It started with kids who weren't allowed to ride motorcycles yet. Southern California, late 1960s, and every boy who watched motocross wanted to be out there sliding through the berms and flying off the jumps like his heroes. Trouble was, he was twelve. So he did the next best thing. He grabbed the bike sitting in the garage — usually a Schwinn Sting-Ray with a banana seat and high-rise bars, a bike Schwinn had been selling since 1963 for riding to school — and he took it out to the nearest dirt lot and pretended it was a motorcycle. Nobody told him to. The bike wasn't built for it. He did it anyway. That's BMX. That's the whole thing, right there at the start, and everything that came after grew out of a bunch of kids in the dirt copying something they were too young to do for real.

What is BMX racing?

BMX racing is a short-course bicycle sport run on a dirt track with jumps, rollers, and banked turns. Up to eight riders drop off a starting hill at the same time, sprint through the first straight, and try to be first to the finish line — usually in under 45 seconds. It's fast, it's physical, and the gate decides as much of it as the finish line does.

The bikes are 20-inch or 24-inch cruiser frames built for strength and acceleration, not comfort. No suspension. One gear. One brake. Riders race in age and skill classes, everything from five-year-old beginners up to grown adults who've been doing this their whole lives.

There are two sides to the sport. Racing is the one this article follows. Freestyle is the other — the trick side, which grew out of the same bikes and the same riders before it broke off into a sport of its own, with its own heroes and brands and culture. That split matters. For the first ten years it was all one thing. Then the paths went their separate ways, and we'll follow both of them.

Where it started

BMX started in Southern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Kids too young for motorcycles wanted to do what their motocross heroes did — fly the jumps, slide the berms, race their buddies — so they did it on whatever they had. Mostly that meant the Schwinn Sting-Ray, the 20-inch bike with the banana seat and high-rise bars that Schwinn had been selling since 1963. It was never meant for dirt. They rode it in the dirt anyway.

No one person invented BMX. It was happening in vacant lots from San Pedro to San Fernando, and probably in Nebraska and New Jersey too. But California was where it got filmed.

On Any Sunday, July 1971

In July 1971, filmmaker Bruce Brown put out On Any Sunday, a motorcycle racing documentary that Steve McQueen produced and helped pay for. The opening four minutes had nothing to do with motorcycles. It was neighborhood kids on Sting-Rays, pedaling through dirt, jumping plywood ramps, pulling wheelies down the street. Four minutes and seven seconds of opening credits, and they did more to spread BMX than any actual race of that era. Kids watched it, saw themselves up there, and went home to build their own track.

Three men in particular were paying attention. Ernie Alexander, a motorcycle race promoter. Bob Osborn, who'd go on to found BMX Action magazine. And Chuck Robinson, who'd later build Robinson Racing frames. They weren't the only ones watching. They were the ones who turned what they saw into the businesses that built the sport.

The first real race: BUMS, November 14, 1970

A 13-year-old named Scot Breithaupt was already at it before the film ever came out. Breithaupt raced motorcycles for Yamaha as a support rider, and when he practiced on a dirt trail near his house in Long Beach, other kids would turn up and try his jumps on their bicycles. So one day he went home, grabbed a few of his motorcycle trophies, and told the 35 kids hanging around that if they each chipped in a quarter, he'd run them a race. They did. He did. The next week, 150 kids showed up.

That dirt lot on the corner of 7th and Lew in Long Beach became BUMS — the Bicycle United Motocross Society. The name was a joke about the hobos living in the surrounding fields, but Breithaupt turned it into the first BMX sanctioning body of any kind. He wrote a rulebook. He printed membership cards and t-shirts. He set up beginner, novice, and expert classes and kept a points system going. By the end of that first year he had 350 members. The date most historians point to as the first organized BMX race is November 14, 1970.

Breithaupt didn't stop at BUMS. Over the next few years he laid out tracks at Saddleback Park, Westminster, the City of Walnut, Signal Hill, Escape Country, La Palma Youth Village, and the Fountain Valley Boys and Girls Club. He was a teenager doing the work of a full-time track builder, a sanction president, and a race promoter, all at once.

Read the full story of the early tracks →

The early sanctions

Every sport needs rules, scoring, and somebody to enforce them. Between 1970 and 1977, the organizations that would run BMX for the next four decades all got off the ground. Each had its own founder, its own home base, and its own idea of what the sport ought to be.

