Mike Miranda

Mike "Hollywood" Miranda is one of the racers you don't forget from BMX's peak mid-80s run. Count it on race wins alone and he isn't the most decorated rider of his generation — his signature achievement is the 1986 NORA Cup, voted by the readers of BMX Action magazine. But visible? Recognizable? Influential? Few came close. Pink uniforms. A theatrical style on the bike. A speaking role in the 1986 film RAD. A career that ran through five of the decade's biggest brands. He also pushed back on one of the era's silent rules — that male racers didn't wear pink — and ended up the person most responsible for the neon-color fashion wave that swept BMX from 1985 to 1988.

His career ended hard. A spinal injury at the 1989 NBL Orlando national would have finished most people's involvement with the sport for good. Miranda came back differently. He's since worked at GT, at Cycling Sports Group (Cannondale, Schwinn, Mongoose), at Hyper, and at Pacific Cycle. He started and co-hosts the Dirty Knobs Podcast with James Vicente and Eric Carter, both former teammates. He founded DirtyFest and he's a regular at the Buckeye Bike Show. If there's a through-line, it's that Hollywood never really left.

Early years: Corona Raceway, 1977

Miranda was born Fredrick Michael Felty on November 15, 1963 in Jacksonville, Florida. He later took his stepfather's surname, Miranda, and that's the name BMX has known him by his whole career. Legally, he goes by Michael Felty now.

He started racing in September or October 1977, age 13. His first race wasn't at a standard BMX track. It was a school-district race at Corona Raceway in Corona, California, set up so kids from his Junior High School in Riverside could compete. No skill classes. Racers got grouped by grade level, and Miranda lined up in "Six Grade Class." Why he started racing at all comes down to one thing: his parents didn't want him on a motorcycle.

By his own account he "won a lot" early on — though the BMX Plus! 1988 Calendar nudges back on that a little, noting he didn't win his first trophy until February 7, 1978, four months after he started. His first sponsor was Steady Pedaler Bike Shop. Then a small amateur team called RRS. He moved to CW Racing's amateur program in January 1981.

The "Hollywood" nickname

The nickname has two origin stories, and Miranda has told both. The first: Bicycle Motocross Action editor Steve Giberson coined it because Miranda liked to show off. The second: Miranda stuck a name sticker under the visor of his helmet reading "My name is Hollywood" at the 1981 NBA Rancho Nationals, and the name stuck.

Miranda laid out the actual backstory himself in a Super BMX interview in April 1983:

Both stories are, technically, true. The name came from a joke. Giberson amplified it. Miranda leaned into it. It suited him.

A brief SE stint, then CW Racing: 1980–1983

Before he landed at CW, Miranda had a very brief stint with SE Racing — roughly two weeks, late 1980. The arrangement didn't last long enough to show up in most published sponsor chronologies, but it's part of the real record. I can vouch for it firsthand: I was around SE Racing in that period, and the short stint happened. SE was still early as a manufacturer back then, building the JU-6 and the emerging PK Ripper line, and Miranda was one of the young amateurs who cycled through the factory program before finding a longer-term home somewhere else. That short SE stint is what explains the occasional mention of SE in Miranda's career retrospectives. It happened. It just didn't define anything.

Miranda joined CW Racing in January 1981 as an amateur. He turned pro with CW on February 15, 1982, the day after the ABA Winter Nationals in Chandler, Arizona. He was 18. His first pro win came at an NBL national in Lawrenceville, New Jersey in April 1982 — where he became the first "B" Pro to win the Pro Trophy/Award class.

CW was the right fit. Roger Worsham's California brand, running its hand-built Phaze 1 Z-Frames, was still small enough to feel personal, and Miranda and Worsham were close friends. He racked up national wins for CW through 1982 and 1983. By the end he'd put together 11 NBL "B" Pro wins and 4 ABA Junior "A" Pro wins in CW colors — and he actively chose to stay in "B" Pro rather than move up to "A" Pro, because he felt it would be unfair to his competitors to graduate up when he was already doing well. NBL management went along with it. That's an unusual decision, and it says something about how Miranda thought about the sport.

