I have known Pete Loncarevich most of my life, and I still catch myself watching him snap out of a gate and thinking the same thing the announcers thought forty years ago. He is gone before anybody else has moved. Four ABA National #1 Pro titles. A record only Gary Ellis ever matched. Two NBL National #1 Pro titles stacked on top of that, a 1990 IBMXF Pro World Championship over in France at Paul Ricard, a 1988 NORA Cup, and a career that opened in 1980 and never really closed. He peaked through the mid-to-late 80s, carried it into the early 90s, built a whole second life in mountain bike downhill in the middle of all that, and then came back to BMX again in 2010. In 1992 the ABA's own magazine, American BMXer, called him the greatest BMX racer of all time. I was around for a lot of it. I do not argue with that one.

Seven different primary sponsors ran through his peak BMX years, and the moves were rarely clean. Contract fights. A lawsuit. A restraining order. Family-business fallout that bled straight into the racing. What makes Pete rare, though, is not the chaos. It is that he had real careers after BMX, not victory laps. A third-degree black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. A mountain bike downhill champion. And still a racer today, still showing up on the gate. The nickname always fit, because he came out like a bullet out of a gun. But the rider underneath it was always more than the start.

Where the name came from

Pete was born April 8, 1966 in Lake Forest, California, Croatian on both sides. He started racing young and he was a wrecking ball as an amateur. Seventeen straight #1 expert titles across the ABA and NBL from 1978 through 1982. Seventeen.

The nickname showed up in 1984 at an ABA national. Merl Mennenga, the founder and then-president of the ABA, used to do play-by-play for the crowd at the nationals, and he started calling Pete "The Pistol" for the same reason Bob Hunt hung "The Human Dragster" on Tommy Brackens. Pete got the holeshot. Every time. Out of the gate like a round leaving a barrel. There was a second layer to it too. Loncarevich sounded close enough to Pete Maravich, the old NBA guard they called "Pistol Pete" for his shooting, that the whole thing just locked together. Pistol Pete Loncarevich. It stuck because it was true.

The announcers in BMX's first generation handed out a lot of the names that lasted. Bob Hunt gave Brackens "The Human Dragster." Mennenga gave Pete "The Pistol." Steve Giberson tagged Mike Miranda "Hollywood." Some of the biggest pros of the decade got their identities from a guy on a microphone over the PA.

TW Racing and the $5,000 theft (1979–1980)

Pete's first real sponsor was TW Racing, December 1979 through September 1980, and the way it ended tells you everything about the business side of early BMX. TW was run by business partners of Pete's father. According to the published accounts, those partners allegedly stole US $5,000 from the elder Loncarevich and took off with it. Nobody could find them. So Pete stopped racing for TW. First chapter of his career, and already the money side of the sport was behaving nothing like the racing side. That gap never fully closed for him.

Diamond Back and a pro career that lasted three days (1980–1982)

From September 1980 through December 1982 Pete rode for Diamond Back, the Centurion brand. He turned pro in there somewhere, and his pro career with Diamond Back lasted about three days. No exaggeration. They disagreed on when he should go pro. DB thought he wasn't ready, and they had their own plan: they wanted Eddy King, who had come aboard the same time as Pete but was two years older, to turn pro first. They wanted Pete to sit a year and help the factory team win the Team Trophy, the sanctioning body's award for the best factory squad of the season.

Pete turned pro anyway. Then he went out and finished second in the "A" Pro class at his debut, the 1982 ABA JAG World Championship. Diamond Back tore up his contract right after. And that termination lit something in him. Now he wanted to beat Diamond Back's headliners, Harry Leary and Eddy King, more than he wanted almost anything.

The LRP, SE Racing, and CW mess (1983)

1983 got tangled fast. Pete signed with SE Racing in January. The story goes that Scot Breithaupt wanted him to walk away from the family BMX business, Loncarevich Racing Products, the little LRP operation Pete and his dad had built selling titanium seatposts, pedal cages, and a small clothing line. The Loncarevichs wouldn't kill LRP. So Pete was gone from SE by mid-February. The whole thing lasted about six weeks.

From mid-February through November 1983 he raced for his own family's brand, LRP. Then in November he jumped to Shadow Racing, which was also owned by Roger Worsham, the same Roger Worsham behind CW. Shadow didn't last either. By mid-December 1983 Pete had moved over to CW itself.

Here is the part that still gets me. CW made shutting down LRP a condition of the deal. The exact same condition that had driven Pete out of SE earlier that same year. He said no to it at SE. He said yes to it at CW. That's how the business worked in 1983. You took the better deal, terms and all, because there was no pension waiting, no union, no soft landing if the season went sideways.

