Ryan Nyquist

Haro's Triple Threat, One of X Games BMX's Most Decorated Riders

A Legend Bike Co. rider page · primary sources: Wikipedia, USA BMX, USA Cycling, Haro Bikes, the 23mag BMX archive, and period X Games coverage

At a glance

Level Professional, freestyle BMX (dirt, park, street, vert)
Born March 6, 1979, Los Gatos, California
Scene Los Gatos / San Jose, California, mid-1990s to present
Teams Haro Bikes (1997 to present) · Vans · Rockstar Energy Drink · earlier: Bontrager, Airwalk, Primo, and the Jiffy Market of Los Gatos
Known for 16 X Games medals across 39 starts, the nickname "Triple Threat" for competing at the top level in dirt, street, and vert, and becoming the first head coach of USA Cycling's Olympic BMX freestyle team

Ryan Nyquist has been riding for Haro Bikes since 1997. That single fact says a lot about how BMX freestyle actually works at the top: sponsors and riders who find each other early and just stay put for decades. Nyquist turned pro in 1995, made his first X Games start in 1996, and by the time he slowed down as a competitor he had 16 X Games medals to his name across 39 starts — one of the largest hauls in the history of the discipline.

Los Gatos, Calabasas Park, and the Jiffy Market

He started riding at eleven, on a bike his parents bought him — a Boss. What hooked him first wasn't tricks; it was the range. He has said the appeal was being able to ride around town with his friends, explore, and feel independent, and that the tricks came after that.

A friend told him about a jumping spot at Calabasas Park in San Jose. There were no cars in that crew, so getting there meant a long ride out and a long ride back. When the skateboard wave came through, most of his friends switched; he and a riding partner he calls Chris Butthead kept riding bikes. In 1992 he watched Chad Harrington's section in the Hoffman video Ride On and it opened up nothings and nothing variations for him — he kept trick lists for years afterward with moves from that section still on them.

His first sponsor was a hometown grocery store: the Jiffy Market of Los Gatos, which stayed on his sponsor list for years afterward even as national brands piled on. He has pointed to sixteen or seventeen as the age when his riding took off, mostly through getting comfortable with 360 variations.

Turning Pro and Finding X Games

Nyquist was born March 6, 1979, and started riding as a small child in the Los Gatos, California area. He turned professional in 1995 at sixteen and made his first X Games appearance the following year, when the event itself was still new — the first X Games had only run in 1995. He built his name in BMX Dirt, then expanded into BMX Park as that discipline took shape, which is where the "Triple Threat" nickname comes from: very few riders have ever competed at a winning level in dirt, street, and vert at once. Nyquist did.

His first contest was the Sheep Hills Enduro in 1996. That same season he showed up at the Bicycle Stunt series stop in Seal Beach, California, turned pro, and started turning heads — fifth in stuntmen street at the Los Angeles round, fourth in Chicago. Bontrager, then trying to get into BMX, picked him up after seeing him in the Sick videos, and he landed the cover of the first issue of BMX Business News with a no-footed can-can over the box jump. By the end of 1996 his sponsor list read Bontrager, Airwalk, Primo, Jinx, Solid, EP and the Jiffy Market. He started a mechanical engineering degree in 1997 and stopped to ride instead.

How Haro Signed Him

The Haro deal came through a departing teammate rather than a scout. Todd Lyons was leaving the Haro team to ride for Huffy in 1997 and recommended Nyquist as his replacement. Nyquist was already getting coverage as a new rider doing well at contests, and Haro picked him up. Two years later the company gave him a signature frame, the Nyquist Backtrail, and he has said he had full input on its colors and graphics. That relationship has now run more than twenty-five years.

Greenville, and a House with Dave Mirra

In 1998 he moved east, to Greenville, North Carolina, and lived with Dave Mirra — the sport's other great contest rider of the era, and the man who would win the same ESPY award Nyquist won, the year after Nyquist won it. Nyquist has been careful about the move: NorCal, and specifically the San Jose Ramp Club, is where he says he learned most of what he can do, but he wanted to see what was east of it.

