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, physical, and decided as much by the gate as by the finish.

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, from five-year-old beginners to grown adults who've been racing their whole lives.

BMX splits into two main branches: racing, which this article focuses on, and freestyle — the trick side that grew out of the same bikes and the same riders, then broke off into its own sport with its own heroes, brands, and culture. The split matters. For the first ten years, it was all one thing. After that, the paths diverged, and we'll follow both.

Where it started

BMX started in Southern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Kids who were too young to ride motorcycles wanted to do what their motocross heroes did — fly over jumps, slide through berms, race their buddies. So they did it on the bikes they had. Mostly that meant the Schwinn Sting-Ray, a 20-inch bike with a banana seat and high-rise bars that Schwinn had been selling since 1963. It wasn't built for dirt. They rode it in the dirt anyway.

Nobody person invented BMX. It was happening in vacant lots from San Pedro to San Fernando, and probably in Nebraska and New Jersey too. But the scene in California was the one that got filmed.

On Any Sunday, July 1971

In July 1971, filmmaker Bruce Brown released On Any Sunday, a documentary about motorcycle racing produced and partly financed by Steve McQueen. The opening four minutes had nothing to do with motorcycles. It was neighborhood kids on Sting-Rays — pedaling through dirt, jumping off plywood ramps, pulling wheelies down the street. Those four minutes and seven seconds of opening credits did more to spread BMX than any race of that era. Kids watched the film, saw themselves, and went home to build their own track.

Three people in particular were watching. Ernie Alexander, a motorcycle race promoter, took note. Bob Osborn, who would later found BMX Action magazine, took note. Chuck Robinson, who would later build Robinson Racing frames, took note. They were not the only ones, but they were the ones who turned what they saw into the businesses that built the sport.

The first real race: BUMS, November 14, 1970

Before the film came out, a 13-year-old named Scot Breithaupt was already doing it. Breithaupt raced motorcycles for Yamaha as a support rider. When he practiced on a dirt trail near his house in Long Beach, other kids would show up and try his jumps on their bicycles. One day he went home, grabbed some of his motorcycle trophies, and told the 35 kids who were hanging around that if they each pitched in a quarter, he'd run 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 who lived in the surrounding fields, but Breithaupt turned it into the first BMX sanctioning body of any kind. He wrote a rulebook. He made membership cards. He printed t-shirts. He set up beginner, novice, and expert classes. He kept a points system. By the end of his 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 designed tracks at Saddleback Park, Westminster, the City of Walnut, Signal Hill, Escape Country, La Palma Youth Village, and Fountain Valley Boys and Girls Club. He was a teenager doing the work of a full-time track builder, sanction president, and race promoter at the same time.

The early sanctions

Every sport needs rules, scoring, and somebody to enforce them. Between 1970 and 1977, the three organizations that would run BMX for the next four decades all got started. Each one had a different founder, a different home base, and a different idea of what BMX should be.

BUMS — Breithaupt, 1970

First in. 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 in the sport. BUMS wasn't built to scale nationally. It didn't need to. It proved the sport could exist.

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 a lot of motorcycle films and TV shows were shot. In 1970 he saw the same thing Breithaupt saw — kids on Sting-Rays trying to put together their own races. By 1973 he'd formalized it into the National Bicycle Association, modeled on the American Motorcycle Association's structure for motocross. The NBA became the first national sanctioning body for BMX.

Alexander's NBA grew fast. It set up districts, issued national numbers, and in late 1974 it created the first professional class — making BMX one of the first action sports to 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 avoid confusion with the National Basketball Association. By then the cracks were showing. Mismanagement, bad sponsor deals, and public feuds with rivals weakened the organization. Alexander resigned as president in January 1981. The 1981 Grandnationals in Long Beach was the last race the NBA ran as an independent sanction. Its membership was absorbed by the NBL shortly after.

NBL — George Esser, 1974

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

The NBL was set up as a non-profit with a Competition Congress — a grassroots representative body where member tracks could vote on rules. That structure is why the NBL survived things that killed the NBA. Riders and track operators felt heard. The non-profit status would also become crucial decades later when BMX made its Olympic push, because USA Cycling needed a non-profit partner to align with the UCI.

The NBL grew steadily through the late 70s and 80s. It ran its own Grandnationals, 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 at the top of any BMX sanction.

ABA — Merl Mennenga and Gene Roden, 1977

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

The ABA introduced something neither the NBA nor the NBL had: a transfer system that let riders move up through motos based on finishing position, rather than waiting out a traditional main event bracket. It sped up race days, kept the program moving, and riders liked it. The ABA also made the Grandnationals — one race, winner takes all — its marquee event, in contrast to the NBL's season-long points chase.

