NBL — The Story of the National Bicycle League (1974 to 2011)
A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co
It started with two kids racing bikes in a Florida neighborhood and a dad who didn't like what he was watching. Out of that you get the sanction that, all these years later, put BMX in the Olympics. I'll tell it straight on the NBL — where the record is contested, I'll say so.
Where it started
Nobody woke up one morning planning to build a BMX sanction. George Esser's two boys came home racing bicycles around the neighborhood, and George — who was already running the National Motorcycle League out of Florida — took one look at how the local races were being run and didn't care for it.
George Edward Esser promoted motorcycle motocross. By the early 1970s he'd been at it for thirty-three years. His sons Bryan and Greg dragged him into BMX. They'd been racing on unsanctioned local tracks, and after watching it for a while, George decided to fix it himself.
So he built a bicycle division inside the NML. Same move Ernie Alexander had pulled on the West Coast a year earlier when he started the National Bicycle Association. And the same move Scot Breithaupt had made before either of them with BUMS over in Long Beach back in 1970.
The NML's Bicycle Division ran its first sanctioned race at Miami-Hollywood Speedway Park on January 26, 1974. Greg Esser won the 14-and-over class. He'd go on to become the first official NBL pro Number One racer in 1979. In February 1976, Esser split the NBL off from the NML and made it its own thing. Headquarters were in Deerfield Beach, Florida.
The non-profit structure — and why it mattered
This is the one decision that shaped everything else about the NBL.
The NBA, founded by Ernie Alexander in 1973, was a private business. The American Bicycle Association, founded by Merl Mennenga and Gene Roden in 1977, was a private business too. The NBL went the other way. Esser set it up as a non-profit, with a governance body called the Competition Congress — a grassroots meeting where member tracks could actually vote on the rules.
That wasn't just being nice about it. It was a real edge. When the NBA started running itself into the ground in the late 1970s and tracks began peeling off, those tracks had no way to vote out the people in charge. Inside the NBL the Competition Congress was the pressure valve. Unhappy tracks didn't have to walk — they could push back from inside the system.
And the non-profit status did something Esser couldn't have seen coming in 1974. Twenty-three years later, when USA Cycling went hunting for a BMX partner to carry the sport toward the Olympics, that non-profit structure was the thing that swung the decision. USA Cycling is a non-profit itself. The UCI is built on national federations that are non-profits. A governance call made in 1974 turned out to be the door BMX racing walked through to reach Beijing in 2008.
Growing into a national sanction — 1974 to 1982
The NBL grew steady through the late 1970s. By the end of 1978 it had 18 tracks and 4,100 members. The first National and the first Grand National both ran in 1977 at the North Park track in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The house paper, Bicycles Today, came out as a tabloid newspaper in August 1977.
The pro class came together late in the decade. Sal Zeuner was the first NBL pro Number One in 1978, Greg Esser in 1979, Anthony Sewell in 1980, and Stu Thomsen in 1981 and 1982.
Absorbing what was left of the NBA — 1982
By the early 1980s the NBA was in real trouble. Mismanagement, bad sponsor deals, public feuds with rivals — it had been hollowed out. Ernie Alexander resigned as NBA president in January 1981. The 1981 Grandnationals in Long Beach was the last race the NBA ran as an independent sanction.
After the 1981 season, the NBL and the NBA went into joint operations. From 1982 forward the NBL was a coast-to-coast outfit with a footprint that finally matched the ABA's. Greg Hill won the NBL pro plate in 1985 and again in 1988. Eric Rupe took 1983 and 1984.
The Tedesco era — 1983 to 2008
In April 1983, George Esser handed the day-to-day running of the NBL to Bob Tedesco. Tedesco had been around since 1977, first as a track operator and then as Northern Regional Commissioner. He moved into the Managing Director chair in 1983 and stayed there twenty-five years — the longest anybody has ever sat at the top of a BMX sanction.
Look at what came out of that run. The President's Cup, kicked off in December 1985 as a state-vs-state team championship in Columbus, Ohio. ESPN putting NBL racing on television through the late 1980s and into the 1990s. The whole international push, first through the IBMXF and then the UCI. The work that eventually got BMX accepted as an Olympic medal sport in 2003 ran straight through his office. He stepped down at the end of 2008.
The IBMXF — co-founding the international side, 1981
By the late 1970s, BMX wasn't an American-only thing anymore. Dutch promoter Gerrit Does had been putting on races in the Netherlands since 1975.
