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
There was no business plan behind Hoffman Bikes. There was a kid in Oklahoma who had outgrown every frame anybody would sell him. That is the whole origin, right there.
Mat Hoffman was born January 9, 1972 in Edmond, Oklahoma. Not exactly the center of the BMX universe. The freestyle scene back then lived in California — at Haro, at GT, at the contests Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn and Eddie Fiola were running. Oklahoma City was a long, long way from any of that.
So in 1982, ten years old, he and his brothers built a quarterpipe off plans they pulled out of BMX Action magazine. By 1985 he was hitting amateur freestyle contests around the state. June 1986, fourteen years old, he flew to New York for the General Bicycles / AFA Freestyle Championships at Madison Square Garden — and won the 14-15 expert ramp class. The kid from nowhere just took it.
Skyway, Haro, and the first sponsorship years
The factory ride came almost overnight. July 1986, Skyway Recreation signed him to a one-year freestyle deal. He broke his collarbone at a show right out of the gate, healed up, and made his Skyway debut that August at the IBMXF World Freestyle Championships in Vancouver.
Skyway didn't last long. January 1988, with Dennis McCoy and Joe Johnson off the Haro freestyle team and money on the table, Mat signed with Haro Bikes at sixteen.
Now here is the one everybody knows. March 25, 1989, Kitchener, Ontario, a 2-Hip King of Vert contest — Mat landed the first 900 in BMX history. Two and a half rotations in the air. He was seventeen years old, two months past his birthday. Tony Hawk wouldn't land a skateboard 900 for another ten years. Ten years.
By 1991 Mat was nineteen, the best vert rider alive, and watching the whole freestyle side of BMX fall apart around him. FREESTYLIN' magazine had folded. And the bikes weren't holding up to him either — he was going higher, spinning more, crashing harder than anybody on a 20-inch wheel, and the equipment was the thing slowing him down. So he walked away from Haro and built his own.
Hoffman Bikes — late 1991
Hoffman Bikes started in late 1991 in Oklahoma City. Mat was nineteen, almost twenty. Same reason Scot Breithaupt started SE Racing. Same reason I started Supercross BMX a couple of years before — I couldn't get the bikes I wanted for my TECH Racing Team, so I went and built them. The rider can't get the bike he needs from anybody else, so the rider builds the company that builds the bike. It is the oldest story in this sport.
The first frame was the Condor, after Mat's own nickname in the BMX world. Heavy enough to eat the impacts he was throwing at it, light enough to spin, strong enough to live through runs that would have folded a stock freestyle frame in half.
And the design help came from a real one. Linn Kastan — the man who co-founded Redline back in 1970 — helped Mat work out the first Condor frame and fork. Five prototype framesets got 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 themselves, Mat moved production for a stretch over to SE Racing — which was in its own transition years by then — and that got Hoffman Bikes onto a real US frame line while the brand found its legs.
The Bicycle Stunt Series — January 1992
By 1991-92 there was basically no professional contest series left for BMX freestyle. The AFA had wound down. FREESTYLIN' was gone. Ron Wilkerson's 2-Hip King of Vert and a scattering of local contests — that was the whole circuit.
So Mat built his own. He called it Bicycle Stunt, which everybody just shortened to "BS." First BS contest ran January 25-26, 1992 at Jeff Phillips Park in Dallas, Texas. Rider-built, top to bottom. Mat ran the thing himself through a company he set up, Hoffman Promotions. And for a few years there it was the only real freestyle series on the planet. Think about that — the best rider in the world also had to be the promoter, because nobody else was going to do it.
The X Games — 1995
1995, ESPN came in and partnered with Hoffman Promotions to put the Bicycle Stunt Series on TV. That partnership turned into the BMX side of the first ESPN Extreme Games — which inside a year got renamed the X Games. The body Mat set up grew into the Hoffman Sports Association (HSA), and HSA ran the BMX freestyle side of the X Games for years after.
At that first X Games in 1995, Mat won vert gold. Won it again in 1996. Then medaled at a string of 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 wider contest scene he is a ten-time vert World Champion.
His biggest single moment in the air came March 20, 2001 — the Guinness record for highest vertical air on a BMX bike. Twenty-six feet six inches over the deck of a 24-foot quarterpipe. More than fifty feet off the ground. The 2010 ESPN 30 for 30 film The Birth of Big Air — directed by Jeff Tremaine with Johnny Knoxville and Spike Jonze — carried that story out to a mainstream crowd that had never heard the name.
Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX — 2001
Activision had cleaned up with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in 1999 and spun off a sub-label called Activision O2. The first BMX title in the line was Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX, built by Shaba Games, out in 2001 for PlayStation and Game Boy Color, with Dreamcast, Windows, and Game Boy Advance versions right behind it. The sequel, Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX 2, dropped in 2002.
Those two games put a Hoffman bike, a Hoffman park, and Mat himself into the hands of millions of kids who had never set foot on a track or walked into a contest. Talk to anyone who got into BMX in the early 2000s. Good chance the way in 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, came in 1993 — heavier, built for park and street.
By 1997 the flatland guys were asking for a shorter rear end. Hoffman gave them the EP — named like an EP record. Shorter, fewer songs. Day Smith and Leif Valin helped design it, and it turned into one of the most-respected flatland frames of its whole era.
The team grew right along with the bikes. 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 animal. The X Games made vert the headline act of action sports for a while, then street started pulling ahead of vert in the crowd's eye, and by the mid-2010s vert ramps were a smaller slice of the contest circuit than they'd been at any point since the late '80s.
Hoffman Bikes moved with the sport. By the back half of the 2010s the brand had pulled out of the full mass-market chase and settled into something smaller and more focused. They marked 25 years in 2016, 30 years in 2021 — and put out a 30th-anniversary Condor reissue to go with it.
Mat Hoffman, the rider
You can't separate Hoffman the brand from Hoffman the rider. The record does the talking — first 900, first no-handed 900, ten World vert titles, two X Games golds plus a pile of later medals, the Guinness high-air record, and north of 100 original tricks credited to him, the flair and the flip fakie being two of the big ones. The injury list, honestly, reads like a different sport entirely.
In 2012 Mat went into the National BMX Hall of Fame (now USA BMX). 2018, the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame. ESPN handed him the Action Sports Lifetime Achievement Award back in 2002.
Where Hoffman Bikes fits
Mat's a freestyle rider, not a racer. But his spot in the rider-owned wave lines up dead-on with what was happening on the race side at the exact same time. S&M Bikes started in 1987 because the big brands left standing weren't building what street and dirt riders wanted. Supercross BMX started in 1989 because I couldn't get bikes for my TECH Racing Team. Hoffman Bikes started in 1991 because Mat couldn't get a bike that survived him. Three brands, one cause — all of them a direct answer to the crash of 1986-1988 and the cleanout that came after.
The godfather of modern BMX vert
One sentence on what Mat did for BMX vert: he took it from a small subculture buried inside freestyle and turned it into a televised sport with its own contest format, its own equipment industry, and its own Hall-of-Fame-level public figure. Nobody else did that. He did.
Hoffman Bikes is still in Oklahoma City. The Condor is still in the catalog. Mat is still riding. Thirty-some years in, the brand Mat built because he had no other choice is still out there doing exactly 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.