Redondo Beach BMX

The Dominguez Park track, and Bob Osborn before BMX Action

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

What it is A dirt race track — not a shop, not a beach scene

Where Dominguez Park, 200 Flagler Lane, Redondo Beach, California

Also called Dominguez, the Dominguez BMX track, or just Redondo Beach

Running by The early 1970s — among the first organized BMX tracks anywhere

Documented figure Bob Osborn, on the ground in the summer of 1974, more than two years before he founded BMX Action

Sanction Not documented. This predates the first sanctioning bodies

Today Dominguez Park is still a City of Redondo Beach public park. No track remains that we could find

Say Redondo Beach to somebody who knows BMX and you could mean three different things: a track, a shop, or the general fact that the South Bay produced a stupid number of good riders. This chapter is about the track, because that is what the record actually holds, and because the track turns out to be older and more consequential than its almost total absence from the printed history would suggest.

One of the First Four

In June 1973, in Orange, California, Elaine Holt published the first issue of Bicycle Motocross — the first magazine devoted to the sport. Inside it she listed the tracks then operating. There were four: Palms Park, Escape Country, B.U.M.S., and Dominguez Park.

Four. That is the entire official inventory of organized BMX at the moment BMX first got itself a magazine, and one of the four carried the Dominguez name. Scot Breithaupt, who was running B.U.M.S. in Long Beach at the time and who is the closest thing the sport has to a founding witness, later listed Dominguez again among the tracks already going in that era, alongside Escape Country, Malibu, Saddleback, Soledad Sands, Fountain Valley, La Palma, Yarnell and his own two B.U.M.S. lots.

A short documentary survey of the era, circulated in 2020, names the early California tracks in the same breath: Escape Country, Malibu Canyon, B.U.M.S., Redondo Beach. Whichever name it went by on the day, the South Bay had dirt on the map from the very beginning.

Summer 1974: Thrown Off by a Man Who Would Change Everything

The best firsthand look we have at this track comes from a rider named Brian Gutierrez, who has given a detailed account of his short early-1970s riding life in Southern California. He and his friends called themselves the Sodbuster racing team. They raced very little — a park in Pacific Palisades, Palms Park once or twice, and the first Yamaha Bicycle Gold Cup qualifier at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys on July 20, 1974. Mostly they rode local spots.

That same summer they took what he calls a last hurrah trip, a whole weekend of riding. It started, in his words, with the three of them getting thrown off the old Dominguez BMX track in Redondo Beach. They had assumed it was open practice. It was not.

Years later he worked out who had run them off: Bob Osborn.

Sit with that for a second. In the summer of 1974, Osborn is a South Bay BMX dad enforcing the rules at a neighborhood track in Redondo Beach. In December 1976 he starts BMX Action, builds Wizard Publications in Torrance a few miles up the road, and spends the next thirteen years defining how the sport saw itself. The man telling kids to get off the track was two and a half years away from becoming the most important editor in BMX.

That is why this track belongs in the library even though almost nothing about it survives on paper. It is where you can see the people who built the sport before anybody knew there was a sport to build.

The South Bay Cluster

Redondo Beach did not sit alone. Inside a few miles of that park you had Entradero in the flood basin in Torrance, the Pit on the industrial edge of the same city, and later Ascot over in Gardena, which took over as the area's main track after Entradero shut down. Wizard Publications sat in the middle of all of it.

You can draw a straight line through that cluster. Dominguez in Redondo Beach was there first, in the years before sanctioning bodies. Entradero and the Pit carried the mid-to-late 1970s, and the magazine that came out of those blocks put the whole sport on newsstands. By the time the ABA and the NBL were the structure everyone raced inside, the South Bay's earliest dirt had already done its work and mostly disappeared.

What Stands There Now

Dominguez Park is still there, a City of Redondo Beach public park at 200 Flagler Lane. It is a park, used the way city parks get used. We found no indication that any part of the BMX track survives, and no marker or plaque acknowledging that one of the first four tracks in the sport's first magazine listing ran on that ground.

