A 13-year-old kid in a vacant lot on the corner of 7th and Lew in Long Beach drew up a rulebook, picked a date, took a quarter off each of the 35 kids who showed up, and ran a bicycle race. That was November 14, 1970. The kid was Scot Breithaupt, and that race is the one history calls the first official BMX race. Everything that came after it — the sanctions, the brands, the world titles, the Olympics — traces back to that lot. Nobody handed him the sport. He organized it into existence.

Now, he didn't invent BMX. No single person did. Kids were already ripping around dirt lots on beat-up Sting-Rays in California, in Nebraska, probably a dozen other places by the late 60s. What Scot did was give it rules and a reason to show up. And by every serious account, that makes him the founding father.

Early life and motocross

His name was Scot Alexander Breithaupt, born July 14, 1957 in Long Beach. He came up on motocross. By the early 70s he was a support rider for Yamaha, racing regional MX and good enough that the factory was paying attention. That motocross background is in everything he later did with BMX — the rulebook, the points, the skill classes, even how his tracks felt under you. He took it straight from the American Motorcycle Association and the outfits that rivaled it, the CMC and AME.

The way it actually started: he'd practice MX on a dirt trail by his house, and the neighborhood kids would turn up and try his jumps on their bicycles. That's the origin story, stripped down. They wanted to do what he was doing. He was 13. And he figured out fast that there was something there worth chasing.

BUMS and the invention of organized BMX

That first race was half an accident. Scot went home, grabbed some of his MX trophies, told the kids hanging around the trail that if they each kicked in a quarter he'd put on a race. They did it. Next week, 150 kids showed up. By the end of that first year he had 350 members.

The lot became BUMS — the Bicycle United Motocross Society. The name was a gag about the hobos living in the fields around it, but Scot turned it into a real sanctioning body. He wrote a rulebook off the motorcycle MX rules. Made membership cards. Printed t-shirts. Set up beginner, novice, and expert classes. Kept a points system and ran a full season. He held the first BUMS California State Championships in 1972 and won it himself, taking the 16-and-over Expert class.

And he kept building. Over the next few years he laid out and helped build tracks all over California: Saddleback Park in Orange County, Westminster, the City of Walnut, Signal Hill, Escape Country, La Palma Youth Village, Fountain Valley Boys and Girls Club. Later he designed Narler Park in Long Beach, the first BMX track with its own separate pro section, and that one ended up hosting the last-ever NBA Grandnationals in December 1982.

The Yamaha Gold Cup and the first big events

In 1974, 17 years old, Scot got hired by Yamaha to promote the Yamaha Bicycle Gold Cup series. Yamaha was rolling out a new 20-inch bike, the Moto-Bike, and wanted an event to push it. The Gold Cup ran as four races at different California tracks and finished at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on September 14, 1974. Over 5,000 people came out. Stu Thomsen won the Expert class. David Clinton took Juniors. Bob Osborn, who'd go on to start BMX Action magazine, waved the flag at the start.

The whole thing was Scot's. He dreamed up the series. He designed the course. He oversaw building it with Fantasy Inc., a division of Disneyland that put up the ramps and the fiberglass berms. He worked Yamaha's PR people and got BMX onto The Tonight Show, where Bill Cosby was guest-hosting, and jumped his bike clean over Cosby on live TV. Seventeen years old, all of it.

People call the Gold Cup the first quasi-national BMX event. No formal body sanctioned it — the NBA wouldn't run its first real national until March 1975 — but it was the biggest BMX event anybody had ever put on, and it settled the question of whether the sport could pull a crowd. It could.

Racing career

He raced through all of it. In 1975 he promoted the first pro BMX race at Saddleback Park — $5 to enter, $200 purse, won by Thom Lund. In 1976 the NBA finally organized a real pro class, and Scot took the very first national #1 Pro plate on an FMF team replica, with Perry Kramer second and Jeff Utterback third overall. Utterback grabbed #1 Amateur the same year.

His run through the late 70s reads like the resumé of six different people. He raced pro. He was the National Public Relations Director for the NBA in 1975. He announced the 1975 Shimano Grandnationals. He ran clinics across the country. He sat on safety seminars for the Consumer Product Safety Commission. He set a distance record for bicycle jumps, towed in by a motorcycle. His sponsors over the decade ran from Matthews Motocross to Matthews/Yamaha International to Dan Gurney All American BMX Bicycles/Bell Helmets to FMF.

And there was this running joke that nobody ever knew how old he really was. In July 1974, six days past his 17th birthday, he signed up for a 16-and-under qualifier and got tossed when Mike Devitt — then with Dirtmasters, later one of Scot's closest friends and his business partner — protested it. Nine other riders in that same event were also over 16, which tells you how loose the rules were back then. Scot leaned into the age thing for the rest of his career. He'd put a question mark in the age box on a sign-up form just to mess with people.

The nickname "OM" — Old Man — came out of that. BMX was a pre-teen and early-teen thing in those days, and here was Scot, a grizzled veteran in his late teens, which made him ancient by the standard of the day. The name stuck for the rest of his life. Years later SE Racing was still selling a cruiser frame called the OM Flyer in his honor.

The injury that almost ended his racing

Late 1974, Scot shattered his ankle during a photo shoot — for the cover of a book called How to Win Bicycle Motocross, of all things. Doctors told him he'd never walk right again, let alone race. Seven months in traction and physical therapy. In 1975 he walked into the Bicycle Industry Trade Show on a cane, hunting for a sponsor, and walked out with 13 offers. He signed with Dan Gurney All American BMX Bicycles, with Mike Devitt brokering the deal. Scot always said Devitt became his best friend and his mentor, and the two of them would be partners at SE Racing for the next 24 years.

