IBMXF — The International BMX Federation

Founded 1981 · Absorbed by the UCI 1993

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

Every Olympic BMX gold medal handed out since 2008 traces back to three men in a borrowed meeting room. A promoter set the room aside for them at a race in Indianapolis in 1979, and they sat down and started sketching out what a real international BMX body would look like. That sketch became the IBMXF. Take that room out of the story and the sport never reaches the Olympics. We're telling this one the way we told the rest — straight, brands and riders both.

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 had already started moving past the borders.

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 pulling riders in from outside the U.S.

So 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 ran the legal work through a lawyer down 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 decided to bring American-style BMX to Holland. In February 1978, at an international motocross event in Valkenswaard, he ran the first BMX demonstration the country had ever seen.

By May 1978 he had an informal national organization up and running. In October he made it official as the Stichting Fietscross Nederland (S.F.N.). When the IBMXF was registered in 1981, Does got named General Secretary — the day-to-day operational seat, which fit him.

George Esser — the American side

George Esser had founded the National Bicycle League in Florida in 1974, set up as a non-profit. He brought the American operational experience to the IBMXF — he'd already done it once at home.

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 man who tied it into the international body.

Dayton, Ohio — August 1982

The first IBMXF World Championships ran in Dayton, Ohio in 1982. About 1,107 riders entered, and roughly 90 percent of them were American. Seventeen countries sent racers, but the American pros owned it almost top to bottom — no rider from outside the U.S. finished in the top three of any class.

Here's the part most people don't know. The track itself almost didn't get built in time. A group of pro riders who'd come out early to practice grabbed shovels and rakes and finished it themselves the day before the race. It got done. Greg Hill — the SE Racing team rider whose GH Flyer eventually became the SE Mini Ripper — took the Pro 20-inch class. That made Hill the first official BMX World Champion, and he'd go on to win the IBMXF Pro title five times.

The American pros at Dayton were the same guys who had been carrying the sport at home. Stu Thomsen, Perry Kramer, Mike Miranda, that whole generation — those were the names on the start gates. And the bikes under them were the bikes you already knew: 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 whole 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 ever won a class at an IBMXF World Championships. At the 1984 Worlds in Suzuka, Japan, he took both the Amateur 20-inch and the Amateur 24-inch in the same year. World titles in 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1986. The kid was the real thing.

Slagharen mattered for another reason too. It proved the World Championships would actually rotate, not just stay parked in America.

The FIAC problem

The IBMXF wasn't the only outfit 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 the International Olympic Committee recognized. Starting in the mid-1980s, FIAC began running its own BMX World Championships right alongside the IBMXF.

So now you had two world championships in the same sport, often in the same year, different riders pulling on different rainbow jerseys. From inside BMX, nobody was confused about which one mattered — the IBMXF event was the real one. FIAC's secretary, Madame Juliani, said out loud that "BMX was a play for kids." That quote got around fast inside BMX, because it told you exactly how the FIAC side saw us back then.

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

Joint Worlds, then merger — 1991 to 1993

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

Then on January 1, 1993, it was done. The IBMXF got absorbed into FIAC. A few years on, the UCI reshuffled its own internal divisions — folding FIAC and the professional cycling federation FICP back into a single UCI — and BMX rode along with it. By 1996 the UCI had granted BMX full recognition as a discipline.

What the IBMXF actually built

In twelve years on its own, the IBMXF ran annual World Championships in eleven different countries across four continents. It wrote the international rulebook the sport still works from. It ran a points system that tied national programs to one international ranking.

And none of that got thrown out in the 1993 merger. The rulebook carried over. The national-federation structure carried over. The rider ranking system carried over. The people who'd run the IBMXF became the people who ran UCI BMX in those first years. The body changed names. The work didn't.

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 that level. Latvia's Māris Štrombergs won the men's race. France's Anne-Caroline Chausson won the women's.

And none of that happens without the IBMXF.

Follow the line back. BMX is in the Olympics in 2008 because the UCI added it as a discipline. The UCI added it because FIAC absorbed the IBMXF in 1993. FIAC absorbed the IBMXF because the IBMXF had spent twelve years building something credible that actually worked. And the IBMXF existed because Gerrit Does, George Esser, and Tadashi Inoue sat down in that room Renny Roker set aside for them at the 1979 Jag Worlds. Pull any one of those steps out and the sport never gets to Beijing.

What happened to the people

Gerrit Does retired from Attractiepark Slagharen in February 2010 at 65 and turned 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 kept his hand in on 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 kept running 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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