BUMS — Breithaupt, 1970

First in. The first sanctioning body of any kind, regional, California-only, built by a teenager. BUMS held its first State Championships in 1972 — Breithaupt won the 16-and-over Expert class. The Father's Day race in June 1971 and the Nor-Cal vs. So-Cal race later that year were among the first real competitive events anybody put on. BUMS was never built to go national. It didn't have to. It proved the sport could exist, and that was the point.

NBA — Ernie Alexander, 1973

Ernie Alexander was a motorcycle race promoter who ran events at Indian Dunes, a big MX facility north of Los Angeles where they shot a lot of motorcycle films and TV. In 1970 he saw the same thing Breithaupt saw — kids on Sting-Rays trying to put their own races together. By 1973 he'd formalized it into the National Bicycle Association, built on the American Motorcycle Association's structure for motocross. The NBA was the first national sanctioning body BMX ever had.

Alexander's NBA grew fast. It set up districts, issued national numbers, and in late 1974 it created the first professional class — which made BMX one of the first action sports to actually pay its top riders. The first NBA nationals ran March 30, 1975 in Phoenix, Arizona. The first national No. 1 Amateur was David Clinton. The first No. 1 Pro, named in 1976, was Scot Breithaupt.

In 1979 the NBA renamed itself the National Bicycle Motocross Association — NBmxA — to stop people confusing it with the National Basketball Association. By then the cracks were showing. Mismanagement, bad sponsor deals, public feuds with the rivals. Alexander resigned as president in January 1981, and the 1981 Grandnationals in Long Beach was the last race the NBA ran on its own. The NBL absorbed its membership not long after.

NBL — George Esser, 1974

George Esser was doing on the East Coast what Alexander was doing out West. He ran the National Motorcycle League out of Florida. His sons Bryan and Greg were racing BMX in their neighborhood, and Esser — like Alexander and Breithaupt before him — didn't care for how the unsanctioned local races were being run. So he built a bicycle division inside his motorcycle league. The first NBL-sanctioned race went off at Miami-Hollywood Speedway Park on January 26, 1974, and Greg Esser won the 14-and-over class.

Esser set the NBL up as a non-profit with a Competition Congress — a grassroots representative body where member tracks could vote on the rules. That structure is the reason the NBL outlasted things that killed the NBA. Riders and track operators felt like they had a say. That non-profit status would matter again decades later when BMX made its Olympic push, because USA Cycling needed a non-profit partner to line up with the UCI.

The NBL grew steadily through the late 70s and the 80s. It ran its own Grandnationals and its own pro circuit, and eventually took over what was left of the NBA. Bob Tedesco led the organization from 1983 to 2008, the longest run anybody ever had at the top of a BMX sanction.

ABA — Merl Mennenga and Gene Roden, 1977

By the mid-70s the NBA had California and the NBL had the East. Arizona had tracks, it had riders, and it had no sanction it trusted. So Merl Mennenga, who ran a track, and Gene Roden, a race promoter, started their own. On October 13, 1977 they founded the American Bicycle Association out of Chandler, Arizona. The Chandler track became ABA Track 001, and the ABA's first national race ran in Azusa, California in February 1978.

The ABA brought something neither the NBA nor the NBL had — a transfer system that let riders move up through the motos based on where they finished, instead of waiting out a traditional main-event bracket. It sped up race days and kept the program moving, and riders took to it. The ABA also made the Grandnationals — one race, winner takes all — its marquee event, where the NBL ran a season-long points chase instead. One thread worth pulling: Gene Roden was also the Phoenix manufacturing contact behind Rebel Racing's first-generation Johnny Reb and General Lee frames — a thread that runs from a 1981 San Antonio garage straight into the founding of USA BMX, since Rebel co-founder Bernie Anderson later purchased the ABA in 1985.

By the 1980s the ABA was the biggest sanction in the country. Through the 90s and 2000s it and the NBL ran side by side, cooperating now and then, mostly competing. In June 2011 the two merged, with the ABA acquiring the NBL, and the combined organization was rebranded USA BMX.

One more worth mentioning: IBMXF

In 1981, Dutch promoter Gerrit Does and NBL founder George Esser co-founded the International BMX Federation (IBMXF), based in the Netherlands. The IBMXF ran the first BMX World Championships in Dayton, Ohio in 1982. Greg Hill was the first World Champion. The IBMXF was later absorbed by the UCI in 1993, which is the direct path by which BMX eventually reached the Olympic Games in Beijing, 2008.

