BMX Racing History · Track File · Legend Bike Co

Saddleback Park: The Motocross Icon That Paid BMX's First Pro Purse

Saddleback Park wasn't built for BMX. It was built for grown men on 250s — a 700-acre motocross playground in the hills above Orange, California, with hill climbs steep enough to kill your motor and a reputation that reached every corner of the off-road world. But for a stretch of the mid-1970s, the same dirt that hosted AMA Motocross nationals also hosted kids on Stingrays. And when it came time to pay a BMX racer for the first time in the sport's history, Saddleback is where it happened.

The Motocross Mecca

Saddleback opened to "a huge and happy crowd" on March 1, 1968, according to Cycle World publisher Joe Parkhurst, who put the park together with off-road racers Vic Wilson and Bruce Meyer on land leased from the Irvine Company. It was America's first purpose-built motocross park, and it was serious: a 1.25-mile pro-level track with 27 turns and 12 uphill sections, laid out by Motocross World Champion Joel Robert with help from fellow MX legend Gunnar Lindstrom. The park's crown jewel was "The Matterhorn," a hill climb topped by a 40-foot, 80-degree vertical pitch that Parkhurst himself doubted anyone would ever clear. Malcolm Smith proved him wrong. Across 700 acres of trails and fire roads, Saddleback became the destination every off-road magazine tested bikes at and every rider wanted to say they'd ridden. It hosted AMA Motocross nationals in 1972 and 1973, then again from 1979 to 1984.

Breithaupt Brings BMX to the Big Dirt

Scot Breithaupt built the first BMX track at BUMS I in Long Beach in 1970, and from there he kept building — new tracks for surrounding cities, in his own words: "La Habra, La Palma, Irvine (Saddleback) and Fountain Valley." Saddleback was different from a scraped-up vacant lot. The kids racing there were on the same 700 acres, and in some cases the same hills, as the motocross pros. That mattered. A BMX track built into a real motocross park gave Southern California's Sting-Ray racers something no flood-control basin could: actual moto terrain, banked and graded by the same ground crew that prepped it for the AMA circuit.

The First Pro Purse

In 1975, Breithaupt promoted what he calls the first-ever Pro BMX race, held at Saddleback: $5 to enter, a $200 purse to the winner — real money for a sport that had, until then, paid riders in trophies. Breithaupt has said Thom Lund, riding for Rick's Bike Shop, won that day.

Lund's own account, given in a 2003 interview, tells it differently. Asked directly if he raced Breithaupt's events, Lund said: "Scott keeps telling me I won the 1st Pro race at Saddleback, he promoted it but I don't remember. As the story goes Dave Clinton broke his Kawasaki frame flying down Bonzai hill. I crashed down Bonzai and they restarted the race. So the top guys are busting frames and getting totaled, where's Scott? Announcing." Two firsthand accounts, the same race, two different memories of who actually won it — a straightforward example of how thin the paper trail is on BMX's earliest pro purse. We're crediting Lund as the historical result, since that's the account Breithaupt has given consistently and it's the version that made it into the record — but Lund's own uncertainty is worth knowing.

Racing the Big Dirt — Bonzai Hill

What both accounts agree on is Bonzai Hill — the same motocross obstacle regulars called "Banzai," a steep drop that had already wrecked plenty of full-size dirt bikes before a single BMX racer ever pointed a 20-inch wheel down it. An issue of BX Weekly, likely from late 1975, covered the Whitney Marine BMX Team Championships at Saddleback and ran a photo of rider Rick Collins in what the magazine called "possibly the most spectacular crash in BMX history" off the Bonzai. Riders who raced it later described the same layout in similar terms: a hard right sweeper that fed onto a short plateau before the ground dropped away underneath you. One rider remembered Kevin McNeal taking a memorable championship race at Saddleback in a tight battle down that same hill. Saddleback's downhill reputation held up in the retelling for years — Thom Lund's own list of the gnarliest tracks he raced puts Saddleback alongside Soledad Sands, the Yarnell tracks, Randall Ranch, and Corona. That's serious company.

What We Don't Know