La Mirada BMX: The Fast Start and the Big Downhill
BMX Racing History · Track File · Legend Bike Co
La Mirada BMX: The Fast Start and the Big Downhill
La Mirada is the track the cameras found. Back in 1977, when Boys' Life magazine went looking for a way to show every Scout in America what this BMX thing was all about, they pointed the camera at the track in La Mirada Regional Park. Look at what survives — the photos, the footage — and you understand the pick. A fast gate. A big downhill. And fields packed with kids who were about to be the names everybody knew.
Built by Parents, Designed by a Track Builder
La Mirada came together the way most of the good early tracks did. One parent who wouldn't let it go, one builder who knew what he was doing. Wanda Curran pushed the thing through the Southeast Recreational Park District. Rick Troy — same man who shaped the Corona downhill — designed it and stood over the construction. Race days fell to the La Mirada Bikers, parents and riders who did all of it, from punching membership cards to dragging a rake across the dirt. Ask anyone who rode it and you get the same short answer. Fast off the gate, and that big downhill.
The Boys' Life Moment
Then 1977 happened. Boys' Life — the Boy Scouts' own magazine, sitting in millions of American living rooms — ran a BMX feature, and they shot it at La Mirada. The kids in those pictures were a who's who before anybody knew it: Bobby Encinas, David Sebring, Scot Breithaupt, Greg Hill. Picture a kid two thousand miles from California, never seen a real track in his life, opening that issue at the kitchen table. That was the spark. Rider memory also puts a young Tinker Juarez in the first-straight shots — we're holding that one loosely until somebody pulls the original issue and confirms it.
The Races
La Mirada ran the Powerlite 1000 in 1980. That's the race tied to some well-traveled footage that got labeled 1976 for years, until Mark Rink of the Peddlepower and Torker family set the date straight. An ABA California Cup at La Mirada in 1980 turns up in period photo captions too. Here's the honest part: the sanction history is a mess. Sources split between NBL and ABA across the track's life, and instead of picking a side to look tidy, we'll tell you it's split and keep digging.
The End
Nobody wrote down when it closed. Not that we can find, anyway. Rider memory has the place torn down somewhere in the early-to-mid 1980s, the park gone back to plain grass a long time ago. If you know the day the last gate dropped at La Mirada, the record needs you.
Raced La Mirada? Got the Boys' Life issue, race flyers, or photos? Legend Bike Co wants to hear from you — this page grows as the people who were there fill in the record.
Sources: "The Tracks Rick Troy Built," BX Weekly — firsthand account by art director Jim Curran (design, construction, the La Mirada Bikers, the Boys' Life feature and its riders, the Powerlite 1000 correction by Mark Rink); bmxmuseum.com Southern California track-history forum (rider recollections, marked as such); period photo captions on the 1980 ABA California Cup (to be confirmed). Open year, closing year, and sanction remain unconfirmed in the available record — stated plainly rather than guessed.