The brands that built the sport

For the first few years, kids raced whatever they had, and what they mostly had was a Schwinn Sting-Ray with the fenders and chainguard pulled off. But Sting-Rays were never built for dirt. The frames cracked. The forks bent. The seat posts snapped clean off. A handful of people saw that gap and started building bikes that were meant to race. These are the brands that created the equipment side of the sport.

Schwinn

Schwinn had it all. The bike, the name, the money, a shop in damn near every town in America — years before anybody else even had a logo. And they still handed the whole sport to a bunch of guys working out of garages. Think about that. Schwinn didn't invent BMX — BMX happened in spite of Schwinn, on bikes Schwinn had built for something else entirely. But the Sting-Ray put a 20-inch bike with a banana seat and high-rise bars in front of every kid in America in the 1960s, and without that bike, the early scene doesn't exist. Later Schwinn built actual BMX bikes — the Scrambler in the late 70s, the Predator in the 80s — and for a stretch in the early 80s the Predator was the bike a lot of kids found under the tree at Christmas.

Read the full Schwinn story →

Webco

Webco, out of California, was one of the first to build a purpose-built BMX frame. Early Webco frames were chromoly, built to race, and they turned up under a lot of the first generation of top riders. Webco was a key name in that 1974–1978 stretch when the whole equipment side of the sport was still getting figured out.

Read the full Webco story →

Redline

Linn Kastan and Mike Konle founded Redline in Chatsworth, California. The Redline MX-II in 1974 is the one people usually point to as the first bike built from the ground up for BMX — not a converted Sting-Ray, not a beefed-up beach cruiser, but a bike designed for the sport. A year or two later the Squareback pushed that further. Redline's Flight crank, out in 1979, was the first one-piece forged aluminum crank in BMX, and it stayed the standard pro crank for a decade. The Redline factory team in the late 70s and early 80s read like a who's who of the whole sport.

Read the full Redline story →

Mongoose / BMX Products

Skip Hess founded BMX Products, Inc. in September 1974, building wheels out of a factory in Chatsworth, in the San Fernando Valley. The Mongoose name came from Hess's friend, the drag racer Tom "The Mongoose" McEwen. The Motomag — a one-piece cast alloy wheel that survived the jumps that bent spoked rims to scrap — was a hit from day one, and for a generation of kids the complete Mongoose bike that followed in late 1975 simply was the BMX bike. Mongoose was also the principal sponsor of the 1979 NBA Mongoose Grand National, which became one of the flashpoints in the NBA's collapse.

Read the full Mongoose story →

Torker

Torker got going in 1976 in Anaheim Hills, California. It started as a small family operation called Texon, founded in 1975 by John Johnson. John's son Doug was racing BMX and wanted a better bike, so John and Steve Rink from Peddlepower Cycles built the first prototype — the twin-top-tube frame that would become Torker's signature. Around 1976, John's other son Steve Johnson renamed the company Johnson Engineering, then Torker — a name Steve pulled from the word 'torque.' The first Torker ad ran in December 1976 in BMX Weekly. The Torker MX, the one everybody called the Big Bike, was the flagship — a TIG-welded, aircraft-quality 4130 chromoly frame that BMX Action publisher Bob Osborn called "the Husqvarna of motocross bicycles."

Torker rode that twin-top-tube look through the late 70s and into the 80s with the L.P., the 280, the 340 cruiser, and the Pro-X. In 1984 they sponsored some of the fastest and funniest riders of the era — Mike Miranda and Tommy Brackens — alongside Clint Miller and the freestyle innovator Martin Aparijo, who designed the 1984 Torker Freestylist. In 1982 Torker also built the very first freestyle-specific frame and fork — the Haro Freestyler — for Bob Haro. Torker went bankrupt in November 1984. Seattle Bike Supply picked up the name, and the brand changed hands a number of times over the decades that followed, until Supercross BMX acquired it and started the process of bringing it back in 2015. Modern Torker AA pros included Matt Hadan.

Read the full Torker story →

SE Racing

Scot Breithaupt founded Scot Enterprises — which became SE Racing — in 1977 in Paramount, California. SE was the brand-building version of what Breithaupt had done with BUMS: take the sport seriously, build real products for it, hire real riders. The SE PK Ripper, first sold in 1978, was the first truly successful aluminum BMX frame, and it's still in production today, almost 50 years on. The Quadangle, with that distinctive four-bar triangular rear end, became another icon. SE's team in the late 70s and early 80s included Perry Kramer, Stu Thomsen, Rod Beckering, Greg Hill, Jeff Utterback, and for a brief blip of time Mike Miranda, along with a long list of riders who went on to shape the sport.

