BMX Racing History · Track File · Legend Bike Co

Pipeline: The Upland Skatepark and BMX Track Behind King of the Skateparks

Most of the tracks in this library were dirt lots first, nothing else. Pipeline was different. It started as a skatepark — one of the most famous ever built — and BMX showed up later, welcomed in when the skateboard boom that built the place started to fade. For a stretch of the early-to-mid 1980s, the same stretch of ground in Upland, California hosted a BMX race track running its own weekly schedule alongside Azusa, and a concrete bowl that crowned BMX freestyle's biggest champions. Two sports, one plot of land, one family running the whole thing.

The World's First Vertical Skatepark

In May 1977, Stan and Jeanne Hoffman opened a skatepark on a stretch of ground in Upland, California that skaters nicknamed the Badlands — "unseasonably cold and damp during the winter, blisteringly hot and deathly smoggy all summer," as BMX Plus! writer Dean Bradley put it in January 1983, with a local legend about a body once found in the drainage ditch giving the place, in his words, "spooky vibes." They called it Pipeline, and the name wasn't just branding. The park was built around a 40-foot full pipe roughly 20 feet tall — the first in-park full pipe anywhere — and it's remembered as the world's first vertical skatepark. It was the eighth skatepark built in the country and one of the last of that first generation still standing a decade later. Not long after opening, the Hoffmans added the Combi Pool: a 12-foot-deep double bowl, a steep square pool connected to a round one by a small shallow section, which became one of the most photographed pieces of concrete in skateboarding.

BMX Comes to the Badlands

In 1981, Bob Morales met a young rider named Eddie Fiola and started the Amateur Skatepark Association (ASPA) to run BMX freestyle contests at the big Southern California skateparks — Upland among them, alongside Lakewood and Skatopia — under the banner of King of the Skateparks. The first contest ran at Lakewood in November 1981, with Fiola taking the win. Round 2 landed at Pipeline on October 24, 1982, held in the Combi Pool, and BMX Plus! covered it as "two-wheeled war in Pipeline's concrete jungle, a skatepark shootout to the death in the Badlands."

By early 1983, Morales had stepped down as ASPA president to focus on his Dyno business, and the sanction found its next leader close to home: "Enter one Don Hoffman: owner/operator of the Pipeline Skatepark and BMX track," as BMX Plus! introduced him that January, taking the job to "transform ASPA from an amateur to a fully professional organization." A member of the family that ran Pipeline was now running the sanction behind the sport's marquee freestyle series — at least for that stretch.

Pipeline kept hosting King of the Skateparks rounds through the rest of the series' run: Round 2 in 1982, the Finals in 1983, Round 1, Round 3, and the Finals in 1984, Round 2 and the Finals in 1985, and both regular rounds plus the Finals in 1986. Fiola won the 1985 Finals at Pipeline to clinch that year's title, and took the last-ever King of the Skateparks crown there in 1986, when the series wrapped for good — one of his five KOS titles, the run of dominance that later got him inducted into the ABA/BMX Hall of Fame. Mike Dominguez beat him for the 1984 season title on points, arriving at the Pipeline final with his leg already in a cast from a crash weeks earlier, but Fiola still won that day's competition outright.

The BMX Race Track

Alongside all that freestyle history, Pipeline had a straightforward dirt BMX track too. It replaced four of the park's original skateboard snake runs, regraded into jumps and berms — riders who raced it remember it as a $7,000 build, close enough to the bowl and the pipe that you could skate before or after your motos.

On Legend Bike Co's own Azusa BMX page, Thomas Ainsworth described this same track from the racer's side. When Monrovia closed, its Sunday-morning slot got picked up by "a track called Pipeline [that] opened around the Chino area, run by a man I knew as Stan and sharing its site with a skatepark." His account puts the schedule together like this: Azusa raced Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings plus Sunday evening; Pipeline raced Tuesday and Thursday, plus Sunday mornings — "racing pretty much every day of the week" between the two tracks, promoting each other rather than competing for the same riders (Thomas Ainsworth's account, 2026). Thomas's own placement of the track — "around the Chino area" — sits a few miles off; Chino and Upland border each other in the same stretch of San Bernardino County, and Thomas has said more than once that he was taking in a lot of this as a young kid.

Who Ran It — the Hoffman Family

Pipeline was a family operation from the start. Stan and Jeanne Hoffman built it and owned it, and worked the pro shop counter together — the Skateboarding Hall of Fame's own 2014 induction writeup runs a photo of the two of them doing exactly that. Their family ran the place with them. A park regular's 2020 tribute thanks "Stan, Jeanne, Don and April Hoffman" by name for "all the years they enabled us to enjoy and compete at this park." Don Hoffman shows up specifically on the BMX side of the record: the same BMX Plus! January 1983 piece that covered the ASPA contest at Pipeline named him "owner/operator of the Pipeline Skatepark and BMX track," crediting him as the family member who took the ASPA presidency that year.

That gives us a firm answer to a question this library has been carrying since the Azusa BMX page went up. Thomas Ainsworth, writing in about his family's ownership of Azusa, remembered a nearby track "run by a man I knew as Stan," without a last name to go with it. The record on Pipeline points squarely at the Hoffmans — the Stan that Azusa's kids knew was Stan Hoffman, the same Stan who built Pipeline with his wife Jeanne in 1977. Whether Thomas's own dealings ran through Stan directly or through Don, specifically credited running the BMX side of the operation, isn't nailed down — but the family behind the name is.

The End of the Badlands

The insurance and liability pressure that closed most of Pipeline's early-80s imitators by 1983 eventually caught up with Pipeline too. Stan and Jeanne sold the property, and the park closed in 1988; by 1989 it had been bulldozed and replaced by an industrial park. It wasn't quite the end of the Hoffmans' Combi Pool, though. In 1994, working with the Hoffmans, the new Vans Skatepark in Orange, California built a replica of the original Combi Pool. In 2002, Pipeline regular-turned-pro Steve Alba worked with Purkiss Rose and California Skateparks to build a new Pipeline Skatepark, carrying over several of the original features, not far from where the first one stood.