Justin Green
Modesto's Green Machine — two world titles in one weekend, a No. 1 cruiser plate, and a career that stopped short
A Legend Bike Co. rider page · primary source: Bill Ryan
At a glance
Scene Modesto, California — ABA and I.BMX.F. racing
Era Mid-1980s through 1991
Sponsors Diamond Back in the mid-1980s; GT Bicycles by 1991
Known for Winning the 14 Expert and 14/15 Cruiser world titles at the same 1988 World Championships, and holding the 1990 ABA National No. 1 Cruiser plate
Who he was
Justin Green came out of Modesto, California, and started racing at seven years old. By the mid-1980s he was one of the fastest kids in the country in his age group, and by the end of the decade he had two rainbow-level world titles and a national number one plate. Riders who came up alongside him — Shelby James, George Seevers, Todd Lyons, John Purse, David Milham — are names the sport still knows. Green belongs in that group.
Around the traps he was called the Green Machine. It fit. He was consistent in a way that wore other kids down over a long weekend.
The 1987 Worlds in Orlando
The 6th I.BMX.F. World Championships were run August 8-9, 1987, at the fairgrounds in Orlando, Florida, hosted by the NBL. Twenty-four countries turned up with more than 1,500 entries. It was so hot and humid that racing was pushed to the evening under lights.
Green rode 13 Experts and 13 & Under Cruiser. He took sixth in the expert class and third in cruiser, behind Shelby James and George Seevers. That is a real result at a world championship, but it turned out to be the warm-up.
The 1988 Worlds in Chile — two titles
The 7th I.BMX.F. World Championships ran August 13-14, 1988, inside the velodrome at the Estadio Nacional in Santiago, Chile. About a thousand entries from fifteen countries. The weather turned and the track became a mud bath on the Saturday.
Justin Green won two world titles that weekend: 14 Expert and 14/15 Cruiser. Doubling up at a world championship is hard in any era. Doing it on a torn-up mud track in South America, a long way from home, says plenty about how he raced.
The TECH BMX pants
Here is the part Bill Ryan knows firsthand.
I started TECH BMX Pants in 1984, when I was fifteen, out of my bedroom at 6912 Tahiti Drive in Cypress, California. We made pants and jerseys for S&S, S&M, Redline, Haro, Diamond Back, Cyclecraft, the L&S team, the Boss team, and some Peddlepower riders.
We made a pair of pants for Justin Green while he was on Diamond Back.
That was how a lot of that business worked. A factory rider wanted something his sponsor wouldn't make — a color, a cut, a fit that actually worked for him — so he came to the kid with the sewing setup. One-off pairs for factory riders were a big part of what kept TECH going in those years.
Pro, then the knee
Green kept climbing. He picked up a stack of NAG number ones as an amateur and held the ABA National No. 1 Cruiser plate for 1990. He turned pro and was riding for GT Bicycles by 1991, and people in the sport had him marked as the next serious threat in AA Pro.
It ended in 1991. Racing in Norway, he shattered his knee. GO magazine reported that November that he would be in a leg brace for about a year, that it took him out of the running for the plate, and that it might take him out of BMX for good. It did. Cards were to be sent to him care of GT.
He did not hang around and fade out. He redirected, went to college, and earned a degree in marine biology.
Where the public record runs thin
A lot about Justin Green is not written down anywhere we can point to.
We have not been able to confirm his date of birth. Based on his age classes at the 1987 and 1988 world championships he was born around 1973 or 1974, but that is arithmetic, not a source.
The sponsor sequence is incomplete. We know he was on Diamond Back in the mid-1980s, because we built pants for him there. We know he was with GT by 1991. What sat in between, and in what order, we cannot document. If he had bike shop or local sponsors on the way up — and almost every Modesto-area kid did — we do not have their names.
His full national results are not compiled in any public place we can cite. "Numerous NAG No. 1s" is how the sport remembered him; we cannot list the years and classes.
We also cannot say which event in Norway the knee injury happened at, only that it happened in Norway in 1991 and that it ended his racing.
And we do not know what he has been doing since the marine biology degree. If you know Justin, or raced with him, or have a magazine page with his name on it, we would like to hear from you. Pages like this get better when the people who were there fill them in.
Where Justin Green fits in the bigger story
Green is the kind of rider the sport produced constantly in the 1980s and then mostly forgot: fast enough to win a world title, good enough to turn pro, and gone before he got the pro career the amateur years pointed at. His path ran straight through the machinery the sport was built on — a factory ride at Diamond Back, a ABA national number one plate, a custom pair of pants sewn by a teenager in Cypress because the factory would not make what he wanted. That last part is not a footnote. That is how the industry actually functioned, and it is why Bill Ryan can tell you about Justin Green at all. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.
Sources
Bill Ryan, firsthand account of TECH BMX Pants, September 2026. Gerrit Does, History of BMX (1986-1987) and History of BMX (1988-1989), University of BMX — full class-by-class results for the 6th I.BMX.F. World Championships (Orlando, Florida, August 8-9, 1987) and the 7th I.BMX.F. World Championships (Santiago, Chile, August 13-14, 1988). GO: The Rider's Digest, November 1991, on the knee injury and the GT connection. "The Top 90 BMXers of the 90's," rider No. 52, for Modesto, the Green Machine nickname, racing from age seven, the NAG number ones, the 1990 ABA National No. 1 Cruiser plate, and the marine biology degree.
Notes on uncertainty. Justin Green is a common name, and there are well-known Justin Greens in other fields. Everything on this page comes from sources that are clearly about BMX racing, and the ages line up cleanly across the 1987 and 1988 world championship results, the 1990 ABA plate, and the 1991 injury — one rider, one timeline. Bill Ryan's account puts Green on Diamond Back in the mid-1980s; we have not found an independent published source naming that sponsorship, and we are relying on Bill's direct memory of building the pants. Where we could not confirm something, we said so rather than filling the gap. If any of this is wrong, tell us and we will fix it.