BMX History · Rider Profile · Legend Bike Co

Rick Moliterno

Rick Moliterno is the answer to a trivia question almost nobody gets right on the first try: name the only rider to win a Pro BMX race, a Pro Flatland contest, and a Pro Ramp contest. He started as a Quad Cities kid turning wheelies on a Schwinn Sting-Ray, worked his way to an ABA pro card at 17, crossed over into freestyle at the peak of the AFA era, picked up a speaking line in a Hollywood movie almost by accident, and then spent the back half of his life building the bikes he always wished someone else had made. He's still building them.

A Davenport kid on a Sting-Ray

Moliterno started riding at six years old, turning his Schwinn Sting-Ray into whatever the street demanded — jumps, wheelies, whatever kept him out until the streetlights came on. By the mid-1970s, BMX-specific bikes started showing up in the Quad Cities, and he never quit. His launchpad was Steve DePron, who owned Bike & Hike on 14th Avenue in Rock Island, Illinois for 49 years. DePron gave a young Moliterno a job in the shop, let him wear the store's name racing for the shop team, and helped pay his way into bigger sponsorships. "He was my launchpad and huge financial support in the beginning," Moliterno has said. "I didn't know he was new to it because he'd always been just Steve."

Turning pro at seventeen

On November 7, 1982, Moliterno and a friend were in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for a race when the friend decided to buy his ABA pro membership on the spot. Moliterno handed over the $19 fee too, and his name went down in cursive on a slip of paper torn off the bottom of a form — official confirmation he was a BMX pro. He won his first race out as a pro. "I got first that day, too. I beat the dude I never thought I'd beat," he said. "That was pretty cool."

From racing to freestyle, and a line in RAD

Moliterno's real reputation was built away from the start gate — jumping over things, off things, doing what would come to be called freestyle before the sport had fully settled on the word. He picked up sponsorship from Hutch in 1985 and toured that year as, per a surviving 1986 Hutch Trick Team tour poster, "Rad Rick Moliterno. King of amazing aerial artistry." He appeared in the 1986 BMX film RAD, and during production broke his ankle. The injury made it into the movie: as Cru is about to start the Helltrack race, Moliterno's character asks him to sign his cast. It's the only speaking line delivered by a BMXer anywhere in the film. When Hutch ran into trouble, Moliterno moved to Haro in late 1986 and rode for that team through 1989.

The 1987 Austin decision

Moliterno's biggest rival in flatland during this stretch was a rising rider out of York, Pennsylvania named Kevin Jones. At the 1987 AFA Masters round 3 in Austin, Texas, Jones debuted a run of tricks nobody in AFA competition had seen — the Trolley, the Locomotive, the steamroller. Moliterno, the reigning 19-and-over expert flatland champion, answered with a flawless routine of his own, and the judges gave him the win, with Jones second. It's remembered as a controversial call, loud enough that part of the crowd disagreed with it on the spot — and it's also the exact kind of pressure-run flatland riding that made Moliterno the rider AFA judges kept crowning that season.

Undefeated in flatland

The National BMX Hall of Fame's own record of Moliterno's competitive run reads like a checklist nobody else on the circuit could match: 1985 NFA Grands Overall and Ramp Champion, 1986 AFA 16-and-over Flatland Champion, and in 1987, AFA 19-and-over Flatland and Overall Champion — undefeated in flatland that entire year. He followed it with the AFA's #2 Pro Overall ranking in 1988. Add in the race pro card he'd earned back in 1982, and the Hall of Fame credits him as the first and only rider to win a Pro BMX race, a Pro Flatland contest, and a Pro Ramp contest — three different disciplines, three different kinds of winning.

The biggest show he ever did

Freestylin' II: The Book, the 1987 Wizard Publications trick manual by Mark Lewman and Craig "Gork" Barrette, ran a full-page photo of Moliterno with a caption that says as much about his drawing power as any trophy: "the biggest show Rick Moliterno ever did — about 10,000 people showed up to watch him." The same book lists him among the era's elite riders doing backwards drop-ins, alongside Ron Wilkerson, Woody Itson, and Dennis McCoy — heavy company for a kid from the Quad Cities.

Rampage, and the birth of Standard

In 1989, with BMX booming back home, Moliterno opened Rampage Skate Park on Kimmel Drive in Davenport — an indoor park with three wooden half-pipes, a run of quarter pipes, and a vertical wall. It closed in 2005 after a run remembered locally as the longest-running skate park in the world. The rougher riding Rampage encouraged exposed a real problem: nobody was building bikes tough enough to take it. "None of the companies were doing anything to make the bikes better, so it was a need we tried to fill on our own," Moliterno said. In November 1991 he opened Standard Byke Company in Davenport, naming it after the standard of excellence he wanted the bikes held to. Four years later he added Goodtimes Superstore, the retail side of the business, in the same building.

Standard Byke Company, then and now

Moliterno introduced a threadless fork and stem combination to BMX in 1993 and 1994, built into Standard's S.T.A. jumping bike and Bicycle Motocross race frame, fork, and stem combo — ahead of where the wider bicycle industry would eventually land. Standard's bikes were built in Wisconsin for the company's first sixteen years before Moliterno brought manufacturing in-house. Today the shop, staffed by a crew of three, turns out roughly 500 hand-built bikes a year from a workshop in East Moline, Illinois, where the company relocated in 2019. He's appeared in riding videos going back to 1988's Team Haro Video through Standard's own 2007 DVD, Stronger Than All, was voted one of the Top-25 Most Influential Riders of the 1990s by Ride BMX Magazine, and co-founded the Midwest BMX Donation Program, which gives underprivileged kids high-end race and freestyle bikes.

National BMX Hall of Fame, 2018

Rick Moliterno was inducted into the National BMX Hall of Fame in 2018 in the Early Freestyle category, alongside Debbi Kalsow, Tim "Fuzzy" Hall, Brian Foster, Bob Morales, and Clarence Perry. The Hall's own citation sums up a career that crossed three disciplines the way few riders ever have — racer, flatland champion, ramp rider, movie cameo, and bike builder, in that order, none of it planned that far ahead. "I still think it's funny that we're still here," he said of Standard in 2024. "It was started to fill a need, and I just figured, well, maybe it'll be around two or three years. We've been around 33 years."