Eddie Fiola was BMX freestyle's first real superstar. Half the riders who made names for themselves in the 90s and 2000s were still kids when Fiola had already taken King of the Skateparks five times over. He'd invented a whole generation of pool and ramp tricks before most of them. He co-designed the freestyle bike everybody wanted, then did the riding in one of the best BMX movies ever shot. One longtime editor just called him "BMX's first super star" and left it there.

Forty years on he's still riding. Still doing stunts. Still showing up for the sport that made him.

Early life and coming up

Edward Lynn Fiola was born September 28, 1964 in Bellflower, California. The skateboard came first — around age 10, in 1974, riding Skatopia and Lakewood down in Southern California. He was watching the skaters of the day, Stacy Peralta, Ray "Bones" Rodriguez, and he started dragging their moves over onto a bike. The bike was just easier to get around on than a board.

He had no money. There's a story he tells about riding his BMX bike miles from his parents' house to the dumpster behind the SE Racing shop in Paramount, digging out busted frames and parts he could rebuild into something that rolled. It runs through his own book, When I Was King: The Eddie Fiola Story (co-written with Billy Henrickle): a 14-year-old kid with no pro bike, scrambling to put together something good enough to land a published photo, sprinting home and back when he didn't have his bike at the park that day because Bob Osborn was shooting and that might've been his one shot. That's the grit you see in his riding. It's also why he ended up where he did.

His first sponsor, around 1980, was Premier Helmets. Fred Blood — SE Racing, later General — introduced him to Premier's Denise Barter and a racer named Harry Leary, who'd go on to become production manager at Diamond Back. Torker chipped in early on equipment too. By 1981 the Southern California skatepark crowd was passing around stories about this 16-year-old out of Lakewood riding concrete bowls in a way nobody had seen before.

The King of the Skateparks years

In 1981, Bob Morales co-founded the Amateur Skatepark Association (ASPA) to give freestyle BMX an actual contest structure. ASPA's marquee event was the King of the Skateparks — a series run at the big Southern California parks (Upland, Lakewood, Skatopia, and others), riders scored on style, trick difficulty, and flow. ASPA later renamed itself the AFA, the American Freestyle Association.

Fiola won the first 16-plus Expert class in 1982. In 1983, the 17-plus Expert. Then they created the pro class and he won that too, in 1984 — first ever Pro King of the Skateparks. He was the first member of the renamed AFA that year as well. 1985, took the title again. 1986, he won it a fifth and final time, and the series wrapped that year. Five King of the Skateparks titles across the decade. Add four Freestylin' magazine NORA Cups (Number One Rider Award), the very first one ever handed out in 1985 among them. He also picked up BMX Plus! Freestyler of the Year more than once, including 1985 and 1986.

The thing that set him apart was the style. Fiola had the smoothest flow going. Some freestylers were technicians, some were showmen — Fiola was both. The opposite one-hander, the lookback one-hander, those became his. And the way he linked tricks together in bowls and on quarterpipes set the bar everybody else was measured against. His rivalry with Mike Dominguez — Dominguez on vert, Fiola in the bowls and parks — was basically the mid-80s competitive freestyle scene.

Haro, Kuwahara, and the E.T. bike

Fiola turned pro in 1982 at 18. Bob Morales, already on Haro Bikes, helped broker Fiola's first big sponsorship with Haro that same year. It didn't last long. By the end of 1982 both Fiola and Morales had left Haro and signed a one-year deal with Kuwahara, where they helped design and promote the company's first freestyle bike — the same year Kuwahara was getting world-famous for supplying the BMX bike Elliott rides in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

GT Bicycles and the Performer

When the Kuwahara deal ran out in 1983, Fiola and Morales both moved to GT Bicycles. That turned into one of the most consequential rider-and-brand pairings BMX has ever had. At GT, Fiola and Morales co-designed a frame built specifically for freestyle. It came out as the GT Pro Performer in 1984 and became the best-selling freestyle BMX of the whole decade. Just about every freestyle kid in America in the mid-80s either had a Pro Performer or wanted one.

1983 was when it all took off. Fiola did a freestyle show with Morales at the Super Bowl of Motocross at Anaheim Stadium, 40,000 people watching. He judged the World Amateur Championships. He won the 17-plus Expert class at King of the Skateparks. The next year he took the GT-BMX summer freestyle championship in Venice Beach. He flew to the UK for the televised Kellogg's freestyle BMX competition and won it — the commentator called him "the flying banana" on account of the all-yellow bike and kit, "TRIX R 4 KIDZ" printed across the back of his pants.

