BMX History · Rider Profile · Legend Bike Co

Mat Hoffman

Edmond, Oklahoma. Not California. That part matters, so start there. Every name that built freestyle in the early days came out of Southern California — the contests, the magazines, the factory teams. Bob Haro was out there. Eddie Fiola was out there. And then there's a kid in Oklahoma, a thousand miles from any of it, who decided he was going to be better than all of them anyway. He was.

Mat Hoffman built his first quarterpipe at ten years old off plans he tore out of a BMX magazine. By fourteen he flew to New York and won his class at the AFA championships inside Madison Square Garden. The kid nobody had heard of, from the place nobody was watching, just walked in and took it. Every sponsor at the contest came looking for him after.

They called him The Condor. If you ever saw him go off a ramp you understood why. A condor is about the biggest thing that flies, and that is what it looked like — a guy who went up higher than everyone, hung up there longer than everyone, and came down somewhere you didn't expect. The name stuck so hard he eventually stamped it on his own bike.

Skyway, then Haro

Haro offered him a spot on the B team in 1986 — start at the bottom, work your way up. Skyway offered him the real thing, a factory ride, a salary, flights to contests. He was fourteen. He took Skyway. Broke his collarbone at a show almost immediately, healed, and went straight to the world freestyle championships in Vancouver.

By 1988 he was on Haro — the brand Bob Haro started, the company that invented the freestyle bike in the first place. For Mat that was a respect thing. Haro's roster was the best in the world and he wanted to be on it. He was sixteen.

The first 900

March 25, 1989. Kitchener, Ontario. A 2-Hip King of Vert contest. Mat Hoffman threw a 900 — two and a half full rotations in the air — and landed it. First one in BMX, period. He was seventeen years old. He'd only tried it once before.

Now hold that date in your head. Tony Hawk landed the first skateboard 900 at the X Games in 1999. Ten years later. Mat did it on a bike, in front of a small crowd in Canada, a full decade before the trick became famous on a skateboard. Most people have it backwards. They think the skateboard came first. It didn't.

So he built his own bike

Here's the problem with being the best. Mat was going higher and crashing harder than anyone alive on a 20-inch wheel, and the bikes couldn't take it. He'd break a brand-new frame doing what he did. He left Haro at the end of 1991, and instead of chasing another sponsor he did the only thing that made sense. He built the bike himself.

That's Hoffman Bikes, started in late 1991 in Oklahoma City. The first frame was the Condor, named after him. Linn Kastan — one of the men who started Redline years before — helped him work out the geometry and built the first five prototypes in his California shop. The thing was strong enough to survive a Hoffman run, which is about the highest bar a freestyle frame could be held to at the time.

It's the oldest story in this sport. The rider can't get the bike he needs, so the rider builds the company that builds the bike. I did the same thing with Supercross a couple of years before Mat did it, for the exact same reason. You can read the full company history on the Hoffman Bikes page.

He built the contests too

By 1992 there was almost no professional freestyle circuit left. The magazines had folded. The old sanction had wound down. So Mat built a series from scratch and called it Bicycle Stunt — everyone just said BS. First one ran in January 1992 in Texas. Rider-built, top to bottom, run through his own outfit, Hoffman Promotions.

Think about what that means. The best rider on earth also had to be the promoter, the organizer, the guy renting the venue — because if he didn't do it, nobody was going to. For a few years his series was the only real freestyle competition on the planet.

Then in 1995 ESPN came in. They partnered with Hoffman Promotions to put the series on television, and that partnership became the BMX side of the first X Games. The Sprocket Jockeys — the rider crew and stunt team Mat ran — and later the Hoffman Sports Association grew out of all this. HSA ran the BMX freestyle side of the X Games and its qualifiers for years. Mat didn't just compete in the sport's biggest stage. He built the stage.

Big air

Mat was the first rider to go off the oversized ramps — the giant ones, back in 1993. On one early attempt he tore his spleen and would have died if he hadn't gotten to a hospital inside a few minutes. He kept going anyway.

The number that ended up in the Guinness book is twenty-six feet six inches of air above the deck of a 24-foot quarterpipe. Add it up and that's more than fifty feet off the ground on a BMX bike, no engine, no rope, nothing but what he carried up the ramp. The 2010 ESPN 30 for 30 film The Birth of Big Air told that whole story to people who'd never heard his name.

What he left behind

Two X Games vert golds, in 1995 and 1996, and a stack of medals after. The first 900 and the first no-handed 900 — that one at the 2002 X Games, which was the last vert run of his competitive career. More than a hundred original tricks credited to his name. A video game with his name on it that pulled a whole generation of kids into BMX through a controller. National BMX Hall of Fame in 2012. Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame in 2018.

But the real measure isn't the medal count. Mat Hoffman took BMX vert — a small corner of a small sport — and turned it into something on national television with its own bikes, its own contests, and its own Hall of Fame. He rode it, he built the bike for it, and he built the show around it. Nobody else did all three. He did.

Sources

Mat Hoffman, The Ride of My Life (ReganBooks, 2002) — primary autobiography, quoted throughout. Wikipedia: Mat Hoffman, Hoffman Bikes, Hoffman Sports Association, X Games. 23mag.com — Mat Hoffman photo biography and Bicycle Stunt contest archive. DIG BMX — "The Dangers of Flying on a Budget" (Mat Hoffman, first person). BMX Plus! (April 1987, John Ker) and Freestylin' Magazine (Aug / Nov 1986) — early contest coverage. Ride UK BMX rider profile. ESPN 30 for 30 — The Birth of Big Air (2010). USA BMX / National BMX Hall of Fame — 2012 inductee. Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame — 2018 inductee. Cross-referenced against our own Hoffman Bikes brand history.