Read the full SE Racing story →

GT

Gary Turner was a drag racer who welded his own chromoly race-car chassis, and in the early 70s he started welding BMX frames for his son Craig in his garage in Orange. Other kids wanted one. Turner kept building. In 1979 he went in with Richard Long, who owned Anaheim Cycles and ran the Azusa BMX track — the ABA's first national venue — and the two of them founded GT Bicycles. GT grew through the 80s into one of the two or three biggest BMX brands in the world. The GT Performer, designed by Eddie Fiola and Bob Morales, became the best-selling freestyle bike of the mid-80s, and the GT Pro, Pro Series, and Mach One were staples on the racing side. The Robinson brand, originally founded by Chuck Robinson, was later acquired and run as a division of GT — Bill Ryan ran the Robinson Division at GT as team manager and managed Glenn Pavlosky, who later rode for Supercross BMX. Martin Aparijo spent the heart of his pro career as a GT factory flatland pro, and Billy Griggs later joined GT in product development and welded the custom GT frames Mike Day and Jill Kintner rode at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Read the full GT story →

Yamaha Moto-Bike

Yamaha — the motorcycle company — put out the Yamaha Moto-Bike in 1974, a 19-kilo steel BMX bike meant to cash in on the scene as it took off. It was heavy, it didn't race worth a damn, and it's mostly remembered now as a footnote. But Yamaha's 1974 Bicycle Gold Cup series — a four-race promotional tour that ran through California and ended at the LA Coliseum on September 14, 1974 in front of over 5,000 people — is arguably the first major BMX event anybody ever staged. Scot Breithaupt promoted the series. Stu Thomsen won the Expert class at the Coliseum final. David Clinton won the Junior class.

The next wave: 1976–1980

Between 1976 and 1980 the equipment side of the sport went off. Torker launched in 1976. CW, Hutch, JMC, Diamond Back, Patterson Racing, Race Inc., Thruster, DG, and plenty of others all launched in the same window. Robinson Racing opened in March 1978, Panda Racing Products was already one of the first BMX brands being factory-produced in Taiwan, and Voris Dixon Bikes (VDC) was contract-building parts and frames out of Anaheim for half the brands on this list. By the end of the decade, BMX wasn't kids building their own bikes anymore. It was a real industry — catalogs, factory teams, national advertising, the works.

The early magazines

You can't build a sport without a press behind it. BMX got three publications that mattered in those first ten years.

Bicycle Motocross News came first, launching in 1974 out of Orange, California. Publisher Elaine Holt ran it. The first issue, dated June 1974, carried an interview with Scot Breithaupt; the Yamaha Moto-Bike test ran in issue two that July. Holt is generally credited as the originator of BMX media, full stop.

BMX Action — officially Bicycle Motocross Action — launched in December 1976, founded by Bob Osborn. Osborn had written for Bicycle Motocross News and was the flag-waving starter at the 1974 LA Coliseum Yamaha Gold Cup final. His daughter Windy Osborn became one of the first great BMX photographers, shooting for the magazine as a teenager. BMX Action was the dominant voice of the sport through the late 70s and the 80s. It also got famous for its test-track operation in Torrance — "the Pit" — where the magazine's test riders, the Emrich brothers and Donny Jones among them, developed and beat on product. The magazine ran for nearly 13 years before its final issue in September 1989.

BMX Plus! came along in November 1978, founded by Jim Stevens and Scot Breithaupt under Plus Publications — Hi-Torque Publications took it over in 1983 and ran it all the way to 2015. It became BMX Action's main rival, the second of the two big monthly magazines that defined BMX press for the next twenty years. Minicycle / BMX Action — which became Super BMX in 1980 under Challenge Publications — and Snap followed.

The boom years: 1978–1982

By 1978 the sport had a backbone. Three national sanctions. Two big magazines. A dozen real brands. Factory teams paying real riders real money. And the kids who'd started racing in 1973 and 1974 were 17, 18, 19 now — fast, seasoned, and ready to be the first generation of BMX pros.

