A BMX History Library chapter · United Kingdom section

Jamie Bestwick

An engineer from Nottingham who moved to America, got on a vert ramp, and did not get beaten for eight years

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

In June 2014, at X Games Austin, a forty-two-year-old from Nottingham dropped into the vert ramp and won the BMX contest again. It was his ninth straight gold medal in the event. Nobody in the history of the X Games, on a bike or a board or a motorcycle, had ever put nine wins back to back in one discipline.

The strange part is that it barely registered as news by then. Bestwick winning vert had stopped being a result and turned into a weather report. The men he was beating were half his age and most of them had grown up watching him.

Nottingham, and a proper job

Bestwick got his first BMX at ten and rode it the way most kids did — because his friends were riding. He entered contests for fun. There was no plan in it, and in Britain in the mid-1980s there was no obvious career at the end of it either.

When he left school he did what a sensible young man in the East Midlands did: he took an engineering job at Rolls-Royce. That was supposed to be the life. He quit it to ride a bicycle for a living, which in 1990s Britain was a decision that needed either a lot of confidence or a very short memory.

Out of Britain

He turned professional and rode in Europe, backed for a spell by KHE and Puma. He left that arrangement in June 1998 and signed with GT in the United States as their top contest pro. In 1999 he moved to America outright, drawn by Woodward Camp in Pennsylvania and the year-round ramps and riders that Britain simply did not have. He has been based in Pennsylvania since.

The GT connection produced signature frames. There were Jamie Bestwick Pro models in the GT catalog in the early 2000s, which put a rider from Nottingham on the wall of bike shops in countries that could not find Nottingham on a map. GT was, by then, the biggest bike brand BMX had ever produced — the story of how it got there is told in our GT chapter.

He rode his first X Games in 1996 and finished third in vert. That is a fine result for a rider off a small island with a handful of ramps. It was also the last time for a very long while that anybody thought of him as a promising outsider.

2000: the year the door opened

Dave Mirra had owned X Games vert for three years running. In 2000, Bestwick beat him and took the gold. That is the result that changed his standing in the sport: not a good showing by the British guy, but a win over the most marketable rider in BMX, on his own ground.

What followed over the next few years was not immediate domination. Vert in the early 2000s was deep, and the podium moved around. What Bestwick did in that stretch was refuse to leave it.

2005: won everything

2005 is the season people point at. He entered every contest on his calendar and won all of them. In October of that year he took a vert final with a double tailwhip flair — a backflip with two full tailwhips inside it — and rider bios have credited that as the first landed in competition ever since.

That was also the era of the Dew Tour, the summer series that gave action sports a season-long points title called the Dew Cup rather than a single weekend showdown. Bestwick collected them. Reporting from 2010 describes him as a five-time and undefeated Dew Cup winner in vert; later athlete bios put his career total higher still. He was named Dew Tour Athlete of the Year in 2006.

The streak, 2007 to 2014

From 2007 onward the vert contest at the X Games effectively had one answer. Bestwick won it nine times in a row, through to X Games Austin in June 2014. The run included two golds in 2013, the year the X Games ran multiple stops around the world instead of one summer event, and one of those wins came in Barcelona.

Nine consecutive golds in a single discipline had never been done at the X Games. It happened at an age when most riders in the sport have long since moved into team management or ramp building. When American reporters caught up with him during the 2014 Dew Tour he was forty-two years old and still the man to beat.

In 2014 he won the Laureus World Action Sportsperson of the Year award — the closest thing action sports has to a mainstream global honor, voted on by an academy of retired world-class athletes. He later became a Laureus ambassador, welcomed into the role by Tony Hawk.

2015, and the end of it

At X Games Austin in 2015 the streak ended. Vince Byron of Australia won the BMX Vert gold and Bestwick finished second. He had not lost the event since the run began in 2007. When it went, it went in the most ordinary way possible — somebody rode better on the day.

He kept riding. He did not do the thing where a champion disappears the moment the winning stops.

The coaching years

Britain's relationship with BMX changed while Bestwick was away winning in America. By the time BMX freestyle park was added to the Olympic program for the Tokyo Games, Great Britain had a squad in it — and Bestwick was coaching them.

At those Games, held in 2021 after a year's delay, Charlotte Worthington won the women's BMX freestyle park gold with a 360 backflip that no woman had landed in competition before. Declan Brooks took bronze in the men's event. Both riders had Bestwick in their corner.

It is a neat closing of a loop. A rider who had to leave Britain in 1999 to find ramps and riders good enough to push him spent the back half of his career making sure the next generation did not have to.

