Lee Medlin

The Corona Kid Who Doubled at the 1981 BMX Worlds and Turned Pro at 18

A Legend Bike Co. rider page · cross-referenced with our Corona Raceway and RRS Racing chapters

At a glance

Full name Frankie Lee Medlin
Nickname "Peddlin'"
Born December 9, 1964, Riverside, California
Active 1977–1984 (amateur 1977–1982, pro 1983–1984)
Teams Anaheim Bicycle Center · Robinson Racing · GT Racing · Kuwahara Cycles · RRS · Raleigh Cycle Company · Maximum
Known for NBA and NBL Grandnational titles, a double win at the 1981 JAG BMX World Championships, and the fastest sponsor turnaround in this library's record — one weekend on RRS between Kuwahara and Raleigh
Honors USA BMX Hall of Fame, Pioneer category, 2016

Lee Medlin's BMX career fits into seven years almost to the day — a Christmas-present Webco in 1976, a Hall of Fame induction thirty-two years after he quit racing. In between, he ran through seven sponsors, won titles under three different sanctioning bodies, and rode for one of them for exactly forty-eight hours. Few careers in this library are documented down to the specific weekend the way his is, thanks to a detailed, magazine-sourced public record.

Thirteen Years Old at Corona

Medlin raced his first BMX race on January 12, 1977, at Corona Raceway — the steep, mountain-like downhill track in Corona, California that scared plenty of grown racers straight off the start hill. He was thirteen, riding a Webco he'd gotten for Christmas the year before, sanctioned that first day through the Riverside School District. He didn't make the main. He won his fourth race, on February 12, 1977, and picked up his first sponsor that same year: Anaheim Bicycle Center. Legend Bike Co.'s own Corona Raceway chapter marks that January day as the start of a run that would carry him to NBA Grandnational titles in 1979 and 1980 — the same downhill where Kevin McNeal, the track's other hometown star, was building his own reputation at the same time.

Five Sponsors, Five Years

Medlin's amateur ladder ran through a genuine cross-section of late-1970s and early-1980s SoCal BMX: Anaheim Bicycle Center in 1977, Robinson Racing into mid-1978, then GT Racing — Gary Turner's own brand — from mid-1978 through late August 1980, when Medlin joined Kuwahara Cycles. His first race for Kuwahara came at the NBL Grand Nationals on August 30, 1980. He stayed with Kuwahara for two full seasons before quitting in July 1982 over disagreements with team management. He wasn't alone: Kevin McNeal, a close friend who'd just rejoined Kuwahara, quit in solidarity with him.

What happened next is one of the most precisely dated stretches in this library. Medlin signed with RRS — Riverside Redlands Schwinn — for exactly one weekend, August 21 and 22, 1982, riding for RRS at the NBL's Ascot National in Gardena, California. The very next day, August 23, he signed with Raleigh Cycle Company of America. RRS's own chapter in this library calls it "little more than a bridge between two longer sponsorships" — and the dates back that up exactly.

Doubling at the World Championships

Medlin's biggest amateur result predates that sponsor scramble by a year. At the 1981 JAG BMX World Championships, under the United States Cycling Federation's sanction, he won both the 16 Expert Trophy Dash and the 14-and-Over Trophy Dash, and took the overall world title on top of it. Add the NBA's 1978 13 Expert Western States Championship, back-to-back NBA 14/15 Expert Grandnational titles in 1979 and 1980, an NBL 15 Expert Grandnational title also in 1980, and a UBR Spring Championship double the same year, and Medlin's amateur record reads as one of the more complete title runs documented in this series.

Turning Pro, and the Knee That Ended It

Medlin rejoined Kuwahara on January 22, 1983 — the same day he turned pro, at eighteen. His first professional race came the very next day, January 23, 1983, at the ABA Supernationals in Lake Elsinore, California: second place in A Pro, worth $300. His first pro win followed a week later, on January 30, at the ABA Cajun Nationals in Shreveport, Louisiana, worth $280.

The injury that ended his career started at the NBL War of the Stars national in Reno, Nevada, on June 18, 1983, when he crashed on the first jump of the first straight in the B Pro main. He was out of results for two months, resurfacing at the ABA Summer Nationals in Elkhart, Indiana that August, where Bicycles and Dirt magazine noted he was "still gaining strength after an injury." The knee gave out again in a semifinal at the ABA Grandnational in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on November 27, 1983 — he still made the main and finished seventh in AA Pro, his first Senior Men Pro result, but told BMX interviewer Gary Haselhorst years later that it was the moment he decided "it wasn't worth it anymore." He picked up one more sponsor, Maximum, in April 1984, raced a handful more times — including a part-time win in the pro open class at Salt Lake City — and then moved on from BMX for good.

The Hall of Fame

Lee Medlin was inducted into the USA BMX Hall of Fame in the Pioneer category on June 11, 2016, at a ceremony in Chula Vista, California. USA BMX's own induction coverage credits him as one of the original members of the GT factory team and a nationally-ranked top-three amateur from age thirteen to eighteen — a fair summary of a career that, title for title and sponsor for sponsor, is about as well documented as amateur-era BMX racing gets.

Where the public record runs thin

Medlin's Wikipedia-sourced biographical record lists his birthplace as Riverside, California, while this library's own RRS Racing chapter describes him in passing as "the Corona-raised amateur" — a description of where he grew up racing, not necessarily where he was born, so the two aren't strictly a contradiction, but we're flagging the difference rather than smoothing it over. Details of his 1984 season with Maximum, and what he did professionally after leaving BMX, aren't documented in the sources available to us.

Where Lee Medlin fits in the bigger story

Tracks: Corona Raceway · Ascot BMX. Brands: Robinson Racing · GT Bicycles · RRS Racing. Riders: Kevin McNeal. Sanctioning bodies: NBA · NBL · ABA. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

en.wikipedia.org, "Lee Medlin" — a heavily footnoted rider profile sourced to contemporaneous issues of Bicycle Motocross Action, BMX Action, BMX Plus!, Super BMX, and Bicycles and Dirt, plus a 2007 bmxactiononline.com interview by Gary Haselhorst; used here for the full sponsor timeline, title list, injury dates, and direct quotes. usabmx.com, "2016 BMX Hall of Fame Inductees announced" and related USA BMX Hall of Fame coverage — 2016 Pioneer-category induction. fatbmx.com, "Announcing the Inductees into the 2016 BMX Hall of Fame." Legend Bike Co. — Corona Raceway and RRS Racing chapters, cross-referenced for consistency on the Corona debut and the RRS-to-Raleigh handoff. oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were checked first, per this library's research standard, but returned no page-level results specific to Medlin beyond general archive material; the Wikipedia entry's direct magazine citations were treated as the stronger primary-source trail and are cited above as the underlying record.