The Jag World Championships

In December 1978, music promoter and team owner Renny Roker ran the first Jag BMX World Championships at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis. Roker owned Jag BMX, which sponsored the event. The race ran indoors on a cement floor with wooden jumps and flat turns — nothing like the dirt tracks BMX had grown up on. Riders had to learn a whole new way to ride it and bring specialized gear. The race ran every year in Indianapolis through 1981, moved to Las Vegas in 1982, and was done by 1985.

The Jag Worlds were the first race in BMX to call itself a "world championship," and at their peak they drew over 4,000 riders along with TV coverage and sponsors like Coca-Cola, 7-Eleven, and Thom McAn. Just as important, they were the first event where riders from outside the U.S. showed up in real numbers — Dutch, Japanese, Canadian, and Venezuelan racers all made the trip. During the 1979 Jag Worlds, George Esser, Gerrit Does, and Tadashi Inoue sat down in a meeting room Roker had set aside for them and started laying the plans for what would become the IBMXF two years later.

Haro and the birth of freestyle

Bob Haro grew up in San Diego. He raced motocross as a teenager — over 50 trophies by 1975 — then got into BMX around 1976 when he borrowed his brother's bike. He was a good racer, but the thing that set him apart was that he could draw. His first published BMX art ran in late 1976, and by 1977 he was drawing for BMX Action as a staff artist. Then he started customizing number plates.

In 1977, Haro was hand-cutting vinyl numbers and sticking them onto Preston Petty motocross plates for his friends. In August 1978, BMX Action ran "Haro's Factory Plates" in their products column — six bucks including shipping. That's the month most histories use as the founding of what became Haro Designs, Inc., run out of Haro's parents' house in Spring Valley. By May 1979, five of the six pros on the cover of BMX Action were running Haro plates. By 1980 he'd moved the operation to South Vermont Street in Torrance.

What made Haro matter historically wasn't the plates, though. It was what he did on the bike. Haro was one of a small group of riders — along with Bob Morales, R.L. Osborn (Bob Osborn's son), and a few others — who started doing tricks for their own sake, outside of racing entirely. Wheelies, curb endos, rollbacks, ramp work. By 1980 BMX Action had hired Haro and R.L. as touring trick riders, doing freestyle demos at races and bike shows. They weren't competing. They were putting on a show.

In 1981, Haro designed the first frame and fork made specifically for freestyle. Torker built it. It launched as the Haro Freestyler in 1982, and that's the bike that turned freestyle into its own thing — not a sidebar to racing, but a sport with its own equipment, its own riders, its own culture. Haro had already started sourcing its own frames by the time Torker went bankrupt in 1984, and Haro Designs kept right on going as a bike manufacturer in its own right.

Read the full Haro story →

E.T. and the mainstream moment

In 1982, Steven Spielberg released E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The big scene — Elliott and his friends outrunning the feds on BMX bikes, then flying across the moon — put BMX in front of the biggest movie audience of the year. Bob Haro was one of the lead stunt riders on it. E.T. became the highest-grossing film of all time to that point, and that BMX chase is still one of the most recognizable sequences in movie history.

The freestyle split: 1982–1986

Up through 1981, BMX was one sport. A kid might race Saturday, ride trails Sunday, and pull wheelies in the driveway in between. After 1982, it wasn't. Racing stayed racing. Freestyle — quarterpipe, street, flatland, vert — became its own thing, with its own magazines, its own champions, its own brands.

The first freestyle teams and tours

The Haro Freestyle Tour — first out in 1981 — was rolling nationwide by 1983, with Bob Haro, Mike Dominguez, and a few others doing demos at malls, county fairs, and BMX races all over the country. R.L. Osborn and Bob Haro — the BMX Action Trick Team — had been on the road since 1980, doing freestyle demos at races and shows. The GT Freestyle Tour ran its own program with Martin Aparijo as the flatland anchor. Vans ran its own freestyle promotion team with Eddie Fiola, Todd Anderson, and Danny Hubbard. Skyway, Redline, and Diamond Back all put freestyle teams together within a couple of years. Behind the scenes, Brian Scura's SST Trick Team — Scura, Woody Itson, and Martin Aparijo — was doing the same product-demo work for GT through the same window, and Scura's invention of the Gyro cable detangler in 1986 made the 360-degree bar spin physically possible for the first time, which changed what a freestyle bike could even do.

