NBL — The Story of the National Bicycle League (1974 to 2011)

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

We're telling this story neutrally. No brand gets elevated. No rider gets shorted. Where the record is contested, we say so.

Where it started

The NBL did not start because somebody set out to build a BMX sanction. It started because George Esser's two sons came home one day racing bicycles in the neighborhood, and George — who already ran the National Motorcycle League out of Florida — did not like how the local races were being run.

George Edward Esser was a motorcycle motocross race promoter. By the early 1970s he had been doing it for thirty-three years. His sons Bryan and Greg pulled him into BMX. They had been racing on unsanctioned local tracks. Esser watched it for a while and decided to do something about it.

So he built a bicycle division inside the NML. It was the same move Ernie Alexander had made on the West Coast a year earlier when he founded the National Bicycle Association, and the same move Scot Breithaupt had made before that with BUMS in Long Beach 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 would go on to be the first official NBL pro Number One racer in 1979. In February 1976, Esser broke the NBL off from the NML to become its own entity. The headquarters were in Deerfield Beach, Florida.

The non-profit structure — and why it mattered

This is the single most important decision in the NBL's history.

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. The NBL was set up as a non-profit, with a governance body called the Competition Congress — a grassroots representative meeting where member tracks could vote on rules.

That was not just goodwill. It was a structural advantage. When the NBA started to mismanage itself in the late 1970s and tracks began to peel off, those tracks had nowhere to vote out the people running the show. Inside the NBL, the Competition Congress was the pressure valve. Member tracks did not need to defect when they were unhappy — they could push back through the system.

The non-profit status also did something Esser could not have planned for in 1974. Twenty-three years later, when USA Cycling went looking for a BMX partner to bring the sport into the Olympic conversation, the NBL's non-profit structure was the deciding factor. USA Cycling is itself a non-profit. The UCI is structured around national federations that are non-profits. The 1974 governance choice turned out to be the door BMX racing walked through to get to Beijing in 2008.

Growing into a national sanction — 1974 to 1982

The NBL grew steadily through the late 1970s. By the end of 1978 it had 18 tracks and 4,100 members. Its first National and first Grand National both ran in 1977 at the North Park track in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The in-house publication, Bicycles Today, launched 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 trouble. Mismanagement, bad sponsor deals, and public feuds with rivals had hollowed it 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 commenced joint operations. From 1982 forward, the NBL was a coast-to-coast organization 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 day-to-day operation of the NBL to Bob Tedesco. Tedesco had been with the sanction since 1977, first as a track operator and then as the Northern Regional Commissioner. He moved into the Managing Director role in 1983 and stayed there for twenty-five years — the longest run at the top of any BMX sanction.

What he did under that run: the President's Cup, inaugurated in December 1985 as a state-vs-state team championship held in Columbus, Ohio. ESPN television coverage of NBL racing in the late 1980s and 1990s. The international side — first through the IBMXF, then through the UCI. The work that eventually got BMX accepted as an Olympic medal sport in 2003 ran through his office. He stepped down at the end of 2008.

The IBMXF — co-founding the international side, 1981

By the late 1970s, BMX was no longer just an American sport. Dutch promoter Gerrit Does had been organizing races in the Netherlands since 1975.

In 1981, George Esser and Gerrit Does co-founded the International BMX Federation — the IBMXF — based in the Netherlands. The first IBMXF BMX World Championships ran in Dayton, Ohio in 1982. Greg Hill won the pro class — the first official BMX World Champion.

The IBMXF ran the international side of BMX for the next twelve years. The two structures resolved in 1993, when FIAC absorbed the IBMXF, and the UCI absorbed FIAC shortly after.

Joining USA Cycling — 1997

In 1997, the NBL joined USA Cycling. That is the sentence the rest of BMX's 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 inside that chain, BMX racing was not getting into the Olympics.

USA Cycling picked the NBL over the ABA for two reasons. The first was the non-profit structure. The 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 won three in a row from 1990 through 1992. The international turn started in 1997 when Christophe Lévêque of France took the plate back-to-back, '97 and '98. Maris Strombergs won in 2009 and 2010 — the same Strombergs who would win the first Olympic BMX gold in Beijing in 2008.

The collapse — 2010 to 2011

The NBL had been stable for thirty-five years. None of that protected it from what happened 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. For a flat annual fee of $99, $245, or $395, members could race an unlimited number of events. The math did not work. A member only had to race about 16 local races in a year to put the NBL in the red on a single $99 membership.

Alongside the membership change, the NBL announced a four-stop elite series called the Nations Tour, with prize purses of roughly $50,000 per stop. The first event was supposed to run March 4 and 5, 2011, in Primm, Nevada. On February 11, with about two weeks of notice, the Primm event was canceled. The rest of the Nations Tour never ran.

By April 2011, member tracks were reporting that the All You Can Race payments coming out of the Ohio office were late, short, or missing. On May 17, Aragon and ABA CEO B.A. Anderson appeared in 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 were signed on June 18, 2011. The acquisition was estimated at 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, headquartered out of the existing ABA office in Gilbert, Arizona. After 37 years and one month, the National Bicycle League closed its 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 remained. Claims totaled $673,613.22; claimants received about 38 cents on the dollar.

What the NBL left behind

The simplest summary of the NBL's impact is this: without the NBL, BMX racing is not an Olympic sport.

The path is traceable. George Esser sets up the NBL as a non-profit in 1974 because that is the model he knows. The non-profit governance survives the 1980s and 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 is added to the Olympic program in 2003. Maris Strombergs wins the first BMX Olympic gold in 2008.

The other piece the NBL left behind is the Competition Congress model. It is 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.