IBMXF — The International BMX Federation

Founded 1981 · Absorbed by the UCI 1993

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

We're telling this story the same way we told the others: neutrally. No brand gets elevated. No rider gets shorted. Where the record is contested, we say so.

Why an international body had to exist

By the end of the 1970s, BMX had grown well past the vacant lots in Southern California where it started. The three American sanctions — the NBA, the NBL, and the ABA — were running national programs at home, but the sport itself was already on the move.

The flashpoint was the Jag BMX World Championships, run by music promoter and team owner Renny Roker at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis. Roker had been calling his race the "world championship" since the first one in December 1978, and by 1979 he was actually drawing riders from outside the U.S.

During the 1979 Jag Worlds, Roker set aside a meeting room and put George Esser, Gerrit Does, and Tadashi Inoue in it. The three of them sat down and started drawing up what a real international BMX body would look like. The talks took a year and a half. They did the legal work through a lawyer in Pompano Beach, Florida, and on April 3, 1981, the International BMX Federation — IBMXF — was registered out of the Netherlands.

The founders

Gerrit Does — the Dutch side

Gerrit Does was born in 1945 in the Netherlands. He came out of cycle speedway and motocross promotion, and in 1977 he made the decision to introduce American-style BMX to Holland. In February 1978, at an international motocross event in Valkenswaard, he ran the first BMX demonstration in the country.

By May 1978 he had set up an informal national organization. In October of that year he formalized it as the Stichting Fietscross Nederland (S.F.N.). When the IBMXF was registered in 1981, Does was named General Secretary — the day-to-day operational seat.

George Esser — the American side

George Esser had founded the National Bicycle League in Florida in 1974. The NBL was set up as a non-profit. Esser brought the American operational experience to the IBMXF.

Tadashi Inoue — the Japanese side

Tadashi Inoue ran the Japanese end of the equation. Japan had a strong BMX scene by the late 1970s, and Inoue was the figure who connected it to the international body.

Dayton, Ohio — August 1982

The first IBMXF World Championships ran in Dayton, Ohio in 1982. About 1,107 riders entered. Roughly 90 percent of them were American. Seventeen countries sent racers, but the dominance of the American pros was almost complete: no rider from outside the U.S. finished in the top three of any class.

The track itself almost didn't get built in time. A group of pro riders who'd shown up early to practice ended up pitching in with shovels and rakes the day before the race. It got finished. Greg Hill — the SE Racing team rider whose GH Flyer eventually became the SE Mini Ripper — won the Pro 20-inch class. Hill became the first official BMX World Champion, and he would go on to win the IBMXF Pro title five times.

The American pro contingent at Dayton was the same group of riders who had been carrying the sport at home. Stu Thomsen, Perry Kramer, Mike Miranda, and the rest of that generation were the names on the start gates. The bikes underneath them were largely the same — PK Rippers, Quadangles, GT Pros, Mongoose Californians, Torker MXs. (For the equipment side, see the SE Racing chapter.)

Slagharen, 1983 — the Dutch take it home

The second IBMXF Worlds moved to Slagharen, Netherlands, in 1983. Gerrit Does had been working at the Attractiepark Slagharen amusement park for years, and the park hosted the event.

A 16-year-old Dutch rider named Phil Hoogendoorn won the Junior 16-and-over title at Slagharen — the first time a non-American had won a class at an IBMXF World Championships. At the 1984 Worlds in Suzuka, Japan, he won both the Amateur 20-inch and Amateur 24-inch classes in the same year. He went on to win World titles in 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1986.

Slagharen mattered for a second reason. It established that the World Championships would actually rotate.

The FIAC problem

The IBMXF was not the only international body claiming to crown a BMX World Champion in the 1980s.

FIAC — the Fédération Internationale Amateur de Cyclisme — was the amateur wing of the UCI, the cycling body recognized by the International Olympic Committee. Starting in the mid-1980s, FIAC began running its own BMX World Championships in parallel with the IBMXF.