In 1981, George Esser and Gerrit Does co-founded the International BMX Federation — the IBMXF — out of the Netherlands. The first IBMXF BMX World Championships ran in Dayton, Ohio in 1982. Greg Hill won the pro class. First official BMX World Champion, right there.
The IBMXF ran the international side of the sport for the next twelve years. The two structures got sorted out in 1993, when FIAC absorbed the IBMXF, and the UCI absorbed FIAC not long after.
Joining USA Cycling — 1997
In 1997, the NBL joined USA Cycling. That's the sentence the whole Olympic story hangs on.
USA Cycling is the national federation that represents the United States to the UCI. The UCI represents cycling to the International Olympic Committee. Without an American national federation pushing BMX up that chain, BMX racing was never getting into the Olympics. Plain and simple.
USA Cycling picked the NBL over the ABA for two reasons. First was the non-profit structure. Second was the international track record — the NBL had co-founded the IBMXF in 1981 and had been sending teams to the World Championships since 1982. BMX racing was officially added to the Olympic program in 2003, for the 2008 Games in Beijing.
The pro class through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s
Pete Loncarevich took the NBL pro plate in 1986 and 1987, riding for CW Racing. Gary Ellis won it in 1989 and 1994. Terry Tenette went three in a row from 1990 through 1992. The international turn showed up in 1997 when Christophe Lévêque of France took the plate back-to-back, '97 and '98. Maris Strombergs won in 2009 and 2010 — same Strombergs who'd already won the first Olympic BMX gold in Beijing in 2008.
The collapse — 2010 to 2011
The NBL had been steady for thirty-five years. None of that saved it from what hit in 2010 and 2011.
In August 2010, Managing Director Gary Aragon rolled out a complete overhaul of the membership model called All You Can Race. Pay one flat fee for the year — $99, $245, or $395 — and race as many events as you wanted. The math never worked. A member only had to run about 16 local races in a year to put the NBL in the red on a single $99 membership. Do the math on that.
Alongside the membership change, the NBL announced a four-stop elite series called the Nations Tour, with purses of around $50,000 a stop. The first event was set for March 4 and 5, 2011, in Primm, Nevada. On February 11, with about two weeks' notice, Primm got canceled. The rest of the Nations Tour never ran at all.
By April 2011, member tracks were saying the All You Can Race payments coming out of the Ohio office were late, short, or just missing. On May 17, Aragon and ABA CEO B.A. Anderson sat down for a joint webinar to announce an agreement in principle for the ABA to acquire the assets of the NBL.
The merger — June 18, 2011
The final merger documents got signed on June 18, 2011. The acquisition came in around $250,000. The ABA took on the NBL's roughly 5,000 members and the track network.
The combined organization was renamed USA BMX, run out of the existing ABA office in Gilbert, Arizona. After 37 years and one month, the National Bicycle League shut the doors.
On August 10, 2011, the NBL Board of Directors was officially dissolved and a receiver was appointed in Franklin County Court in Ohio to wind down what was left. Claims totaled $673,613.22. Claimants got about 38 cents on the dollar.
What the NBL left behind
The simplest way to put the NBL's impact is this: without the NBL, BMX racing isn't an Olympic sport.
You can trace the whole path. George Esser sets the NBL up as a non-profit in 1974 because that's the model he knows. That non-profit governance survives the 1980s and the 1990s. Bob Tedesco runs the office for twenty-five years and builds the international relationships through the IBMXF and then the UCI. USA Cycling picks the NBL in 1997. BMX gets added to the Olympic program in 2003. Maris Strombergs wins the first BMX Olympic gold in 2008. Pull any link out of that chain and it doesn't happen.
The other thing the NBL left behind is the Competition Congress model. That's the structure USA BMX inherited when the merger went through.
Sources
Wikipedia: National Bicycle League, American Bicycle Association, BMX racing, Bob Tedesco, Anthony Sewell, Stu Thomsen, Greg A. Hill, Pete Loncarevich, Eric Rupe, Christophe Lévêque, Maris Strombergs. USA BMX official history. bmxultra.com — interviews and timeline coverage. bmxnews.com — Gary Aragon interview, May 12, 2011. Bicycle Retailer and Industry News — "ABA, NBL Join Forces for BMX Racing" (June 25, 2011). University of BMX — Bob Tedesco profile. Gerrit Does's History of BMX. Super BMX & Freestyle, January 1986. Bicycles Today / BMX Today archives 1977-2009. Franklin County (Ohio) Court filings.
Primary-source recollection: Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX and co-owner of Legend Bike Co., on the NBL/ABA dynamic from inside the BMX industry, 1981 through 2011.