SE Racing

In January 1977, Scot founded Scot Enterprises as an advertising and promo company. It started with stickers, t-shirts, hats. In 1978 it made its first actual bike product, the JU-6 frame, named for Jeff Utterback and his 1977 NBA #6 ranking. The JU-6 was a stiff aluminum frame built with Floval oval tubing. He refined it and renamed it the PK Ripper, after Perry Kramer, and put it out in 1978. That frame — the first aluminum BMX frame that actually worked — is still in production today, nearly fifty years on. Let that sit for a second.

The other signature SE frame was the Quadangle, which came out as the STR-1, the Stu Thomsen Replica, in the late 70s. That four-bar rear triangle made it impossible to mistake for anything else, and it became the racing frame a whole generation wanted under them. Stu Thomsen's first national win for SE came at Saddleback in 1979.

Scot was no trained engineer, and he never claimed to be. He worked with his riders, and with Linn Kastan of Redline — a relationship that was complicated but got real frames built — to turn his ideas into metal. What set SE apart was the team. Through the late 70s and into the early 80s the roster ran through Perry Kramer, Stu Thomsen for a stretch, Mike Miranda, and more. The bus they toured in, a converted camouflage school bus, became its own kind of legend. And his column in Bicycle Motocross Action, "Scotomania," mixed product hype, creative nonsense, and real instruction, and it ran for years.

SE Racing stayed in Scot's orbit into the late 1990s. By then Mike Devitt was running the day-to-day, and foreign investors held a bigger and bigger share. Scot and Devitt tried to buy those investors out, it didn't work, and control of SE Racing's trademarks passed to them on October 15, 1999. Both men left the company. SE rolls on today as SE Bikes, owned now by BikeCo, and it still sells the PK Ripper, the Quadangle, and the OM Flyer.

Television, production, and later business

Early 80s, Scot became one of the first voices of BMX on television, doing color commentary when ESPN — itself only a few years old then — started putting BMX on the air. From commentating he moved into producing. Through the back half of the 80s and into the 90s he produced BMX and action-sports programming for ESPN and Fox under his company LM Productions, reportedly more than 400 TV shows, commercials, and videos. In 1987 he put on the first televised BMX race broadcast worldwide.

By his own count he started or consulted on more than 25 businesses across his life, nearly all of them in or around action sports. He was out front on televising BMX, skateboarding, karting, snowboarding, mountain biking, and mixed martial arts before most people saw any money in them.

After leaving SE in 1999 he teamed up with Gary Turner, co-founder of GT Bicycles, on a new venture called Alliant Bicycles. Then in 2005 he came back as a racer, signing on to race the amateur cruiser classes for SE Bikes — the company he'd started nearly 30 years before. He was 48.

Hall of Fame and legacy

In 1990, Scot was inducted into the ABA BMX Hall of Fame. Long overdue by then. He'd founded the sport 20 years earlier and already had a lifetime of races, businesses, designs, broadcasts, and clinics behind him. But it came, and it came unanimous.

The County of Los Angeles formally recognized him over a decade ago as the organizer of the first BMX race. USA BMX dates the sport to November 14, 1970. Just about every major international BMX body credits his hand in setting up the modern structure of the thing. The pieces he brought to BMX as a teenager — age classes, skill classes, a points system, a sanctioning body, a pro division, sponsored teams, touring clinics, magazine columns — are still the bones of the sport today. I've spent 45 years in BMX, and I can tell you we're all still racing inside the frame a 13-year-old built.

He also trained or shaped a long list of riders who became stars in their own right. Stu Thomsen, Bob "Hurricane" Hannah, Tom Finvers, most of the early California pros came up through BUMS or through races Scot put on. He wrote some of the first articles for Bicycle Motocross News. He was a contributing writer and product tester for Minicycle/BMX Action, which became Super BMX. He was one of the first writers for Bicycle Motocross Action. He co-founded BMX Plus! with Jim Stevens.

Final years and death

His later years were hard, and there's no kind way around it. Drug addiction that friends and family have tied back to the death of his father and the grind of the business followed him through much of his adult life. In the 2000s and early 2010s he was in and out of stable housing and often far from the sport's official side of things, though he still turned up at reunions, museum events, the occasional race.

On July 5, 2015, police answering a call about a body near a shopping center in Indio, California found Scot dead in a tent on a vacant lot. He was 57, nine days short of 58. He left behind his mother Carole, his sister Lynda Muenzer, his brother Jeff, his sons Scot Jr. and Brandon Breithaupt, and his first wife Martha Breithaupt.

The BMX world answered right away, all over the globe. Jamie Bestwick, Mike King, dozens of other Hall of Famers and current pros put up tributes. The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, the Associated Press all ran obituaries. Outlets that had nothing to do with the sport covered it too, because the story was bigger than one racer's passing: the man who started one of the defining action sports of the late 20th century had died in a tent in the desert.

That contradiction — the size of what he built set against how his life ended — is part of the true story of Scot Breithaupt, and you don't smooth it over out of politeness. He was a teenage prodigy who turned a dirt lot into a sport. A relentless promoter, a born entrepreneur, a real innovator. And for a lot of his later life, a man fighting demons that finally won. The BMX community never pretended otherwise, and it never stopped honoring what he gave us. That's the right way to remember a man.

In his own words

Scot was endlessly quotable. His bmxultra.com interview series, done over four parts in the mid-2000s, is still the most complete first-person account of how BMX began that exists anywhere. Asked how it all started, his answer was about as blunt as it gets:

That's how it started. That's how the whole thing started.