Hoffman Bikes — The Brand Mat Built So He Could Keep Riding (1991 to Today)
Hoffman Bikes
The Brand Mat Built So He Could Keep Riding — 1991 to Today
A BMXRacingHistory.com chapter · hosted on Legend Bike Co
We are telling this story the same way we told the origin piece and the SE Racing chapter: neutrally. No brand gets elevated. No rider gets shorted. Where the record is contested, we say so.
Where it started
Hoffman Bikes did not start with a business plan. It started with a kid in Oklahoma who had outgrown every frame anyone was willing to sell him.
Mat Hoffman was born January 9, 1972 in Edmond, Oklahoma. He grew up in a part of the country that was not on the BMX map. The big freestyle action was happening in California — at Haro, at GT, at the contests Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn and Eddie Fiola were riding. Oklahoma City was a long drive from any of it.
In 1982, at age ten, he and his brothers built their first quarterpipe from plans in BMX Action magazine. By 1985 he was entering amateur freestyle contests around the state. In June 1986, at 14, he flew to New York for the General Bicycles / AFA Freestyle Championships at Madison Square Garden and won the 14-15 expert ramp class.
Skyway, Haro, and the first sponsorship years
The first factory ride came almost immediately. In July 1986, Skyway Recreation signed Hoffman to a one-year freestyle deal. He broke his collarbone at a show early on, healed, and made his Skyway debut in August at the IBMXF World Freestyle Championships in Vancouver.
The Skyway years were short. In January 1988, with Dennis McCoy and Joe Johnson off the Haro freestyle team and budget open, Mat signed with Haro Bikes at age 16.
On March 25, 1989, in Kitchener, Ontario, at a 2-Hip King of Vert contest, Mat landed the first 900 in BMX history — two and a half rotations in the air, two months after his 17th birthday. Tony Hawk would not land a skateboard 900 for another ten years.
By 1991, Hoffman was 19, the best vert rider in the world, and watching the freestyle side of BMX collapse around him. FREESTYLIN' magazine had folded. The bikes were not surviving him either. He was going higher, spinning more, and crashing harder than anyone else on a 20-inch wheel, and the equipment was the limit. So he left Haro and started his own brand.
Hoffman Bikes — late 1991
Hoffman Bikes was founded in late 1991 in Oklahoma City. Mat was 19, going on 20. The reason for the company was the same reason Scot Breithaupt had started SE Racing, the same reason Bill Ryan would later start Supercross BMX — the rider could not get the bike he wanted from anyone else, so the rider built the company that built the bike.
The first frame was called the Condor, after Mat's own BMX-world nickname. It was designed to be heavy enough to take the impacts he was generating, light enough to spin, and strong enough to survive runs that would have folded a stock freestyle frame.
Design help came from a name with deep BMX history. Linn Kastan, who co-founded Redline in 1970, helped Mat develop the first Condor frame and fork. Five prototype Condor framesets were built in Kastan's California shop and shipped to Oklahoma by the end of 1991. The first production Condors went on sale in the summer of 1992. Once the prototypes proved out, Mat shifted production for a stretch to SE Racing — by then in its own transition years — which gave Hoffman Bikes access to a real US frame-building operation while the brand found its feet.
The Bicycle Stunt Series — January 1992
By 1991-92 there was no real professional contest series for BMX freestyle. The AFA had wound down. FREESTYLIN' was gone. Ron Wilkerson's 2-Hip King of Vert and a handful of local contests were what was left.
So Mat started his own series. He called it Bicycle Stunt — almost always shortened to "BS." The first BS contest ran January 25-26, 1992 at Jeff Phillips Park in Dallas, Texas. BS was rider-built. Mat ran it himself through a company he set up called Hoffman Promotions. For a few years it was the only real freestyle contest series in the world.
The X Games — 1995
In 1995, ESPN partnered with Hoffman Promotions to put the Bicycle Stunt Series on television. That partnership became the BMX side of the first ESPN Extreme Games — the event that within a year would be renamed the X Games. The organizing body Mat set up grew into the Hoffman Sports Association (HSA), which managed the BMX freestyle side of the X Games for years afterward.
At the first X Games in 1995, Mat won the vert gold. He won it again in 1996, then medaled at multiple X Games through the early 2000s — bronzes in 1997, 2000, and 2001, and a silver in 2002 for the first-ever no-handed 900. Across the broader contest scene he is a ten-time vert World Champion.