By the 1980s the ABA was the biggest sanction in the country. Through the 90s and 2000s it and the NBL operated side by side, sometimes cooperating, 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. Mostly that was a Schwinn Sting-Ray with the fenders and chainguard stripped off. But Sting-Rays weren't built for dirt. The frames cracked. The forks bent. The seat posts snapped. A handful of people saw the gap and started building bikes that were purpose-built for racing. These are the brands that created the equipment side of the sport.

Schwinn

Schwinn didn't invent BMX — BMX happened in spite of Schwinn, on bikes Schwinn had built for a totally different purpose. 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 got for Christmas.

Webco

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

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Redline

Redline was founded by Linn Kastan and Mike Konle in Chatsworth, California. The Redline MX-II in 1974 is often cited 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 Redline Squareback took that further. Redline's Flight crank, introduced in 1979, was the first one-piece forged aluminum crank in BMX and became the standard pro crank for a decade. Redline's factory team in the late 70s and early 80s was a who's who of the sport.

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Mongoose / BMX Products

Skip Hess founded BMX Products, Inc. in 1974 in the San Fernando Valley. The Mongoose name came from the brand's mongoose-and-cobra logo. The Mongoose Motomag — a bike that came with cast magnesium wheels instead of spoked rims — was a hit when it launched, and for a generation of kids the Mongoose 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.

Torker

Torker started in 1976 in Anaheim Hills, California. It began as a small family-owned operation called Texon, founded in 1975 by John Johnson. John's son Doug was racing BMX and wanted a better bike, so John and Peddlepower Cycles' Steve Rink 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, and then to Torker — a name Steve came up with from the word 'torque.' The first Torker ad ran in December 1976 in BMX Weekly. The Torker MX, also 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. 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 went through multiple ownership changes over the following decades until Supercross BMX acquired it and began the process of bringing it back in 2015.

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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 is still in production today, almost 50 years later. The Quadangle, with its 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, and a long list of riders who went on to shape the sport.

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GT

Gary Turner was a welder in Fullerton, California who built his son Craig a chromoly BMX frame in 1972. Other kids wanted one. Turner kept building them. In 1979 he partnered with Richard Long, who ran Azusa Bicycles and whose track was the ABA's first national venue, and the two 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 of the racing side. The Robinson brand, originally founded by Chuck Robinson, was later acquired and run as a division of GT.

Yamaha Moto-Bike

Yamaha — the motorcycle company — released the Yamaha Moto-Bike in 1974, a 19-kilo steel BMX bike meant to cash in on the fast-growing scene. It was heavy, it didn't race well, and it's mostly remembered now as a footnote. But Yamaha's 1974 Yamaha 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 spectators, is arguably the first major BMX event anyone put on. 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 exploded. Torker launched in 1976. CW, Hutch, JMC, Diamond Back, Patterson Racing, Race Inc., Thruster, DG, and others all launched in the same stretch. By the end of the decade, BMX was no longer kids building their own bikes — it was a real industry with catalogs, factory teams, and national advertising.

The early magazines

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

Bicycle Motocross News, the first, launched in 1973 out of Orange, California. Publisher Elaine Holt ran it. The first issue had an interview with Scot Breithaupt and a test of the Yamaha Moto-Bike. Holt is generally considered the originator of BMX media.

BMX Action — officially Bicycle Motocross Action — launched in December 1976, founded by Bob Osborn. Osborn had been a contributor to 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 80s. It also became famous for its test-track operation in Torrance — "the Pit" — where the magazine's test riders, including the Emrich brothers and Donny Jones, developed and evaluated product. The magazine ran for nearly 13 years before its final issue in September 1989.

BMX Plus! launched shortly after, co-founded by Jim Stevens and Scot Breithaupt. It became BMX Action's main rival and the second of the two big monthly magazines that defined BMX press for the next twenty years. Minicycle / BMX Action (later renamed Super BMX) and Snap followed.

The boom years: 1978–1982

By 1978 the sport had structure. 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 now 17, 18, 19 years old — fast, experienced, 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 was held 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 technique and bring specialized equipment. The race ran annually in Indianapolis through 1981, moved to Las Vegas in 1982, and ended by 1985.

The Jag Worlds were the first race to call itself a "world championship" in BMX, and they drew over 4,000 riders at peak along with TV coverage, Coca-Cola, 7-Eleven, and Thom McAn as sponsors. Just as importantly, they were the first event where riders from outside the U.S. showed up in force — Dutch, Japanese, Canadian, and Venezuelan racers made the trip. During the 1979 Jag Worlds, George Esser, Gerrit Does, and Tadashi Inoue sat down in a meeting room Roker had provided and started planning 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 what separated him was that he also drew. BMX Action gave him his first illustrator work in 1976, when he was 18. 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 featured "Haro's Factory Plates" in their products column — $6 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 operations to South Vermont Street in Torrance.

What made Haro historically important 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. 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 performing.