The result was two world championships happening in the same sport, often in the same calendar year, with different riders winning different rainbow jerseys. From the inside of BMX, the IBMXF event was the one that mattered. FIAC's secretary, Madame Juliani, said publicly that "BMX was a play for kids" — a quote that became famous inside BMX because it summed up how the FIAC side viewed the discipline at the time.

None of that changed the political reality. FIAC sat under the UCI. The UCI sat under the IOC. Any path to the Olympics for BMX ran through that chain of letterhead, not around it.

Joint Worlds, then merger — 1991 to 1993

The first step was a joint World Championship. On July 22, 1991, the IBMXF and FIAC ran a combined Worlds in Sandnes, Norway. That format ran for the next two seasons.

On January 1, 1993, the merger was complete. The IBMXF was absorbed into FIAC. A few years later, the UCI restructured its own internal divisions — folding FIAC and the professional cycling federation FICP back into a single UCI — and BMX moved with it. By 1996, the UCI granted BMX full recognition as a discipline.

What the IBMXF actually built

Over its twelve years as an independent body, the IBMXF ran annual World Championships in eleven different countries on four continents. It set the international rulebook the sport still works from. It ran a points-tracking system that linked national programs to a single international ranking.

None of that work disappeared in the 1993 merger. The IBMXF rulebook, the IBMXF national-federation structure, and the IBMXF rider ranking system all carried over into the UCI's BMX program. The people who ran the IBMXF became the people who ran UCI BMX in its first years.

The direct line to Beijing 2008

BMX racing made its Olympic debut at the Beijing 2008 Games on August 20 and 21, 2008. Forty-eight athletes from 17 countries raced for the first two gold medals the sport had ever produced at the Olympic level. Latvia's Māris Štrombergs won the men's race. France's Anne-Caroline Chausson won the women's.

That moment does not exist without the IBMXF.

The chain is direct: BMX is in the Olympics in 2008 because the UCI added BMX as a discipline. The UCI added BMX as a discipline because FIAC absorbed the IBMXF in 1993. FIAC absorbed the IBMXF because the IBMXF had spent twelve years building a credible, working international body. The IBMXF existed because Gerrit Does, George Esser, and Tadashi Inoue sat down in a room Renny Roker had set aside for them at the 1979 Jag Worlds. Take any one of those steps out of the chain and the sport doesn't reach Beijing.

What happened to the people

Gerrit Does retired from Attractiepark Slagharen in February 2010 at the age of 65 and turned his attention to writing and archiving — running University of BMX, the online history project. He was inducted into the international BMX Hall of Fame in 2017.

George Esser stayed with the NBL into the 1980s and remained involved in the American sanctioning side. He was inducted into the USA BMX Hall of Fame. The NBL itself ran until 2011, when the ABA acquired it and the combined organization rebranded as USA BMX.

Tadashi Inoue continued to run the Japanese end of international BMX for years after the merger.

Where this sits in the larger story

The IBMXF chapter slots between the founding-era American sanctions covered in the History of BMX origin piece and the rider and brand chapters that came out of the 1980s — the riders who actually raced these Worlds, like Greg Hill, Stu Thomsen, Perry Kramer, and Mike Miranda, and the brands that built the bikes underneath them, like the SE Racing chapter covers.

Sources

Wikipedia: BMX racing; UCI BMX World Championships; Union Cycliste Internationale; Māris Štrombergs; Anne-Caroline Chausson.

UCI — official "What is BMX Racing?" history page. USA BMX — George Esser inductee page and the broader USA BMX Hall of Fame records.

University of BMX (universityofbmx.com) — the Gerrit Does archive. bmxweekly.com — three-part interview with Gerrit Does, "The Godfather of European BMX" (October 2019). bmxultra.com — Greg Hill interview. Olympedia entry for BMX Racing. Olympics.com — Beijing 2008 BMX results. Australian BMX Museum — 1991 Sandnes Worlds. fatbmx.com — Gerrit Does's article "BMX in Holland in fact started in the 1950's."

Primary-source recollection: Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX and co-owner of Legend Bike Co., on the American competitive scene at the time of the first IBMXF Worlds.

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