Sixteen Medals, Thirty-Nine Starts

Over the length of his X Games career, Nyquist medaled 16 times across 39 total starts, with four of those medals gold. That combination of volume and longevity — competing at an elite level across nearly two decades of X Games — is what BMX writers point to when they call him one of the most decorated riders in the event's history. He also holds the record for Dew Tour finals appearances, with 60.

The medal-by-medal ledger, which this page previously flagged as uncorroborated, is now on the record. Sixteen medals: four gold, seven silver, five bronze.

Gold (4)
2000 · X Games VI, San Francisco · BMX Dirt
2002 · X Games VIII, Philadelphia · BMX Park
2003 · X Games IX, Los Angeles · BMX Dirt
2003 · X Games IX, Los Angeles · BMX Park

Silver (7)
1998 · X Games IV, San Diego · BMX Dirt
2001 · X Games VII, Philadelphia · BMX Dirt
2002 · X Games VIII, Philadelphia · BMX Dirt
2004 · X Games X, Los Angeles · BMX Park
2006 · X Games XII, Los Angeles · BMX Dirt
2012 · X Games XVIII, Los Angeles · BMX Park
2013 · X Games Barcelona · BMX Park

Bronze (5)
1997 · X Games III, San Diego · BMX Dirt
1999 · X Games V, San Francisco · BMX Dirt
2000 · X Games VI, San Francisco · BMX Park
2005 · X Games XI, Los Angeles · BMX Park
2013 · X Games Foz do Iguaçu · BMX Dirt

Read the ledger and the shape of the career comes out. He medaled in his first two X Games and his sixteenth year of them. He took both golds available to him in 2003, in two different disciplines, at the same Games — the year the Triple Threat label stopped being a nickname and became a description. And he was on the dirt podium in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2013. In 2006, ESPN's own event coverage called him the winner of more BMX Dirt medals than any athlete in X Games history.

Two years bracket the run and are worth naming even without a medal. In 1998 he arrived at X Games in San Diego as the man to beat in dirt, throwing truckdrivers and barspin backflips, and got beaten by Brian Foster, who transferred a 360 to the backside of a jump fifteen feet away. In 1999, the goal he set himself was not a medal at all: make the top ten in every event he entered. He did.

Gravity Games, Vans Triple Crown, and the Dew Tour

X Games was never the whole picture. At the Gravity Games he took eight medals — four gold and four silver: gold in BMX Dirt at Providence in 1999, BMX Park at Providence in 2001, and BMX Dirt at Cleveland in both 2003 and 2004, with silvers in BMX Park at Providence in 1999 and 2000 and Cleveland in 2002 and 2003.

The Vans Triple Crown was where his dirt riding turned into something close to ownership of a discipline. He won the 2002 series outright — first in dirt at the Oceanside final, more than twenty thousand dollars and a truck for the season — and by the Denver stop in June 2004 he had taken eleven straight Vans Triple Crown dirt contests over three years, sealing that one with back-to-back 720s and a margin under a point. The streak ended at Huntington Beach that September, when he crashed twice and finished eleventh.

On the Dew Tour he holds the all-time record for finals appearances, with 60, and won three Dew Cups: BMX Dirt in 2007 and 2009, and BMX Park in 2013. In 2010 he entered Dew Tour vert for the first time in nine years. NORA Cup voters named him dirt jumper of the year in 2000, and BMX Plus! readers gave him the same title in 2000 and again in 2008.

Haro, Vans, and the Sponsors Who Stayed

Haro Bikes signed Nyquist in 1997 and the relationship never really ended. Haro built signature frames and parts around him over the following decades, and the brand still features him in its own history and marketing today. He also rode for Vans and Rockstar Energy Drink through the core of his competitive career, and had an Adidas signature shoe in 2001. In 2004 he won the ESPY Award for Best Action Sports Athlete, recognition that reached outside the BMX world specifically because of how dominant his run through the mid-2000s was.

Video Parts and Warriors of Wood

Nyquist did not just compete. He created the Warriors of Wood BMX dirt contest, an event that became a fixture for the dirt jumping side of the sport and gave riders outside the X Games circuit a stage of their own. The first one ran on May 31, 2009, in San Jose — back where he started.

