the Koizumi years and the Black and Silver era

By 1979 production was in Japan. The factory was Koizumi, and the man running the program on the Japanese side was Cozy Yamakoshi himself — the same name that was already on every Centurion. That one move took Diamond Back out of contract-shop BMX and into bikes that were, frame for frame, as good as anything being built in the early '80s. Anything.

First Japanese-built bike was the Large Pro in 1979. The Pro Kit range followed in 1981 — Senior Pro, Medium Pro, Mini Pro — so every rider size the sanctions raced had a bike that fit.

Then 1981 is when the look showed up. The one everybody pictures when you say Diamond Back. Sandy Finkelman came over from Wheels n' Things to run the race team, and the whole program went chrome and black. Chrome and black uniforms, chrome and black bikes. Collectors call it the Black and Silver period, and they'll argue — and they're right — that the 1981 through 1984 Koizumi bikes are the best the brand ever was.

The Silver Streak — 1981

The Silver Streak hit in 1981. Chromed frame, chromed forks, chromed bars, black everything else. The name came straight off the team — the riders were "The Silver Streaks," for the color of their kits and the speed they were carrying. Two hundred sixty-five bucks retail, which meant a working family could actually swing one. It sold in the thousands.

The factory team takes shape

The 1981 national team Finkelman put together had David Clinton, already a known DB guy, plus Harry Leary, Doug Davis, Mike Horton, Aaron Stevens, Eddy King, and Pete Loncarevich.

Harry Leary was the marquee pro. Inside the team they called him "Turbo," and you can guess why. Eddy King — Mike King's older brother — ran alongside him as the other factory pro, and the two of them got tagged the Dynamic Duo. Leary went into the BMX Hall of Fame in 1986. Eddy King followed in 1989. Earned, both of them.

The factory program kept developing racers well past that opening roster. Arizona's Nick Liberatore came up through Diamond Back's ranks from 1987 to 1993, climbing from the age-class mains to the AA Pro gate on the same factory colors.

Pete Loncarevich on Diamond Back — September 1980 to December 1982

Here's one a lot of people get wrong. Pete Loncarevich's first national sponsor wasn't CW. It was Diamond Back. He rode for DB from September 1980 to December 1982, and he turned pro while he was wearing that chrome-and-black kit. Thing is, Diamond Back didn't think he was ready, and they 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 they let him go at the end of the year. From there it was LRP, one weekend at SE, a short stop at Shadow Racing, then CW Racing, where he won the 1985 ABA #1 Pro title. So much for not being ready.

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

By 1982 the team's biggest pro had his own signature bike — the Harry Leary Turbo, the HLT. Built at Koizumi. The Turbo Lite came in the same window, a stripped, lighter-spec version for the rider who wanted the geometry without the full pro build.

Late in 1983, Koizumi built the Formula 1. This one was sized down for the 10-to-14 crowd and built so light a complete bike came in around 21 pounds. For a kid's race bike in 1983, that was a real number — people noticed. It ran a stick-tail rear end, each stay made of two tubes, and that distinctive "bat wing" rear brake bridge. The Formula 1 and the Harry Leary Turbo were about the last frames Koizumi built for Diamond Back. By 1984 the Plaza Accord had shoved the yen against the dollar hard enough that just about every American importer had to go looking elsewhere to protect their margin. Diamond Back was no different.

Taiwan — Fairly Bicycle and the second wave

The answer was Taiwan. Starting in 1983 the lower-spec range moved to the Fairly Bicycle company. Koizumi kept 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 — went to Fairly.

First bike out of Fairly was the Viper, late 1983. It looked like the Silver Streak sitting next to it in the catalog and cost less, which is exactly the point. The Pacer 500 came after. Super Viper and Super Streak landed in 1984. The Fairly era is where Diamond Back stopped being a specialty race brand and turned into a brand you'd find in shop after shop after shop.

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

By the mid-'80s, freestyle had broken off from racing into its own thing entirely. Diamond Back went in.

First signing was Mike Dominguez. Diamond Back built the original Strike Zone in 1986-87 as his signature frame — 100% chromoly, geometry and brake mounts made for freestyle. Right next to it was the Hot Streak. Almost the same bike, in tri-moly tubing, with four little spikes welded onto the rear frame platform so your feet would grab. Strike Zone, no spikes. Hot Streak, spikes. Same bike, different feet. That's the whole difference.

Not long after Dominguez, Diamond Back went after Woody Itson. Itson was one of the defining flatland riders of the era over at Hutch, where he designed and rode the Hutch Trick Star. When his time at Hutch was done, both Diamond Back and Schwinn were after him. He picked Diamond Back, and part of the deal was he'd design his own version of the Strike Zone. The 1988 Woody Itson Strike Zone carried the Dominguez frame's basic geometry but tuned it for flatland.

For a stretch in the late '80s the Diamond Back Freestyle Team was Mr. Air and Mr. Flatland — Dominguez on vert, Itson on flat — and the brand had a freestyle program as serious as anybody outside Haro or GT. That's good company to be standing in.

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 leads. Put that next to a national team winning at the ABA and NBL nationals, and a price ladder that ran from the Viper at the bottom clear up to the Harry Leary Turbo at the top, and by the mid-'80s Diamond Back was one of the dominant BMX brands in the country. Same breath as Mongoose, Redline, GT, Haro, Torker, and Schwinn.

The Ridge Runner — and the slow move toward mountain bikes

In 1982 the company put out the Ridge Runner. One of the first production mountain bikes in the world. At that point Diamond Back was still mostly a BMX brand, but the Ridge Runner is the seed of the company that's still around today. By 1990, with US BMX sales deep in the post-boom slump, Western States Imports pulled its road and touring lines in under the Diamondback name. The brand quit being BMX-with-some-mountain-bikes and became mountain-bikes-with-some-BMX. You can argue whether that was the right call. You can't argue it kept them alive.

The ownership chain — Derby, Raleigh, Accell, Regent

From 1977 to 1999, Diamond Back lived inside Western States Imports. In 1999 the Derby Cycle Corporation bought it — same outfit that owned Raleigh America. In 2001 Derby sold off Raleigh and Diamondback both. Through the 2000s and into the 2010s the brand sat under Raleigh America, eventually owned by the Dutch group Accell.

Then August 2019, Accell sold Diamondback — along with Redline and IZIP — to Regent, L.P., a Beverly Hills private equity firm. Regent's had it ever since. Today Diamondback runs out of Kent, Washington and sells mountain, road, gravel, hybrid, and youth bikes. The BMX line is still there, technically. But the BMX side of the business is a sliver of what it was in the Black and Silver days.

Where Diamondback stands today

Diamondback now is a mid-tier full-line bike brand. The BMX side is quiet. There are still BMX bikes in the catalog, sure, but the race team, the Koizumi-built signature frames, the chrome-and-black factory program, the Dominguez and Itson freestyle years — all of that belongs to one specific window, 1981 to about 1989. Anyway. That window is the reason Diamond Back is one of the brands that built BMX in America in the first place. Nobody takes that away from them.

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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. Legend Bike Co.'s own Nick Liberatore page — cross-checked for his 1987-1993 Diamond Back factory tenure.