RAD, March 1986

In March 1986, director Hal Needham — the legendary stuntman behind Smokey and the Bandit — put out RAD. It was the first feature film built around BMX. Bill Allen played Cru Jones, a small-town paperboy stuck choosing between taking his SATs and qualifying for Helltrack, a made-up world-championship-style race with a $100,000 prize and a Corvette on the line. Lori Loughlin played the love interest. Bart Conner, the 1984 Olympic gymnastics gold medalist, played the villain pro racer. The real riders doing the stunts included Martin Aparijo — who did most of the stunt riding for Lori Loughlin's character — along with R.L. Osborn, Eddie Fiola, and the rest of the era's top freestylers.

RAD bombed in theaters. It grossed $2 million against a $3 million budget, and the critics hated it. Then it hit VHS and turned into one of the top-ten rental tapes two years running. For a whole generation of kids who caught it once on TV or borrowed it from a friend, that was the BMX movie. The Helltrack starting ramp — a massive, terrifying drop-in — is one of the things people credit for the look of modern BMX supercross tracks. The starting hill at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 looked an awful lot like Helltrack.

The sport inside the sport

By 1986 freestyle had its own magazine — FREESTYLIN', launched by Wizard Publications (same outfit as BMX Action) in 1984. It had its own star system: Eddie Fiola on vert, R.L. Osborn on flatland, Mike Dominguez on vert, Martin Aparijo on flatland, and a young kid named Mat Hoffman coming up through the ramps in Oklahoma. It had its own contest series — the 2-Hip King of Vert, run by Ron Wilkerson — and its own companies. Skyway had become a freestyle brand. Haro was a freestyle brand. GT had the Performer.

The crash: 1986–1988

And then it fell apart.

There's no one reason BMX crashed in the late 80s. There are about five. The kids who'd started riding in 1978 were 16 now, getting cars, getting girlfriends, leaving the track. Nintendo landed in 1985 and ate huge chunks of kids' free time. Mountain biking was coming up fast as the new cool bike for teenagers and adults. The October 1987 stock market crash squeezed consumer spending across the board. And BMX had oversaturated itself — too many brands, too many bikes, too much inventory sitting dead in the shops. In Britain, which had caught the boom on a delay behind the U.S., sales collapsed by the mid-80s as mountain bikes took over.

The numbers tell it plainly. The USBA (United States Bicycle Association), a fourth sanction that had started up in 1984, folded into the ABA at the end of the 1986 season because it couldn't stay solvent. Mongoose's parent company BMX Products was bought by American Recreation Group in spring 1985 — the first time a public company swallowed an original BMX manufacturer. Torker had already gone bankrupt in November 1984. A lot of the 1977–1980 wave of brands either folded or got bought up by somebody bigger. BMX Action magazine — the dominant publication of the whole boom — put out its final issue in September 1989. Rebel Racing closed in 1987. Titan BMX moved from Texas to Oregon and merged itself out of existence by 1992. White Bear up in Northern California hung on as a small operation through the back half of the 1990s. Hi-Tech BMX — a small Cypress, California brand Bill Ryan and Voris Dixon launched when Bill was 13 — had already been shut down in 1984 over a naming-conflict trademark threat, with the design walking over to Pro Neck to become the National Pro.

Racing kept going, just smaller. The factory teams got cheaper. The pro purses shrank. The kids who stayed in stayed because they loved it, not because it was cool anymore. And out of that — out of the punk-rock, ramen-noodle years of 1987 through 1991 — came the next wave of brands.

The DIY rebuild: 1987–1992

The first era of BMX brands was built by hot-rodders — guys like Linn Kastan and Skip Hess who came out of MX and car culture. The second era was built by riders. The crash made it cheap to start a bike company. It also made it necessary. The kids still riding wanted gear the surviving big brands had stopped making.

S&M Bikes started in 1987 in Santa Ana, California. Chris Moeller and Greg Scott named it after their initials. It was tiny for a few years — Moeller bought Scott out around 1989 and got serious — but S&M became the model every rider-owned brand that came after it copied. Hoffman Bikes, started by Mat Hoffman in Oklahoma City in 1991, did the same thing for vert and freestyle. Wilkerson Airlines, which Ron Wilkerson started after his 2-Hip contest series, came out of that same DIY spirit. Standard Byke Company, FBM, and Eastern Bikes all launched in the late 80s and early 90s. TW BMX, California Racing Designs, Hyper, Hustler, and Bottema Forks all carried small pieces of the DIY rebuild forward through the late-80s and 90s.