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 it's the bike that made freestyle into its own thing — not a sidebar to racing, but a sport with its own equipment, its own riders, its own culture. When Torker went bankrupt in 1984, Haro Designs became an independent bike manufacturer and kept going.

E.T. and the mainstream moment

In 1982, Steven Spielberg released E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The climactic scene — Elliott and his friends escaping 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 that scene. E.T. became the highest-grossing film of all time at that point, and the 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 rider might race Saturday and ride trails Sunday and do 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, and its own brands.

The first freestyle teams and tours

The Haro Freestyle Tour started rolling in 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 touring since 1980, doing freestyle demos at races and shows. The GT Freestyle Tour ran its own program. Vans ran its own freestyle promotion team with Eddie Fiola, Todd Anderson, and Danny Hubbard. Skyway, Redline, and Diamond Back all fielded freestyle teams within a couple of years.

RAD, March 1986

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

RAD bombed at the box office. It grossed $2 million against a $3 million budget. Critics didn't like it. Then it got released on VHS and became one of the top-ten rental tapes two years running. For an entire generation of kids who saw it once on TV or borrowed it from a friend, it 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 a lot like Helltrack.

The sport inside the sport

By 1986 freestyle had its own magazine — FREESTYLIN', launched by Wizard Publications (the same publisher 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 single reason BMX crashed in the late 80s. There are about five. Kids who'd started riding in 1978 were now 16, getting cars, getting girlfriends, and leaving the track. Nintendo came out in 1985 and swallowed 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 hit consumer discretionary spending across the board. And BMX itself had oversaturated — too many brands, too many bikes, too much inventory sitting in shops. In Britain, which had experienced the boom on a delay behind the U.S., sales collapsed by the mid-80s as mountain bikes took over.

The numbers tell the story. The USBA (United States Bicycle Association), a fourth sanction that had started 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 acquired by American Recreation Group in spring 1985 — the first time a public company had swallowed an original BMX manufacturer. Torker had already gone bankrupt in November 1984. Many of the 1977–1980 wave of brands either folded or got acquired by somebody bigger. BMX Action magazine — the dominant publication of the boom years — published its final issue in September 1989.

Racing kept going, but smaller. The factory teams got cheaper. The pro purses shrank. The kids who stayed in the sport did so because they loved it, not because it was cool. 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

If 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 who were still riding wanted equipment that the surviving big brands weren't making anymore.

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 out Scott around 1989 and got serious — but S&M would become the model for every rider-owned brand that came after. Hoffman Bikes, started by Mat Hoffman in Oklahoma City in 1991, did the same thing for vert and freestyle. Wilkerson Airlines, started by Ron Wilkerson after his 2-Hip contest series, came out of the same DIY spirit. Standard Byke Company, FBM, and Eastern Bikes all launched in the late 80s and early 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. When he opened his own shop, Power Plus Cycles, in Stanton, he was already making TECH racing pants for Redline, Haro, S&M, and Cyclecraft. The reason Supercross got started: Bill's team — Billy Harrison, Brian Lopes, Glenn Pavlosky, and Brian "Bogi" Givens — couldn't get a bike sponsor. So Bill started the brand to sponsor them. Brian Lopes turned pro the same year and would later go on to win four UCI Mountain Bike World Championships and be inducted into both the BMX and mountain biking halls of fame.

The international side: 1982–1995

While American BMX was going through its boom and bust, Europe was quietly building what would eventually make BMX an Olympic sport.

The first IBMXF World Championships ran in Dayton, Ohio in 1982. Out 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, a Dutch rider, won his first World Championship in 1983 at age 16 and went on to win multiple titles over the rest of the decade.

Meanwhile, the UCI's amateur wing — FIAC — started running its own "BMX World Championships" in parallel. FIAC's secretary Mrs. Juliani famously said "BMX was a play for kids," and the FIAC Worlds were generally considered poorly run compared to the IBMXF version. The two competing world championship structures ran side by side through the 80s, a political mess that only resolved when FIAC absorbed the IBMXF in 1993, and the UCI absorbed FIAC shortly after.

Inside 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 a 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 had left. What stayed were the riders who were in it to go fast.

The 1988 Pan-American Championships and the 1991 IBMXF Worlds in Vienna produced 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. 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 would turn 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. The clipless pedal at a BMX race was a small technical moment — but it was also the first clear sign that BMX had crossed over with its cousin sport, mountain biking, and that the boundary between the two was going to keep dissolving.

Where BMX stood at the end of 1995

Twenty-five years from BUMS, the sport looked almost nothing like the 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 become two: the ABA and the NBL, with the NBA long gone. The freestyle crash had thinned out most of the big boom-era brands, but had also made room for a new generation of rider-owned companies. S&M, Hoffman, Standard, Supercross, and a handful of others were building the sport from the ground up the 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 person who would 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.