CW Racing and the run to #1 (1983–1986)

Pete rode CW from mid-December 1983 through April 1, 1986, and this is where it all detonated. He closed out 1984 as ABA National #1 Pro. Then 1985 turned into a sore one. Pete won it on the track that year — but the ABA pulled points off him after the fact, and when the dust settled he came up #2. Greg Hill took the #1 plate for 1985. Pete answered it in 1986: ABA National #1 Pro again, with the NBL National #1 Pro stacked on top, both major sanctioning bodies in the same year, and he also grabbed the 1986 "AA" Pro Grand National championship, the Honda Supercup, which paid out a Honda Reflex motorcycle, and a GMC truck for the ABA #1 Pro prize. That was the year the BMX press started writing that he was the best racer alive. From a results standpoint, they had it right.

It was also the year Tommy Brackens crashed in his semi at the NBL Grand Nationals while barely leading Pete for the NBL #1 plate. Brackens had the points lead walking in, but he didn't transfer out of that semi. Pete pounced and took the #1. Even the biggest names got caught flat by him. Brackens was the 1986 IBMXF Pro World Champion that very same year, and Pete still found the opening.

The Haro jump: November 1985

The CW deal was supposed to run through April 1, 1986. Pete showed up and raced the November 1985 ABA Grand Nationals in a Haro uniform. He had already signed with Haro Designs, who put more money on the table than CW would match. Worsham threatened to sue for breach and actually filed for a restraining order to block the move before the CW contract was up. The court turned it down. Worsham appealed, then dropped the appeal once it was clear Pete wouldn't be named ABA #1 Pro for 1985. No leverage left.

Strip it down and the fight was about salary. Pete felt he'd earned a real raise after taking the 1984 ABA #1 Pro plate and racing up front all season. CW wouldn't go to where Haro was. So he walked. His own words to BMX Museum lay it bare: "When you're an athlete, you have to get what you can while you can, because next year you might have a terrible season. So I went with Haro Designs." Anybody who has ever made a payroll understands that sentence completely.

Haro Designs and the peak years (1986–1989)

Pete signed with Haro Designs on April 1, 1986 and rode for them through May 1989. Three years, and it's the most photographed, most magazine-covered, most remembered stretch of his whole career. When people picture Pistol Pete, they picture the Haro years. The mustache. The uniform. The gate starts nobody could touch. The wins piling up across both sanctioning bodies at once. He took the NBL #1 Pro title again in 1987. In 1988 he won the BMX Action NORA Cup, the reader-voted Number One Racer Award, with no published vote breakdown. He left Haro in May 1989 with two ABA #1 Pro titles already on the board — 1984 and 1986 — and, though nobody knew it yet, two more still ahead of him.

The injuries from those years say a lot about how he was wired. October 25, 1987, he broke his collarbone at the ABA Western Regional Gold Cup in Reno, five weeks out from the ABA Grand Nationals. The doctors told him three months. Pete didn't want to miss the Grands, so he hired a sports-medicine doctor at $1,000 a day for twelve hours a day of treatment, tried to race, made the semifinals, and didn't transfer to the main. Think about that. He spent that kind of money just for a shot at the gate. That is who he is.

He cracked two ribs training on his bike on July 4, 1988, out in Ohio visiting his cousin. The year before, in 1987, he won BMX Plus!'s Racer of the Year with 36.92% of 2,925 votes cast, the biggest single-year margin any racer had ever pulled in that award up to then. The prize was a Suzuki RM125.

The 1990 IBMXF World Championship

After he left Haro in May 1989, Pete moved through a string of primary and co-primary deals: MCS, then Vans/Diamondback when the Vans sneaker and apparel side came in, then Vans/Hawk Racing. In 1990, at the IBMXF Pro World Championships at Paul Ricard in France, he won the Pro Class 20-inch World Championship. He'd already won just about everything American BMX had to give. Now he had the world too.

There's a small detail here worth keeping straight, because Pete cared about getting it right. The BMX Hall of Fame overview once credited Wilco Groenendaal with the 1990 World Championship, and that pushed Pete to write to Gerrit Does, the Dutch BMX historian who ran UniversityofBMX.com. Does confirmed it in his reply. Groenendaal was the 1990 Superclass 20-inch World Champion. Pete was the 1990 Pro Class 20-inch World Champion. Two world champions, two different classes, same event. The record got straightened out.