Supercross BMX, 1989

Supercross BMX was founded in 1989 by Bill Ryan in Stanton, California. Ryan had worked at SE Racing as a teenager for Breithaupt, then at GT Bicycles in customer service and as team manager for the Robinson division, then at Brackens Bikes with Tommy Brackens. By the time he opened his own shop — Power Plus Cycles in Stanton — he was already making TECH racing pants for Redline, Haro, S&M, and Cyclecraft. Here's why Supercross got started: Bill's team — Billy Harrison, Brian Lopes, Glenn Pavlosky, and Brian "Bogi" Givens — couldn't land a bike sponsor. So Bill started the brand to sponsor them himself. Brian Lopes turned pro that same year and would go on to win four UCI Mountain Bike World Championships and land in both the BMX and mountain biking halls of fame.

The international side: 1982–1995

While American BMX was busy booming and busting, Europe was quietly building the thing that would eventually make BMX an Olympic sport.

The first IBMXF World Championships ran in Dayton, Ohio in 1982. Of 1,107 entrants, 90 percent were American. Greg Hill won. The following year the Worlds moved to Slagharen, Netherlands, and Dutch riders started winning. Phil Hoogendoorn took his first World Championship in 1983 at 16 and went on to win a string of titles over the rest of the decade.

Meanwhile the UCI's amateur wing — FIAC — started running its own "BMX World Championships" alongside. FIAC's secretary Mrs. Juliani famously called BMX "a play for kids," and the FIAC Worlds were generally reckoned poorly run next to the IBMXF version. Two competing world championship structures ran side by side through the 80s, a political mess that only sorted itself out when FIAC absorbed the IBMXF in 1993, with the UCI absorbing FIAC shortly after.

Back in the U.S., the NBL joined USA Cycling in 1997 — the move that eventually put BMX in front of the International Olympic Committee. USA Cycling picked the NBL over the ABA because the NBL was a non-profit and had the longer international track record.

The racing side: 1988–1995

Racing in the late 80s and early 90s was a smaller sport than it had been, but a more serious one. The hobby kids were gone. What stayed were the riders who were in it to go fast and nothing else.

The 1988 Pan-American Championships and the 1991 IBMXF Worlds in Sandnes, Norway turned out the next wave of international stars. Christophe Lévêque of France, Gary Ellis, Pete Loncarevich, Eric Rupe, and Richie Anderson were the names at the top of the pro class through this stretch. Darwin Griffin took the 1987 ABA No.1 Cruiser plate on U.S. Boss. Billy Griggs turned pro on Redline in February 1987 and went on to win the 1988 ABA Yamaha Supercup Pro Championship. Clint Miller, Jeff Bottema, Denny Davidow, and Todd Steen were all on factory rides through that early-90s window. On November 26, 1995, Lévêque became the first rider from outside the United States to win an American #1 Pro title, taking the ABA National #1 plate for 1996.

The clipless moment: October 21, 1995

Two small things happened in 1995 that turned out to be very big. On October 21, 1995, at the ABA Fall Nationals in Burbank, California, Mike King and Brian Lopes became the first riders to use clipless pedals at a BMX national. Mike King would go on to become the USA Cycling BMX program director and manage Team USA at the 2008 and 2012 Olympics. Lopes would dominate mountain bike dual slalom for the next decade. A clipless pedal at a BMX race was a small technical thing — but it was also the first clear sign that BMX had crossed over with its cousin sport, mountain biking, and that the line between the two was going to keep dissolving.

Where BMX stood at the end of 1995

Twenty-five years on from BUMS, the sport looked almost nothing like that dirt lot in Long Beach. It was two sports by then, racing and freestyle, with two separate industries, two separate presses, and two separate cultures. The three-letter sanctions had thinned to two — the ABA and the NBL, with the NBA long gone. The freestyle crash had wiped out most of the big boom-era brands, but it had also cleared room for a new generation of rider-owned companies. S&M, Hoffman, Standard, Supercross, and a handful of others were building the sport up from the ground the same way Redline and SE had built it in the 70s.

The path to the Olympics was clearer than it had ever been. The UCI had absorbed the IBMXF. USA Cycling was about to absorb the NBL. The international structure was in place. And a kid named Mike King was about to become the man who'd steer Team USA through the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where BMX racing would finally stand on the biggest stage in the world.

That's the story of the next twenty-five years. We'll pick it up from here in the next article.