The Jag BMX World Championships
Renny Roker's indoor race called itself a world championship before anybody else did — and the room he set aside for three men at the 1979 event became the start of the IBMXF
A Legend Bike Co chapter · Part of The History of BMX
This chapter fills a gap our own library keeps pointing at. The History of BMX hub names the Jag Worlds and the room where the IBMXF got its start, and the George Esser and Gerrit Does chapters both lean on that meeting. This is the full story of the event, the brand, and the promoter who ran it.
Where the public record thins out, we say so rather than guess.
Renny Roker, before BMX
Renny Roker was born September 6, 1942, in New York, and he'd already had two careers before he ever put on a BMX race. He acted — a small part in the 1968 comedy Skidoo, a recurring role on Gomer Pyle, a spot in the 1980 series Nobody's Perfect, five episodes of Hill Street Blues playing the attorney Byron Brown, and lead roles in two 1970s features, Tough (1974) and Deliver Us From Evil (1976). He also worked the other side of the camera as a music promoter — Casablanca Records had him running its Black-music division, he co-ran Roker Records with his brother Wally, and he was a platinum-selling promoter behind KISS's Destroyer, working with Donna Summer, the Commodores, and George Benson along the way. Gerrit Does, who worked with Roker directly in the BMX years, later wrote about seeing the gold and platinum records hanging on Roker's office wall in person.
Roker died December 20, 2022, in Florida. The USA BMX Hall of Fame inducted him in 2023 in the Industry category, posthumously, in Tulsa — his daughter Kelly Roker accepted on his behalf.
Jag BMX, the brand
Jag BMX was Roker's own bike company, and Skip Hess's Mongoose built the bikes under private label. "Jag BMX was a company owned by Renny Roker," Hess has said. "He built a strong BMX racing team and my company made private label bikes and components for him and Jag BMX was quite successful." There were two distinct generations of the bike: an early run before 1980, then a 1983 relaunch — sometimes badged Jox — with gusseted frames closer to what Redline and Hutch were building by then. Gerrit Does's own Dutch team rode Jag bikes to the 1979 Worlds — eight of nine riders on Jag, one on Webco.
December 1978: the first Jag Worlds
The first Jag BMX World Championships ran December 30, 1978, in Indianapolis — 165 motos on an indoor cement track with wooden jumps and flat turns, nothing like the dirt tracks BMX had grown up on. The pro purse was $2,500. Foreign entries were still limited that first year — riders came from Venezuela, three from Japan, two from Australia — but the door was open, and it stayed open. Gerrit Does, who was there, later called it plainly: "The JAG BMX Worlds was also the first World Championship event ever worldwide." No other BMX race before it had used the term.
1979: bigger, and a meeting that mattered
The second Jag Worlds, December 29–30, 1979, dwarfed the first — 1,728 entries, 871 motos, roughly 10,000 spectators, and a tie-in with the TV show CHiPs that put a BMX race in front of a television audience most other events of the era couldn't touch. Perry Kramer won Open Pro. Greg Esser, George Esser's son, won 14-Open. Peter Loncarevich won both the 11-13 Open and 13 Expert classes. Tinker Juarez placed in Open Pro. Dutch riders Nico Does and Maarten Roos placed in the Novice classes.
The result that mattered most for BMX's future didn't happen on the track. Roker set aside a meeting room at the 1979 Jag Worlds, and George Esser, Gerrit Does, and Tadashi Inoue of Japan sat down in it and started sketching out what a real international BMX body would look like — one built around national federations instead of run by a single promoter, the way the Jag Worlds itself was. A follow-up meeting at the 1980 Jag Worlds, again in a room Roker provided, is where the final decision got made. The International BMX Federation was formally founded in April 1981 out of the NBL's office in Pompano Beach, Florida.
It's a strange, real piece of BMX history: the man who ran the most commercial, indoor, made-for-TV race of the era is the same man who handed the sport's future governing body the room it was born in.
1980 to 1985: Las Vegas, and the end
The Jag Worlds stayed in Indianapolis through at least 1981 — still indoors, still on cement, still with wooden jumps, confirmed by riders who were sponsored to attend that year. The event then moved to Las Vegas starting in 1982, and by the mid-1980s it had wound down. Roker's exit from BMX in the 1980s was an abrupt one. Both bmxmuseum.com's account and Gerrit Does's own recollections describe pros left unpaid and promises that went unmet — two independent sources landing on the same note.
Where the public record runs thin. The exact venue name for the Indianapolis years — commonly given as the Indiana State Fairgrounds — isn't independently confirmed beyond general references to "Indianapolis" and "a convention center"; we're carrying the Fairgrounds detail because it's consistent with our own hub page, not because we found a second source nailing it down. TV coverage beyond the 1979 CHiPs tie-in and a reported 1981 broadcast is not fully documented year by year. And sources disagree on the closing date by a year — some accounts put the last Jag Worlds around 1985, others closer to 1986. We don't have a source clean enough to settle it, so take the end date as "mid-1980s," not a fixed year. Neither oldschoolmags.com nor bmxsociety.com returned readable content on the Jag Worlds when we checked — oldschoolmags.com does have a period magazine scan filed under the Jag Worlds, but it's not text-searchable through the tools available to us, and bmxsociety.com's relevant thread is behind its forum's script-rendered pages.
Where the Jag Worlds fits in the bigger story
By the time the Jag Worlds existed, BMX already had three regional American sanctions and no real international structure. Roker's race was commercial through and through — built for television, built for sponsors, built to sell Jag bikes — but it did something none of the dirt-track nationals had managed: it pulled in riders from outside the United States and put them in the same building. That's what made it the right room for Esser, Does, and Inoue to start talking. Read the full arc in The History of BMX, and the governing-body side of the story in the IBMXF chapter.
Frequently asked questions
Who ran the Jag BMX World Championships?
Renny Roker, an actor and music promoter who also owned the Jag BMX bike brand. Mongoose founder Skip Hess built the Jag bikes under private label for Roker's company.
Why was the Jag Worlds significant to BMX history?
It was the first BMX race to call itself a "world championship," it drew international riders in real numbers starting in 1979, and it hosted the 1979 meeting between George Esser, Gerrit Does, and Tadashi Inoue that led to the founding of the IBMXF in 1981.
Where and when was the first Jag Worlds held?
December 30, 1978, in Indianapolis, Indiana, run indoors on a cement floor with wooden jumps and flat turns.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Renny Roker" (biographical and Hall of Fame details). USA BMX Hall of Fame 2023 Inductees announcement (usabmx.com). bmxmuseum.com's Jag BMX bike archive page, including Skip Hess's own account of building bikes for Roker. Gerrit Does's firsthand account of the 1979 and 1980 meetings and the founding of the IBMXF (universityofbmx.com). universityofbmx.com's year-by-year BMX history entries for 1978–1979, drawing on period race coverage for entry counts, moto counts, and results. A rider's firsthand 1981 Jag Worlds account (pedalbrakepedal.blogspot.com). oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were checked first per our standing research rule; neither returned readable text content on this topic through the tools available to us at time of writing.
Keep reading
The History of BMX — the full hub this chapter belongs to.
George Esser — founder of the NBL, and one of the three men in that room.
Gerrit Does — the godfather of European BMX, and another of the three.
The IBMXF — the international federation that meeting produced.