The last two titles, and the mid-90s pivot

BMX wasn't done with him yet. In 1991 and 1992 Pete won the ABA National #1 Pro plate two more times — his third and fourth — which is how a rider who'd been at it since 1980 ended up tied with Gary Ellis for the most ABA #1 Pro titles anyone has ever won. The 1992 plate landed the same year he took BMX Plus! Racer of the Year and the Golden Crank Pro of the Year. He went out on top, not on the slide.

Like a lot of BMX racers coming out of the late 80s, Pete found mountain biking. Unlike most of them, he was flat-out great at it. He started racing MTB in 1992, and by 1994 he had basically left BMX behind to chase mountain bike racing full-time. He won a Masters World Championship in downhill and stacked up multiple World Cup wins.

The why was simple. He'd won pretty much everything BMX had, and he was bored. Mountain biking handed him new tracks, fresh competition, a different kind of physical punishment, and at that exact moment in the early 90s, a sport that was blowing up. Brian Lopes made the jump. So did Eric Carter. So did Mike King. That whole late-80s BMX pro generation figured out their skills carried over almost perfectly, and the money and the cameras in MTB right then were real.

By the time Pete officially retired from BMX competition in 1996, he'd reinvented his whole look too. Tattoos. Long hair. The clean-cut Haro image was long gone. He'd moved over to S&M bikes before the BMX side finally wound down.

Brazilian jiu-jitsu and a third act

Back in his early 20s, still racing, Pete started training Brazilian jiu-jitsu and other martial arts. This was never a hobby for him. He went at it the way he went at the gate. Decades on, he's a third-degree BJJ black belt under Joe Moreira, one of the most respected Brazilian-lineage instructors in the country. In 2006 he won the Black Belt Senior 1 Male Lightweight class at the Pan American Championship, run by the International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation. He teaches now out of the Lotus Club in Medford, Oregon.

Hardly any BMX pro has ever built a second world-class career in a completely different sport. Pete did it twice. World-class in BMX. World-class in mountain bike downhill. World-class in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Three separate sports, three separate skill sets, three separate fights for the top, all of them taken to the highest level on offer. I've watched the man's whole life and I'm still not sure how he did it.

The BMX return: 2009 onward

Pete made his official return to BMX racing in 2009, then signed with Redman Rockstar in January 2010 for the comeback. He raced Veteran Pro. Since then he's come back two more times, turned up at old-school events and nationals, landed in magazine retrospectives and Hall of Fame celebrations, and basically taken on the role of elder statesman for the sport.

An outspoken one, too. In a 2010 ESPN interview he called the current state of BMX racing "candy a**" for the lack of bar-banging after the first straight, and floated that performance enhancement had been part of the sport going way back. The quote-friendly, say-it-straight Pistol Pete of today hasn't lost a step on the directness that made him such good copy in the 80s.

In 2021, Haro Bikes put out a "Pistol" Pete Loncarevich signature frame in their Legends series, a 29-inch complete with Cr-Mo fork and bar, full 4130 chromoly, also offered in 20, 24, and 26-inch. Haro reaching back for one of their own historic pros is the same instinct as SE's PK Ripper tribute to Perry Kramer, or GT's retro Brackens frame with Gary Turner's own welding. The brands still standing remember who helped build them.

Legacy

Pete Loncarevich's place in BMX history is as simple as it is rare. He's in the conversation for the greatest racer the sport has ever produced, and in 1992 the ABA's own magazine put him right at the top of it. Four ABA National #1 Pro titles, tied with Gary Ellis for the most ever. Two NBL National #1 Pro titles. A 1990 IBMXF Pro World Championship. A NORA Cup. Racer of the Year honors from the biggest BMX magazines of the era. A 1997 ABA Hall of Fame induction.

What sets Pete apart from a lot of the guys he raced is everything that happened after BMX. He reinvented himself as a mountain bike world champion. Then he reinvented himself again as a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt and Pan American champion. Then he came back to BMX as an older rider, and he didn't do it quietly or with his hat in his hand. He came back with opinions. The Pistol Pete who rode the Haro in 1988 is unmistakably the same man who called modern BMX "candy a**" on ESPN in 2010. Direct. Competitive. He tells you exactly what he thinks. And when he rolls into the gate, all these years later, he still gets out first.

The nickname was perfect because it covered the whole man. A racer who grabbed the hole like a bullet out of a gun, a nod to basketball's Pistol Pete Maravich, and a guy who has always shot straight. I've been lucky to call him a friend for most of my life. That last part is the part I'd vouch for first.