He left CW at the end of 1983 for two stated reasons: he was burned out on the same sponsor he'd been with since basically the start of his racing career, and his friendship with Worsham had cooled as the company grew. Pete Loncarevich took his spot on the CW team.

Torker: January–September 1984

Miranda jumped to Torker in January 1984 to be teammates with his best friend Tommy Brackens, who'd joined Torker a couple of months earlier. The Torker stint was short. Torker was heading for bankruptcy — that came in November 1984 — and by September, Miranda was out. During his brief Torker run, the brand promoted him with the tagline "One Step Ahead" and "We Ship Performance."

One detail worth pulling out of this stretch: Miranda got a BMX Action cover during his Torker time, photographed with "Team Jesus" graphics. That cover is one of the more-remembered Miranda magazine images from the era.

Hutch and the NORA Cup: 1984–1986

On September 15, 1984, Miranda signed with Hutch Hi-Performance BMX. Richard Hutchins, Hutch's founder, was expanding hard — the company had started as a bike shop in Pasadena, Maryland and grown into one of the biggest BMX brands of the mid-80s. Hutch paired Miranda with teammates Tim Judge, Rich Farside, and Toby Henderson.

Hutch also handed Miranda something very few racers of his era ever got: a signature frame. The Hutch "Hollywood Series," released in 1984, was named after him. At over $400, Hutch bikes were among the most expensive on the market. The brand also released a Tim Judge signature frame, "The Judge," in the same window.

Miranda's signature move in his Hutch years was his uniform. Starting in early 1985, he began racing in pink and white. Pink, at the time, was traditionally associated with women's clothing. His decision to race in it was a deliberate push against that convention — and it worked. Other riders followed. Greg Hill's own GHP uniform brought in pink starting early 1985. From 1985 through 1988, neon pink, light purple, lavender, and lime green became a dominant visual language of BMX racing and freestyle — on uniforms, frames, handlebars, and tires. More than any other single rider, Miranda is the guy who started that wave.

The 1986 NORA Cup

In 1986, the readers of BMX Action voted Miranda the winner of the NORA Cup — the Number One Racer Award, the magazine's reader-voted honor for the top pro of the year. He won with 12.02% of the vote (723 out of 6,017 votes cast). Greg Hill, the three-time previous winner, finished second with 11.97%. Tommy Brackens finished third with 11.52%. Miranda won by three votes. He also walked off with an RCA VCR as a prize.

Here's what makes that win stand out. Miranda hadn't won a major race that year. He took the NORA Cup on charisma, visibility, and the pink uniform — which is a legitimate thing to win a popularity-voted award on, and it also tells you exactly what the NORA Cup was measuring. It was the rider the readers wanted to see more of. In 1986, that was Hollywood.

RAD, 1986

Miranda had a speaking role in Hal Needham's 1986 BMX film RAD. His part was crash-stunt work and on-screen dialogue, not freestyle riding. He was one of several prominent racers in the film, alongside Eddie Fiola (who did the lead-character stunt riding), R.L. Osborn, and Martin Aparijo.

Miranda has said publicly he doesn't love the film — there's a whole YouTube interview segment titled "I Don't Like The RAD BMX Movie" — but his presence in it connected him to a huge audience beyond BMX, the same way it did for Fiola. For an entire generation of kids who saw RAD on VHS, Hollywood Miranda is a face they know without knowing why.

The Hutch collapse

Hutch, for all its success, was sliding into financial trouble. By late 1986, the company was missing Miranda's paychecks. His contract called for a salary and contingencies. The checks weren't arriving. Miranda later described what happened:

Miranda left Hutch in early November 1986. Hutch eventually filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It was one of the harder business collapses of the era, and it pushed Miranda to step back from competitive racing for roughly two years.

Return to CW, then Vision Street Wear, then GT

Miranda briefly tested bikes for Jamis Cycles in early 1987. Jamis offered him a sponsorship deal. He turned it down — he didn't want to get burned again, and he was tired of the grind.