Where the record runs thin

This page is short because the record is short, and we would rather run a true short page than a long guessed one. When the Redondo Beach track opened is not documented. When it closed is not documented. Who built it, who operated it week to week, and what — if anything — sanctioned it are all undocumented; this era largely predates the first sanctioning bodies. What the course was physically like, how many straights or turns it had, whether it had a real gate, is not documented. No results, moto sheets or flyers from it surfaced in anything we could reach. Bob Osborn's exact role is not documented either: the firsthand account has him enforcing the rules there in the summer of 1974, which is not the same as saying he built it or ran it, and this page does not claim that he did. One point deserves a flag of its own: the first magazine's 1973 track listing names Dominguez Park without a city, and there is more than one Dominguez Park in the Los Angeles basin. That the 1973 listing and the Redondo Beach track named firsthand in 1974 are the same track is very likely and is how the surviving accounts read, but it is not proven. Two archives that would probably settle several of these questions could not be read during this research: bmxsociety.com was unreachable throughout, and bmxmuseum.com blocks automated access, so its Southern California track-history threads could not be read directly.

Raced Dominguez? Know who built it or when it went away? Got a flyer, a trophy plate or a photo from that park? Legend Bike Co wants to hear from you — this page grows as the people who were there fill in the record.

Timeline

  • June 1973Elaine Holt publishes the first issue of Bicycle Motocross in Orange, California. Its track listing carries four names, one of them Dominguez Park.
  • Early 1970sThe Dominguez track is running in Redondo Beach, part of the small first generation of organized BMX dirt in Southern California.
  • July 20, 1974The first Yamaha Bicycle Gold Cup qualifier runs at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys — the same summer, and the event that dates the account below.
  • Summer 1974Brian Gutierrez and two friends are thrown off the old Dominguez BMX track in Redondo Beach for riding outside open practice. He later works out the man who did it was Bob Osborn.
  • December 1976Osborn founds BMX Action, run out of Wizard Publications in Torrance, a few miles from that park.
  • February 1977Racing is documented at Entradero in Torrance, the next stop in the South Bay's chain of dirt.
  • TodayDominguez Park is a City of Redondo Beach public park at 200 Flagler Lane. No trace of the track that we could find.

Where Redondo Beach fits in the bigger story

The rest of the South Bay: Entradero, the Pit, Ascot, and the wider survey in The Tracks That Built BMX. Other early dirt: The Orange Y, La Mirada. The people: Bob Osborn, Scot Breithaupt, R.L. Osborn, Bill Ryan. The press that came out of those blocks: BMX Action, Freestylin', Wizard Publications. The sanctions that came later: ABA, NBL. The full arc lives in our History of BMX series.

Sources

FatBMX, Preserving BMX History interview with Brian Gutierrez — the firsthand account of the Sodbuster crew, the July 20, 1974 Yamaha Gold Cup qualifier at Birmingham High School, being thrown off the old Dominguez BMX track in Redondo Beach that summer, and the later realization that the man who did it was Bob Osborn. University of BMX (Gerrit Does), History of BMX 1968–1974, including Scot Breithaupt's own firsthand corrections — the June 1973 first issue of Bicycle Motocross published in Orange by Elaine Holt, its four-track listing naming Palms Park, Escape Country, B.U.M.S. and Dominguez Park, and Breithaupt's separate list of tracks already operating in that era. bmxultra.com, "Early BMX Tracks in California" (April 2020), presenting a short documentary survey that names Escape Country, Malibu Canyon, B.U.M.S. and Redondo Beach among the early California tracks. Mike Carruth, A Partial History of the Sport of BMX Racing (BMXNews.com, updated January 2019) — the June 1974 Bicycle Motocross News date, the July 20, 1974 first Gold Cup race, and the December 1976 founding of Bicycle Motocross Action. City of Redondo Beach and public listings for Dominguez Park at 200 Flagler Lane — the park's present-day existence and address. Legend Bike Co's own Entradero chapter for the February 1977 South Bay racing date. Not reachable during research: bmxsociety.com was down throughout, and bmxmuseum.com blocks automated access, so its Southern California track-history forum could not be read directly.