BMX Freestyle History · Rider Profile · Legend Bike Co

John "Dizz" Hicks

Every era of BMX freestyle has a rider whose reputation was built less on trophies than on being the guy who showed up and did the thing nobody else would try. In the mid-1980s CW Racing freestyle scene, that rider was John Hicks — known to everyone in the sport simply as Dizz. He rode a wedge ramp better than almost anyone touring at the time, premiered a trick that spread across the country within a year, and, more than three decades after his prime, walked into the National BMX Hall of Fame.

From motocross to a parking lot in Vegas

Hicks came up racing both motocross and BMX alongside his older brother Bob, and by his early teens had already made a name locally in both. The turn toward freestyle came at a race in Las Vegas, where he watched Bob Haro perform some of the sport's first true freestyle tricks. Something about it clicked, and Hicks started spending his practice time on trick riding instead of the start gate. His riding buddies gave him the nickname that stuck for the rest of his career after watching him drill spinning tricks over and over, to the point of literally making himself dizzy.

CW Racing and the wedge ramp

Hicks rode for CW Racing, Roger Worsham's Southern California brand, touring with the company's freestyle team through the mid-1980s in CW's leathers. It's where he earned the nickname "King of the Wedge Ramp" — a title that speaks to how completely he owned that piece of ramp terrain relative to everyone else riding it at the time. He and the rest of the CW crew put in serious road time: the team's 1986 CW BMX Freestyle Tour carried Hicks and his teammates across the country performing shows through the summer months, in the same stretch that had him riding Venice Beach in both 1985 and 1987.

The Mega Trick, Venice Beach, 1984

The best-documented story from Hicks' riding career is the spread of one specific trick. According to Freestylin' II: The Book, the 1987 trick manual from Wizard Publications, Hicks is credited as the inventor of a move originally called "The Maiden" — named for the band Iron Maiden — later known in the sport as the Power Pivot. He premiered it at a Venice Beach AFA contest in the summer of 1984. The trick caught on fast: by the AFA San Diego contest in 1985, the book records roughly twenty riders doing versions of it. Hicks was part of the CW Racing freestyle crew — alongside Ceppie Maes, Martin Aparijo, and Dave Nourie — who performed the trick together at Vans and Knott's Berry Farm Easter shows, with Everett Rosecrans running the promotional side for Vans at the time. Freestylin' II calls Hicks the "Master of Dizzaster" in its coverage and separately credits him with a kick turn stall move elsewhere in the book.

Freestylin' Generation F, and the heavy metal look

Hicks also appears in the 2008 retrospective Freestylin' — Generation F: 1984–1989, which reprints his original CW Racing-era interview and profile from the magazine's late-1980s run. That profile leans into the same persona that made him memorable on tour — an all-black, heavy-metal-themed uniform gimmick that matched a rider whose whole approach to freestyle was about commitment to the bit, whether that meant a ramp trick or a look.

National BMX Hall of Fame, 2019

On October 5, 2019, John "Dizz" Hicks was inducted into the National BMX Hall of Fame at a ceremony at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California, in the Early Freestyle category alongside vert legend Jamie Bestwick. The induction marked the 35th year of the ceremony, held as part of BMX's 50th anniversary as a sport — recognition, decades on, for a rider whose reputation was built one wedge ramp and one packed Vans show at a time.