In 1985, GT put Fiola and fellow GT rider Dave Breed on a 15-country world tour over three months: Saudi Arabia, Japan, Australia, England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the U.S. including Hawaii. By the middle of the decade Fiola was reportedly pulling in around $100,000 a year from riding. Sounds modest now. For an action sports athlete in the mid-80s it was a fortune.

RAD, 1986

In 1986 the stuntman-turned-director Hal Needham was making RAD, the first feature-length BMX movie. Bill Allen got cast as the lead, Cru Jones. Fiola came on as technical advisor and the primary stunt rider for all of Cru's on-bike scenes. Allen had to dye his hair to match Fiola's because the cuts between the two ran so tight. Both the scripted story and the stunt choreography were built around what Fiola could actually pull off on a bike.

His book and a pile of interviews have confirmed what people always whispered: the film was loosely based on his own life. A kid from a smallish town, not much money, clawing his way up through a freestyle contest against better-funded rivals — that was Fiola's 1979 to 1984. The Helltrack stunts, the flatland sequences, most of the hero shots in RAD, that's all Fiola. He rides all through RAD TV: The Sequel too, the promo video that came after.

Same year, he won the 1986 IBMXF Freestyle World Championships in Vancouver. The judging got messy — he lost the pro ramps scoring because he hadn't worn a mouthguard, but the overall-Pro scoring still came down his way and the title was his. He took the AFA Masters Series runner-up spot, won his second NORA Cup and his second BMX Plus! Freestyler of the Year, and grabbed the final pro-class King of the Skateparks.

The crash and reinvention

By 1987 BMX was caving in. The crash that took down Torker, Mongoose, most of the freestyle brands, BMX Action magazine, and the factory teams didn't spare Fiola either. GT killed its freestyle program. Fiola signed a short-lived deal to promote Citicat bikes that never really came together. He spent 1987 and 1988 as a BMX Plus! test rider. By 1990 he was riding for Vans and Bully, touring with Josh White and Scotty Freeman. In 1992 he was still doing shows on leftover support from GT and Vans.

What came next turned into the second act of his career. Early 90s, Fiola started auditioning for commercials in Los Angeles. The BMX skills that had made him a champion carried straight over into stunt work. He was good at falling. Good at hitting his marks. Good at making complicated physical choreography look like nothing. He started getting booked.

Over the next 25 years Fiola built a second career as one of Hollywood's go-to stunt riders and stunt coordinators. His IMDB-credited work runs through Superman II and III, The Dukes of Hazzard (2005), The Italian Job (2003), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), The Hangover, The Bourne Legacy (2012), Independence Day, and Gamer. He's worked alongside Harrison Ford, Will Smith, most of the A-list action stars of the last two decades. One spot people still bring up was a Mountain Dew ad where he chases down and tackles a cheetah that swiped his can — it ran hard in Australia.

The return to BMX

Fiola never really left BMX. In 2004 he hooked back up with Redline. In 2005 he sat for an interview in Joe Kid on a Stingray, the documentary that became the canonical filmed history of the sport. In 2006 he did a July 4 show with Todd Anderson in Orange County. In 2008 they honored him at the OS-BMX gathering with a tribute white GT Pro Performer.

In 2009, the American Bicycle Association put Fiola into the BMX Hall of Fame as a Freestyle Pioneer.

In 2013 he launched the EF Proformer — a limited run of 250 signature frame, fork, and handlebar sets, U.S.-made, built as a straight homage to his original GT Pro Performer designs. Collectors cleaned them out.

Through the 2010s and into the 2020s Fiola has kept up selective stunt work, including a 2025 America's Got Talent commercial spot, plus ongoing BMX demos at events like the GT BMX Freestyle World Tour and Woodward West half-pipe sessions. He started his own YouTube channel covering the riding and the stunt career both. A feature documentary, Effortless: The Eddie Fiola Story, came out in 2026.

Legacy

What Fiola did for freestyle in the 80s is what Scot Breithaupt did for BMX as a sport in the 70s — he set the standard for what being the best looked like. Before Fiola, freestyle was something riders messed around with between races. After him it was its own sport, with its own contests, its own magazines, its own world champion, its own hero. Every vert rider, every park rider, every flatland rider who came after was riding on ground he'd helped break. A lot of them were riding frames that traced right back to the GT Pro Performer he co-designed in 1983.

He's also one of the few BMX riders of his generation who built a whole second career outside the sport without ever actually leaving it. The stunt work didn't replace BMX for him. It ran right alongside it.

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