His biggest single feat in the air came on March 20, 2001 — the Guinness world record for highest vertical air on a BMX bike: 26 feet 6 inches above the deck of a 24-foot quarterpipe, more than 50 feet above the ground. The 2010 ESPN 30 for 30 documentary The Birth of Big Air, directed by Jeff Tremaine with Johnny Knoxville and Spike Jonze, told that story to a mainstream audience.
Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX — 2001
Activision had hit with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in 1999 and launched a sub-label called Activision O2. The first BMX title in the line was Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX, developed by Shaba Games and released in 2001 for PlayStation and Game Boy Color, with Dreamcast, Windows, and Game Boy Advance versions following. The sequel, Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX 2, dropped in 2002.
The two games put a Hoffman bike, a Hoffman park, and Mat himself into the hands of millions of kids who had never been to a track and never been to a contest. Talk to any rider who got into BMX in the early 2000s and there is a strong chance the entry point was a controller, not a curb.
The bikes — Condor, Big Daddy, EP, and the lineup
The Condor stayed the flagship. The Big Daddy, the second Hoffman frame, launched in 1993 — a heavier, more park- and street-oriented platform.
By 1997, flatland riders were asking for a shorter rear end. Hoffman answered with the EP — named like an EP record, shorter, fewer songs. The EP was designed in collaboration with Day Smith and Leif Valin, and became one of the most-respected flatland frames of its generation.
The team grew with it. Over the years Hoffman riders have included Dave Mirra (briefly, before Haro), Kevin Robinson, Seth Kimbrough, Taj Mihelich, and Bruce Crisman.
The 2000s and the slow contraction
BMX in the 2000s was a different sport. The X Games made vert the headline event of action sports for a stretch, then street pulled ahead of vert in the audience's eye, and by the mid-2010s vert ramps were a smaller part of the contest circuit than they had been at any point since the late 1980s.
Hoffman Bikes scaled with the sport. By the mid-to-late 2010s the brand had pulled back from a full mass-market push and settled into a smaller, more focused operation. The brand celebrated 25 years in 2016 and 30 years in 2021, including a 30th-anniversary Condor reissue.
Mat Hoffman, the rider
Hoffman the brand and Hoffman the rider are inseparable. The record speaks for itself — first 900, first no-handed 900, ten World vert titles, two X Games golds plus multiple later X Games medals, the Guinness high-air record, and over 100 original tricks credited to him (the flair and the flip fakie are two of the biggest). The injury list reads like a different sport.
In 2012, Mat was inducted into the National BMX Hall of Fame (now USA BMX). In 2018 he was inducted into the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame. ESPN gave him the Action Sports Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002.
Where Hoffman Bikes fits
Mat is a freestyle rider, not a racer, but his role in the rider-owned wave maps cleanly onto what was happening on the race side at the same time. S&M Bikes started in 1987 because the surviving big brands were not building what street and dirt riders wanted. Supercross BMX started in 1989 because Bill Ryan could not get bikes for his TECH Racing Team. Hoffman Bikes started in 1991 because Mat could not get a bike that survived him. All three were direct responses to the crash of 1986-1988 and the cleanout that followed.
The godfather of modern BMX vert
One sentence on what Mat Hoffman did for BMX vert: he turned it from a small subculture inside freestyle into a televised sport with its own contest format, its own equipment industry, and its own Hall-of-Fame-level public figure.
Hoffman Bikes is still in Oklahoma City. The Condor is still in the catalog. Mat is still riding. More than thirty years in, the brand Mat built because he had to is doing what it was built to do.
Sources
Wikipedia: Mat Hoffman, Hoffman Bikes, Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX, Bicycle Stunt Series, X Games. Hoffman Bikes official site (hoffmanbikes.com). Mat Hoffman official site (mathoffman.com). DIG BMX — "30 Years Of Hoffman Bikes" series. BMXmuseum.com — Hoffman Bikes gallery. 23mag.com — Bicycle Stunts contest archive. SplendidBMX.com. Encyclopedia.com. The Haro Freestyler (theharofreestyler.com) — Haro freestyle team history. USA BMX — National BMX Hall of Fame 2012 inductees. Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame — 2018 inductee. ESPN 30 for 30 — The Birth of Big Air (2010). MobyGames and IMDb — Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX (2001) and Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX 2 (2002).
Where sources conflict — most often on Mat's total X Games gold count versus his ten World vert titles — we have used the numbers that show up consistently across the brand's own materials and the contemporaneous press.