Where the record runs thin

Timeline

• 8 July 1971 — born in Nottingham.
• c. 1981 — gets his first BMX at ten years old.
• Late 1980s — leaves school and takes an engineering job at Rolls-Royce, then quits it to ride professionally.
• 1996 — first X Games appearance, third in BMX vert.
• June 1998 — leaves KHE and Puma, signs with GT in the United States.
• 1999 — moves to the United States, basing himself in Pennsylvania around Woodward Camp.
• 2000 — beats Dave Mirra for X Games vert gold, ending Mirra's three-year run in the event.
• 2005 — wins every contest he enters. Takes a vert final in October with a double tailwhip flair.
• 2006 — Dew Tour Athlete of the Year.
• 2007 — the X Games vert streak begins.
• 2010 — recognized by Guinness World Records at X Games 16.
• 2013 — wins twice in a single X Games year, including Barcelona.
• June 2014 — ninth consecutive X Games vert gold at X Games Austin, at forty-two.
• 2014 — wins the Laureus World Action Sportsperson of the Year award.
• 2015 — takes silver at X Games Austin behind Vince Byron. The streak ends.
• 2021 — coaches Great Britain's BMX freestyle riders at the Tokyo Games. Charlotte Worthington wins gold, Declan Brooks bronze.

Where this sits in the bigger story

Vert was invented and mostly owned by Americans. Ron Wilkerson built the contests, Brian Blyther gave the discipline its style through the Haro years, Joe Johnson put the first tailwhip air on record, and Mat Hoffman pushed the ramp itself past the point of sense. That lineage is documented in this library because it is where the discipline came from.

Bestwick is what happened next, and he came from Nottingham. He is the rider who took a form built in Californian and Oklahoman backyards and held the top of it longer than any of the men who invented it.

Britain has produced a handful of riders who reached the very top of a world sport from a standing start: Andy Ruffell as the country's first BMX superstar, Jamie Staff with a BMX world title and then Olympic gold on the track, Kye Whyte with the first Olympic BMX racing medal Britain ever won. Bestwick belongs in that company, and he got there first, on a ramp, in another country, in a discipline Britain had almost no infrastructure for. Elsewhere in this library, the Belfast label JIVE connects to the same freestyle era — its founder went on to co-found DIG BMX, the magazine that covered riders like Bestwick from a British desk.

Two more British names sit alongside this chapter without pages yet: Dale Holmes, another Nottingham rider who built a professional career in America, and Simon Tabron, the British vert rider who shared podiums with Bestwick through the same years. Both belong in this section. A third connection worth noting: Stephen Murray of Newcastle made the same move to America in the same year, and won on dirt while Bestwick won on vert.

Sources

Wikipedia, "Jamie Bestwick" — date of birth, Nottingham, the nicknames, riding from age ten, the Rolls-Royce engineering job, the 1996 X Games debut and third place, the 2000 win over Dave Mirra, the 13 BMX Vert golds and one Vert Best Trick gold, the undefeated 2005 season, the 2015 silver ending the streak, the Laureus award, and the coaching of Charlotte Worthington and Declan Brooks at the Tokyo Games, drawing on ESPN, CraveOnline, Deseret News and Northants Live. ESPN, "Bestwick earns record ninth X Games gold in Vert," 2014, and xgames.com, "Famous nines — BMX Vert pro Jamie Bestwick and his upcoming nine-peat attempt," 2014 — the nine consecutive golds and the first nine-peat in X Games history. xgames.com, "X Games Barcelona 2013 — Jamie Bestwick wins BMX Vert," 2013. Mpora, "X Games Austin 2014: Jamie Bestwick wins ninth BMX Vert gold." CraveOnline, "Vince Byron ends Jamie Bestwick's streak," 2015, and Deseret News, "Jamie Bestwick falls short of 10 in a row at X Games Austin," 2015. Laureus, "British BMX sensation Jamie Bestwick wins Laureus Action Sports Award," and Laureus, "Tony Hawk welcomes X Games record-holder Jamie Bestwick as Laureus ambassador." Baltimore Sun, "Jamie Bestwick, 42, living BMX dream on Dew Tour," 28 June 2014. Deseret News, "Jamie Bestwick comes to Salt Lake on heels of success," 28 August 2011 — the five-time undefeated Dew Cup description. FatBMX, "October 2005: Bestwick claims vert with double whip flair," and the FatBMX Jamie Bestwick interview — the KHE and Puma split in June 1998 and the move to GT USA. ASA Entertainment and Monster Energy athlete biographies — the 1999 move to the United States, Woodward Camp, the Pennsylvania base, the 2006 Dew Tour Athlete of the Year title and later sponsors. PR Newswire, "Jamie Bestwick secures place in the Guinness World Records at X Games Sixteen," 2010. GT catalog listings for the Jamie Bestwick Pro signature models of the early 2000s.

Checked and unreachable at the time of research: bmxsociety.com and bmxmuseum.com.

Last reviewed: August 2026.