BMX Racing History · Rider Profile · Legend Bike Co

Eric Carter

Most kids learn to handle a bike on a track. Eric Carter learned his on a curb. He grew up in Lakewood, California, in a regular suburban neighborhood, and the tracks were too far to ride to. So he rode laps around his own block — not the sidewalk, the 9-inch curb next to the gutter. Car mirrors. Trees. Fire hydrants. Trash cans. He left all of it right where it was and figured out how to thread through without putting a foot down or dropping off the curb. He didn't know it then. But that curb is where the bike control came from.

That's the part people forget about EC. The titles get all the attention, and there are a lot of them. But the cornering came first, and the cornering is the whole story.

The kid with all the titles

The magazines called him "The Golden Child" when he was still an amateur, and it wasn't a stretch. He won IBMXF amateur World Championships three years running — 1985, 1986, 1987. The IBMXF was the real world stage for BMX back then, the federation that ran the global championship before the sport went where it's gone since. Carter kept winning his class on it. Three straight.

He came up through a long string of teams the way amateurs did then — JMC early, then Hutch, then CW Racing, then Schwinn, where he turned pro in 1989. The pro years had their stops and starts. He took breaks. He raced motorcycles for a stretch. But when he was on it, he was on it — in 1993 he came back to BMX full-time and took the NBL National No.1 Pro title.

Out back at Supercross

I knew the name before most people did. In the early days of Supercross BMX, when I was still designing the very first Supercross frame, Eric was one of the riders doing gate starts out back. Pete Longerich was out there. Kiyomi Waller. Billy Griggs. Fast kids, all of them, getting their snaps in. I wasn't building his career and I'm not going to pretend I was. But I watched him pull that gate, and you could see it. The kid was special.

Then he changed sports

Here's where it gets unusual. Most riders get one sport. EC got two. Around the mid-'90s he moved over to mountain bikes, and the curb paid off all over again. Dual slalom, then four-cross — short, tight, gates and turns and contact, the closest thing on a mountain bike to a BMX moto. It was the perfect fit for a guy who'd spent his whole life learning how to pass people in a corner.

And he cleaned up. 1999 Dual Slalom World Cup Champion. 2003 World Cup champion in four-cross. 2004 four-cross World Champion. A NORBA national downhill title in 1999, the year he was also named USA Cycling's athlete of the year. He helped invent four-cross as a discipline, not just win it. Add the BMX side and the mountain bike side together and you land somewhere around 19 national titles and 5 world titles across the two sports. Nobody hands you a record like that. You earn it one corner at a time.

He rode for Barracuda, Troy Lee Designs, GT, and then Mongoose for a long run — long enough that Mongoose built a signature Eric Carter four-cross bike. Last I checked he never took a job outside the bike industry in his whole life. That's about as pure a career as this sport produces.