Ron Wilkerson — The Rider Who Built the Halfpipe Around Himself

BMX Freestyle History · Rider Profile · Legend Bike Co

Ron Wilkerson — The Rider Who Built the Halfpipe Around Himself

Most pros wait for somebody to hand them a contest to win. Ron Wilkerson got tired of waiting and built his own. A freezing barn in Minnesota, 1986, a halfpipe, and a name nobody had heard yet: King of Vert. That's the kind of rider he was. If the sport didn't have the thing he needed, he made the thing.

Known for: Vert riding — and inventing the tricks that came with it
Teams: GT → Haro (came over fall 1984)
Tricks credited: The nothing, the abubaca, fakies
Built: 2-Hip King of Vert and Meet the Street contest series
1985: AFA Flatland, Ramp and Overall Champion
Own brand: Started 1989 (first called Wilkerson Airlines) — became 2-Hip
Hall of Fame: National BMX Hall of Fame, Class of 2013 (Freestyler)

The First Cover

1984. Wizard Publications launches a brand-new magazine called Freestylin'. Whole sport's about to change, and they need a face for the very first cover. The face they pick is a mop-headed kid going off in Golden Gate Park. That kid is Ron Wilkerson. Think about what that means. Before most people had even heard the word freestyle, his picture was the one that introduced the whole thing. You don't get on the first cover by being good. You get there by being the future.

GT, Then the H

He rode for GT first. The 2-Hip crew did a tour for GT in 1984, criss-crossing the country putting freestyle in front of kids who'd never seen it live. Then, that same fall, he came over to Haro — onto the best team the sport had. He got on a Haro Sport, the bike built around vert, and went to work. The Haro years are the ones where the legend really got made. Big airs. Bigger ideas.

The Tricks Nobody Had Done

Here's where it stops being about results and starts being about invention. Wilkerson is credited with the nothing — you let go of everything, hands and feet off, in the air, holding nothing. The abubaca, a fakie rollback trick on the ramp. Fakies themselves. These aren't tweaks on somebody else's move. These are doors that didn't exist until he kicked them open. Every vert rider who came after rode through them, whether they knew the name on the door or not.

And he wasn't a one-trick guy. People remember him for vert, but in 1985 he took the AFA Flatland, Ramp and Overall titles in the same year. Flatland and ramp don't usually live in the same rider. They did in him.

King of Vert

By the mid-80s the established circuits were mostly built around flatland. Vert and street riders didn't have a real home. So Wilkerson made one. The first 2-Hip King of Vert ran in 1986 — that barn in Minnesota — and it became the halfpipe series. The one that mattered. He ran the Meet the Street contests too, giving street riding a stage of its own. This is the series where a teenage Mat Hoffman threw down the kind of riding that rewrote the ceiling. None of that happens without somebody building the ramp and hanging the banner. That somebody was Ron.

He didn't just ride the era. He scheduled it.

His Own Name on the Frame

In 1989 he started his own thing. First name on it was Wilkerson Airlines — which tells you everything about how he saw a bike, as a machine for getting off the ground. It became 2-Hip, one of the first rider-owned freestyle brands, and it's still around. Owning the company, running the contests, riding the ramps, managing a team and picking up young talent along the way — he worked every angle of the sport at once. Not many people can say that.

The Crash, and the Coming Back

It wasn't all airs and magazine covers. He went down hard once and it nearly ended everything — a serious head injury, a stretch where the riding was taken away from him. He came back. Relearned it. Got back on the ramp. The fact that the comeback is part of the story instead of the end of it tells you what he was made of.

What we don't know for sure. A few things in Ron's story get told different ways depending who's telling them, so we're flagging them instead of guessing. His exact birth year isn't nailed down in our sources — "early 1960s" is as tight as we can honestly go. The "first-ever nothing air" claim is real, but the Hall of Fame credits him broadly with inventing "nothings" rather than dating one specific air, so we say he's credited with the trick rather than pin it to a day. And the founding of his brand gets dated two ways: the 2-Hip name and crew go back to the early-to-mid 80s as a tour team and contest series, while the bike company is generally dated to 1989 (first called Wilkerson Airlines). Both are true — they're just different things wearing the same name. The details on the crash vary source to source, so we've kept that part plain.

Timeline

  • 1984 First-ever cover of Freestylin' magazine — Golden Gate Park. Tours for GT with the 2-Hip crew.
  • 1984 Comes over to Haro that fall. Onto the Haro Sport.
  • 1985 AFA Flatland, Ramp and Overall Champion — all three in one year.
  • 1986 First 2-Hip King of Vert — a barn in Minnesota. The halfpipe series is born.
  • 1989 Starts his own brand, first called Wilkerson Airlines — later 2-Hip.
  • 2013 National BMX Hall of Fame, Class of 2013, Freestyler.

Sources: National BMX Hall of Fame / USA BMX, "BMX Hall of Fame's Class of 2013 Announced" (usabmx.com) — primary biographical source for the Freestylin' cover, the invented tricks, the 1985 AFA titles, the 2-Hip King of Vert and Meet the Street contests, and the 1989 Wilkerson Airlines / 2-Hip brand; SplendidBMX rider profile; bmxmuseum.com (2 Hip brand history and forum records on the GT and Haro team years); contemporaneous Freestylin' magazine, 1984. Where sources disagree on dates — the 2-Hip team and contests versus the 1989 bike company, and the exact framing of the "first nothing" — we note the range in "What we don't know for sure" rather than pick a side. Cross-referenced against our own Haro history.

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