BMX Racing History · Chapter 9 · Legend Bike Co

Haro: The Company That Invented Freestyle

Everybody else started with a bike. Haro started with a six-dollar number plate and a kid who could draw. And out of that little side hustle came the first frame ever built just for freestyle, the best team the sport had seen, and a whole second sport that grew up next to racing and then walked off in its own direction. You want to know where freestyle actually came from? It's this company. Right here.

The Kid Who Could Draw

Bob Haro came up racing motocross around San Diego. Fifty-some trophies before the money dried up. He got onto a BMX bike around 1976, his brother's bike, and the thing that made him different wasn't how fast he was. It was the pen. His first BMX art ran on the cover of BMX Weekly in December 1976, and by 1977 Bob Osborn had him on staff drawing for BMX Action. Spare time, he was down at the San Diego skateparks, watching what the skateboarders were doing and figuring out how to do it on a bike instead. That Rock Walk photo Osborn shot in September 1978? People credit that as the first flatland trick anybody ever put on film.

Six Dollars, Shipping Included

It all started with number plates. Hand-cut vinyl numbers on Preston Petty motocross plates, made for buddies — including out on the road with Scot Breithaupt's SE crew in 1977. Then in August 1978, BMX Action ran "Haro's Factory Plates" in the products column. Six bucks, shipping included. That's the date the company counts as day one. Inside a year, look at the covers of BMX Action — most of the pros on them were running Haro plates. By 1980 he'd outgrown his parents' place in Spring Valley and moved the whole thing to its own shop in Torrance.

The Trick Team

With Bob Osborn behind it, Haro and Osborn's kid R.L. Osborn put together the BMX Action Trick Team — choreographed trick shows at races and bike shows. Nobody had toured doing BMX tricks as the actual main event before. It was always the warm-up act, the thing before the real thing. Not anymore. Summer of 1981, Haro took it national. The first Haro Freestyle Tour: three months, 18,000 miles crammed in a Dodge van with Bob Morales and R.L.'s crew, Vans and Oakley footing the bill. They weren't racing anybody. They weren't competing for anything. They were making up a job that didn't exist yet.

The Freestyler

Here's the problem. You ride ramps and ditches on a race frame, you break race frames. So on that 1981 tour Haro sat down and sketched out what a freestyle bike ought to be, then took it to his frame sponsor — Torker — that fall. Prototypes got beat on in the skateparks by Haro, Bob Morales, and Eddie Fiola. Torker's Fullerton factory started building them in 1982, and that summer the Haro Freestyler landed: the first frame and fork ever built on purpose for freestyle. The real Torker-built ones carry a serial number ending in "F." That's how you know.

Same year, Haro spent five days doing second-unit stunt riding on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Biggest movie of 1982. That BMX chase scene is burned into every kid who sat in that theater.

Master, Sport, and the Best Team in Freestyle

By 1984 Haro was running its own manufacturing and dropped the two frames that defined the middle of the decade. The Master, for flatland. And the Sport — the first signature freestyle model, built around vert prodigy Mike Dominguez. The cheaper FST complete showed up that fall. And the 1985 Master came in a neon green that nobody who lived through it has ever managed to forget.

The team was just the best there was. Dennis McCoy signed at the end of 1984 and ran the AFA circuit. Ron Wilkerson came over from GT, threw the first nothing air on a Haro Sport, and started up the 2-Hip King of Vert series. Brian Blyther. Dave Nourie. Joe Johnson, who landed the first tailwhip air. Rick Moliterno. And a teenage Mat Hoffman, who put his first 900 down on a Haro Sport. All of them wore the H. Then later you get Dave Mirra in 1994 and Ryan Nyquist in 1997 — and Nyquist stayed on the team better than 25 years.

After Bob

Bob Haro quit riding himself by the mid-80s — four knee surgeries will do that to you. In the 1986–87 deal he sold the company to West Coast Cycle, stayed on under contract, and down the road started his own design firm. That firm, among everything else it did, choreographed the bike sequence at the London Olympics opening ceremony in 2012. Hall of Fame in 1987. The company went to Derby in 1988, then in 1993 to an investor group led by Jim Ford — who'd been Haro's general manager since 1981, so it stayed in the family in a way. Haro Bicycle Corporation is still here today, still independent, and it's got the longest unbroken freestyle bloodline in the whole sport.

Timeline

• 1976 First published Haro art, BMX Weekly cover, December.
• 1977 Staff artist at BMX Action. Hand-cut plates for friends on the SE tour.
• 1978 "Haro's Factory Plates" in BMX Action, August — $6 shipped. Rock Walk photographed in September.
• 1980 Operations move to Torrance. BMX Action Trick Team touring with R.L. Osborn.
• 1981 First Haro Freestyle Tour — 18,000 miles. Freestyler concept pitched to Torker in the fall.
• 1982 Haro Freestyler launches — the first freestyle frame and fork. Five days of stunt riding on E.T.
• 1984 Master and Sport launch. Production moves to Taiwan. FST follows in October.
• 1984–86 McCoy, Wilkerson, Blyther, Nourie, Johnson sign. The 2-Hip King of Vert begins.
• 1985 Haro Racing Division unveiled at the ABA Grands with Pete Loncarevich.
• 1986–87 Bob Haro sells to West Coast Cycle.
• 1988 Mat Hoffman joins the team. Company passes to Derby.
• 1993 Investor group led by Jim Ford takes over.
• 1994–97 Dave Mirra, then Ryan Nyquist — a 25-plus-year run begins.