BMX Racing History · Rider Profile · Legend Bike Co

R.L. Osborn

Two guys in a parking lot in Torrance. That's where this really starts. R.L. Osborn and Bob Haro both worked at BMX Action magazine — R.L. testing bikes, Haro drawing — and after the workday was done they'd mess around on their bikes out back and on the ramps nearby. Wheelies, rollbacks, curb endos. None of it counted for anything at a race. No class, no rules, no points. They did it because it was fun, and because nobody had told them not to.

The first time anyone paid to watch was the ABA Winternationals in February 1980. The magazine put them on the road as the BMX Action Freestyle Team, riding demos at races and shows around the country. Nobody was even calling it "freestyle" yet. They were on Redlines. And those demos are where the whole freestyle industry comes from — you can trace it straight back to that.

R.L. stuck with the BMX Action Freestyle Team and his Redline deal through the early 1980s, and the bond with the brand went past just riding it. He had a real hand in the Redline RL-20II — the freestyle frame that wore his initials and finally found the audience the original RL-20 Prostyler never quite reached. It was one of the first production freestyle frames built around what a rider actually told the engineers, not the other way around.

One of his signature tricks has a very ordinary origin story. R.L. is credited with inventing the Backwards Infinity Roll — he worked it out on the way out of the BMX Action warehouse to grab a bite at In-N-Out Burger, then spent roughly two months getting it dialed. By the account in Freestylin' II: The Book (Mark Lewman and Craig "Gork" Barrette, Wizard Publications, 1987), it went on to become one of the most copied tricks in the sport.

Before any of it — before BMX Action, before freestyle even had a name — R.L. was already running his own operation. At age 12 he was importing and selling firecrackers out of Mexico, by his own account in Freestylin' — Generation F: 1984–1989 (Endo Publishing, 2008). Same restless, make-your-own-opportunity streak that later built BULLY Bikes.

Then the Redline deal ended. He could have signed with another established name. He didn't. He went and started his own company instead: BULLY Bikes. That put him right in there with the rider-owned brands — Haro, Hoffman, S&M — that ended up defining BMX after the boom years faded.