BMX Racing History · Chapter 6 · Legend Bike Co

GT Bicycles: The Biggest Brand BMX Ever Built

Every BMX brand starts in a small place. GT started smaller than most. One dad, one garage, one kid who needed a frame that wouldn't fold under him. And it ends — for a while, anyway — with about half the BMX bikes sold in this country wearing a GT family name on the headtube. Nobody in the history of the sport ever got bigger. Here's how that happened, and how it came apart.

The Welder and the Kid

Gary Turner came out of drag racing. He spent the 1960s welding chromoly dragster chassis, and that matters — it means he understood thin-wall steel tubing better than just about anybody who'd ever go on to build a BMX frame. Early 1970s now. His son Craig puts it at 1971, out at a dirt field near Holifield Park in Norwalk. Gary watched the neighborhood kids slamming their heavy department-store bikes off jumps and figured Craig deserved better than that. So he cut up race-car chassis tubing in his garage in Orange and welded together a 4130 chromoly frame. The decals on those first ones read "Gary Turner BMX."

Then the other kids wanted one. Then the bike shops did. By 1976 Turner was building frames for Pedals Ready, the pro shop at the Western Sports-A-Rama track, and the Pedals Ready/GT "Ames Replica" ran as an ad in the very first issue of BMX Action in December 1976. For three years his frames sold under other people's names. The man built the bikes and didn't have a brand of his own to put on them.

Richard Long

Richard Long owned Anaheim Cycles and ran the Azusa BMX track — the track that hosted the ABA's first national back in February 1978. He noticed Turner's frames were selling as fast as he could put them on the floor, so he picked up the phone and called the welder directly. In 1979 the two of them incorporated GT Bicycles. Turner's initials went on the headtube. Turner ran engineering and production, Long ran the business. The first GT frames got built in Sam and Anita Shockley's garage in Santa Ana, and that garage was the first address GT ever printed in its ads, before things grew into a real frame shop in the same town. Long was the salesman and the planner, and by every account I've ever heard he was the engine that drove the whole thing for the next seventeen years.

The first GT ads showed up in BMX Action in early 1980, and complete GT Pro bikes came right behind them. Through the early 80s the race line filled out — the Pro Series, the Mach One, the Interceptor. Bikes that put GT on tracks all over the place, under everybody from first-day novices to national pros.

The Performer and the Freestyle Gold Rush

In 1983 GT signed two freestylers coming off Kuwahara deals: Eddie Fiola and Bob Morales. The bike that came out of that, the 1984 Pro Performer, carried GT's own ad copy as its credit: "Designed by professional freestylers, Eddie Fiola and Bob Morales." The bent down tube cleared the front brake cable so you could spin the bars all the way around, and when it launched the only other purpose-built freestyle bike you could buy was the Haro Freestyler. The Performer turned into one of the best-selling freestyle bikes of the whole decade. It was the bike under thousands of kids in driveways from one end of America to the other.

Fiola rode for GT through August 1987 and fronted the GT World Tour. Martin Aparijo, Josh White, then Dave Voelker and a young Dave Mirra all carried the GT freestyle flag through the late 80s and into the early 90s.

Buying the Neighborhood

GT didn't just grow. It went out and bought. Dyno, which Bob Morales started in 1982, came into the family mid-decade. Robinson — Chuck Robinson's race brand — joined in 1986, after GT had already been building Robinson frames for them; Chuck stuck around for a stretch after the sale. Auburn, started in 1988 by Todd Huffman and Bob Morales, got picked up in 1989. Powerlite, founded back in 1977 by Steve Rink — same Steve Rink who helped build the first Torker prototype — came aboard in 1989 too. Throw in the Riteway distribution arm in 1987, and now GT owned the whole pipeline, factory floor straight through to the shop counter.

By 1995, GT's Todd Hoffman told Ride BMX UK the company was sitting on roughly fifty percent of the American BMX market across GT, Dyno, Robinson, Auburn, and Powerlite. Half the market. Nobody before them did that, and nobody's done it since.

The Olympics, and the Worst Week

In 1993 the company went through a management-led buyout and Gary Turner stepped back from the day-to-day. October 1995, GT went public on NASDAQ. The next year it built the carbon "Superbike" for the US Olympic track team — Project '96 — and aluminum Speed Series race frames were dragging mountain bike tech back over into BMX. Things were flying.

And then, on July 12, 1996, Richard Long was killed in a motorcycle accident on his way to the NORBA national at Big Bear. He was 46. One week later his Superbikes rolled onto the Olympic velodrome in Atlanta and won two silver medals. The company he built never really replaced him. You don't replace a guy like that.

After Long

In 1998 Questor Partners, who owned Schwinn, bought GT. June 2001, the combined Schwinn/GT operation filed for bankruptcy, and that September Pacific Cycle bought the brands out of bankruptcy court for $86 million. Dorel Industries bought Pacific Cycle in 2004. Then in 2021 Pon Holdings bought the entire bike portfolio for $810 million. Through every bit of that, the GT name kept racing — its modern BMX program took riders all the way to the Olympic podium, including Kye Whyte's silver for Great Britain in Tokyo.

In December 2024 GT hit pause: no new product, staff cuts, inventory sold down through 2025. The BMX race team got let go that same month — which is exactly how Kye Whyte ended up signing with Supercross BMX in January 2025. As of mid-2026 the brand's still paused, and Pon has said the name isn't for sale.

Gary Turner, meanwhile, is right back where the whole thing started — building frames with his son Craig under the Gary Turner name. The welder outlasted the empire. Figure that one out.

Timeline

• 1971–72 Gary Turner welds his first chromoly BMX frames in his garage in Orange for son Craig.
• 1976 Pedals Ready/GT "Ames Replica" ad runs in the first issue of BMX Action, December 1976.
• 1979 Turner and Richard Long incorporate GT Bicycles. First frames built in the Shockley garage, Santa Ana.
• 1980 First GT ads in BMX Action; GT Pro completes reach shops.
• 1983 Eddie Fiola and Bob Morales sign with GT.
• 1984 Pro Performer launches — "Designed by professional freestylers, Eddie Fiola and Bob Morales."
• 1985–89 GT acquires Dyno, Robinson, Riteway, Auburn, and Powerlite.
• 1993 Management buyout; Gary Turner steps back.
• 1995 IPO on NASDAQ. GT claims ~50% of the US BMX market.
• 1996 Richard Long dies July 12, en route to Big Bear. The GT Superbike wins two Olympic silver medals a week later.
• 1998 Questor Partners (Schwinn) acquires GT.
• 2001 Schwinn/GT bankruptcy; Pacific Cycle buys the brands for $86M.
• 2004 Dorel Industries acquires Pacific Cycle.
• 2021 Pon Holdings acquires the portfolio for $810M.
• 2024 GT pauses new products in December; BMX race team released.