In April 1987, he went back to CW Racing — not as a competitive pro, but as the team manager for CW's freestyle program. He raced occasionally in the pro class for fun. When CW merged with Revcore and Shadow (both owned by Roger Worsham as well) in December 1987, Miranda stayed on through September 1988.

After that, Miranda moved to Vision Street Wear and Free Agent on a joint-sponsorship deal. That stretch produced the most unexpected credit on his résumé: involvement in Tom Petty's "Free Fallin'" music video, through Vision Street Wear's crossover into pop-culture marketing.

From Vision, Miranda moved to GT Bicycles — Gary Turner and Richard Long's company — where he headed GT's Juvenile Promotions Program. He wasn't a racing pro by this point. He was an industry guy, helping the next generation of young racers come up through a structured factory program.

The injury: April 3, 1989

At the NBL's Orlando, Florida national on April 3, 1989, Miranda suffered a compression fracture of the spine. He misjudged the height of a jump, the front wheel clipped the peak of a mogul, and he went over the bars and landed on his head.

It was a career-ending injury. He'd been through injuries before — he broke his hand at the 1983 East Coast National in Bargaintown, New Jersey and was laid up about a month, and he broke his jaw practicing a curb jump in September 1985 — but the spinal injury was a different animal. As a competitive racer, he was effectively done that day. He was 25 years old.

After BMX, and back to BMX

Miranda's post-racing arc is one of the more instructive in the sport. He didn't stay in BMX full-time right after the injury. He took up golf — became a golf pro for a few years, in fact — and worked outside the cycling industry.

Eventually he came back. He worked for Cycling Sports Group, the parent company of Cannondale, GT, Schwinn, and Mongoose. He worked at Hyper as co-director of promotions — his title there, characteristically, was "Co-Director of Shenanigans." In February 2020, Pacific Cycle — a division of Dorel Industries that owns Schwinn, Mongoose, and Kid Trax — hired Miranda as Director of Sales focusing on the Walmart and Sam's Club business.

Alongside the industry work, Miranda has stayed active in the old-school BMX community. He co-hosts the Dirty Knobs Podcast, a long-running nostalgic-but-honest conversation about BMX history with fellow legends. He shows up at DirtyFest, the Buckeye Bike Show, and other old-school events. He's been a regular presence at the Supercross BMX warehouse and has appeared on Supercross's YouTube channel talking about the podcast and his career.

He's also been part of the revival of CW Racing, producing classic-style 4130 chromoly frames and forks that pay homage to the original Phaze 1 era — closing a loop that started when a 17-year-old Miranda first joined CW's amateur program in 1981.

Woodward and giving back

One credit worth noting: Miranda spent time as a camp counselor at the Woodward Gymnastics and BMX Camp in Woodward, Pennsylvania. He followed Bobby Encinas and Perry Kramer into that role — part of a clear pattern of mid-80s pros turning into the next generation's coaches and mentors once their racing days wound down.

Legacy

Miranda's racing resume isn't the longest in BMX. His pro racing career ran about seven years — 1982 through early 1989 — with the truly dominant stretch being the 1986 NORA Cup year on Hutch. But pure race wins are the wrong yardstick for his impact on the sport.

Here's what he actually did. He made BMX more visible. The pink uniforms, the flamboyant style, the deliberate theater of his riding — all of it made him one of the most-photographed racers of his era. He helped pull BMX into a pop-culture moment where kids saw the sport as a lifestyle, not just a competition. The Hollywood Miranda of the Hutch years is a big part of why 1985 and 1986 look the way they do in BMX's collective memory: pink, loud, fast, and fun.

And he's one of the rare racers who came back from a career-ending injury not as a bitter ex-pro, but as an active, engaged part of the industry and the old-school scene. "Miranda Mountain," the 180-degree tabletop jump/turn named after him at the Corona-Norco YMCA BMX track, is still there. Young riders still try to hit it with flair. That's the right kind of legacy.

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