He also filmed, which contest riders of his era often did not. His parts in Fox's Expendable Youth videos, Ride BMX's Drop the Hammer and Josh Harrington's End Search moved him out of the contest-footage bracket and into video riding on its own terms; the End Search part earned a NORA Cup video part of the year nomination, and he has called it the thing he is proudest of.

From Rider to Olympic Coach

By the mid-2010s, Nyquist had turned some of his competitive attention toward freeride slopestyle mountain biking, training for events like Red Bull Joyride and Crankworx, where he became the first rider to use pegs on a mountain bike in competition. He took bronze at Red Bull Joyride in 2017 and finished fourth overall in the FMB Diamond Series the same year. Then, in September 2019, USA Cycling named him the first head coach of Team USA's Olympic BMX freestyle program, ahead of BMX freestyle's debut as an Olympic event at the Tokyo Games. It closed a loop: a rider who had spent his career building the sport's biggest tricks was now the one training the next generation to do it on the Olympic stage.

The Paris 2024 cycle is the clearest measure of the coaching job so far. Olympic BMX freestyle places were decided mainly through the inaugural Olympic Qualifier Series, held in Shanghai in May 2024 and Budapest in June. The United States qualified the maximum allowed — two men, Marcus Christopher and Justin Dowell, and two women, Hannah Roberts and Perris Benegas. No other country qualified more than two. USA Cycling's director of BMX, Jamie Staff, singled out Nyquist for putting his heart into the program; Nyquist's own comment was that coaching a powerhouse team is not for the faint of heart, and that the job wasn't done.

2023 — USA BMX Hall of Fame

USA BMX inducted Ryan Nyquist into the National BMX Hall of Fame in October 2023, in Tulsa, Oklahoma — recognition of a career that ran from a 1996 X Games rookie season through nearly two decades of medals, plus the coaching chapter that followed.

Where the public record runs thin

The medal-by-medal X Games ledger above is now sourced and no longer flagged: the year-by-year competition table and medal record are documented and match, event for event, several independent contemporaneous reports — the 23mag BMX archive's own entries for 1998 (second in dirt, fourth in street, fourth in doubles vert), 2004 (second in park, eighth in dirt) and 2006 (second in dirt) line up exactly.

What is still loose is small. The published year-by-year table accounts for roughly 38 individual event entries against the widely cited figure of 39 starts, so one entry is unaccounted for — possibly the 2006 park event, which he was entered in but could not ride after wrecking his knee in practice. X Games' own athlete page for Nyquist is offline and its archived copy would not load for this page, so the totals here rest on the published competition table rather than on the organizer's database. His birth date is given as March 6, 1979 by Wikipedia and Haro and as March 3, 1979 by 23mag; we have kept March 6. Finally, we found no documented working relationship between Nyquist and Dennis McCoy beyond both being long-career contest riders in overlapping eras, so we have not asserted one.

Where Ryan Nyquist fits in the bigger story

Brands: Haro Bikes, Vans. Riders: Dave Mirra, Brian Foster, Mat Hoffman. Sanctioning and honors: USA BMX (2023 Hall of Fame). The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

Wikipedia — "Ryan Nyquist," including its X Games medal record and year-by-year competition table. 23mag.com's Ryan Nyquist file, which reproduces his interviews and contest results from Ride BMX US (#25 December 1996, #29 August 1997, #49 June 2000, #92 January 2004), Ride BMX UK #38 (December 1998), BMX Plus!, BMX Business News, bmxunion.blogspot.com (November 2008) and expn.com event reports — the source for the Jiffy Market, Calabasas Park, the Bontrager years, the Todd Lyons recommendation, the Greenville move, the Vans Triple Crown streak and the first Warriors of Wood. USA Cycling, "Roberts, Benegas, Christopher, and Dowell Qualify for Paris 2024 After Overall Finishes at Olympic Qualifier Series" (June 24, 2024) for the Paris cycle and the Nyquist and Jamie Staff quotes. USA BMX and regional news coverage of the October 2023 National BMX Hall of Fame induction (WECT, Fox Wilmington, WWAY TV3, Bicycle Retailer and Industry News). Haro Bikes — "InFocus: Ryan Nyquist." oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were checked for period coverage; neither returned independent results beyond general archive material at the time of research, since Nyquist's competitive era runs later than most of their scanned print archive.