A BMX History Library chapter · United Kingdom section

Stephen Murray

A Geordie who went to America to ride dirt against the best in the world, and did the trick nobody had done

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

Somebody has to go first. In 2001, on a set of dirt jumps in front of a contest crowd, Stephen Murray went upside down twice in one jump and rode away from it. The double backflip had been talked about, tried and crashed. He landed it in competition, and after that it was a trick that existed.

He was twenty-one, from Newcastle, and he had been beating British riders since he was small enough to need a booster seat to get to the track.

Newcastle first

Murray came out of the north east, which in British BMX terms means he came up a long way from the money and the magazines. He raced, and he won constantly. Before he turned sixteen the record shows seven expert British championships and six UK national championships, plus finals appearances at European and world level.

That is a racer's resume. What he became was a dirt jumper — trails, four-packs, big lips, the discipline where the only judge that matters is whether you rode away. British trails riding in the 1990s was a scattered, self-built thing. If you wanted to make a living at it, you went where the contests and the sponsors were, and they were not in England.

Huntington Beach, 1999

At nineteen he moved to the United States, settling in Huntington Beach, California. The stated goal was blunt and it is worth taking at face value: to ride against the best in the world and beat them.

It took him about two years.

2001 and 2002

2001 is the season that made him. He won the BMX Dirt gold medal at the Summer X Games VII, took gold in BMX Dirt at the Gravity Games, and landed the first double backflip in competition. In 2002 he went back to the Gravity Games and won it again, back to back.

Three gold medals in two years, and a trick with his name on it. He was also nominated for ESPN's BMX rider of the year.

What riders talk about, though, is not the medal count. It is what he was willing to try. Murray built a reputation on the biggest and least forgiving tricks on dirt — the double, then 360 backflips, then turndown backflips, each one a variation that adds a way to get it wrong. He was the rider other dirt jumpers watched to find out what was possible next.

22 June 2007, Baltimore

On Friday 22 June 2007, Murray rode the BMX Dirt final at the Dew Action Sports Tour stop in Baltimore, Maryland. Going for a double backflip, his foot came off the pedal partway through the rotation and he crashed on the landing.

He sustained a spinal cord injury in his neck. The account published by his own Stay Strong campaign states that he was left paralyzed from the shoulders down. He was twenty-seven, married, and a father of two young boys. He did not compete again.

Murray and his family chose from the start to talk about it in public and in their own words, rather than let it be talked about around them. Almost everything on this page after this point exists because they made that choice.

Stay Strong

It started as two words on a T-shirt. Riders wore them at contests in the weeks after Baltimore because there was nothing else useful to do with what they were feeling.

It did not stay a T-shirt. Stay Strong became a working BMX brand with a race team and a freestyle team, product on shop walls, and collaborations that carried real weight in the industry — limited-edition shoes with Vans, grips with ODI. It runs the Bangers and Mash dirt jam, held at Murray's own place, which puts trails riding and the Stay Strong name back in the same field where the story started.

Riders on the Stay Strong roster over the years have included Ben Wallace, Bob Manchester and Jordan Aleppo. Those are not charity placements. They are sponsored riders on a brand that competes for shelf space like any other.

The phrase on the website, in Murray's words: When you think there is nothing left, reach inside and dig deeper.

The work since

In 2012, ESPN reported on his use of eye-control technology — a system that reads where you are looking and turns it into cursor movement — which gave him back the ability to run a computer, and with it a business, on his own.

In 2017 he published a book about his life, Staying Strong: An Immensely Human Story, written with John F. McDonald and Lee Martin and released by Gatecrasher Books. It was launched at House of Vans in London and Ride UK ran a ten-week series with him around it, covering everything from his memorabilia to what he wanted to do next. The same year he sat down with the True Geordie podcast and talked about the whole of it, at length, on his own terms.

His sons ride. There is Nitro Circus footage of Murray watching his boy Seth put a double backflip into a landing, which is the kind of full circle you could not write into a script without somebody calling it too neat.

Where the record runs thin

Timeline

• 9 January 1980 — born in Newcastle upon Tyne.
• Before 1996 — seven expert British championships and six UK national championships before the age of sixteen, plus European and world championship finals.
• 1999 — moves to the United States at nineteen, based in Huntington Beach, California.
• 2001 — BMX Dirt gold at the Summer X Games VII; BMX Dirt gold at the Gravity Games; lands the first double backflip in competition.
• 2002 — second consecutive Gravity Games BMX Dirt gold.
• 22 June 2007 — crashes in the BMX Dirt final at the Dew Action Sports Tour in Baltimore, Maryland, and sustains a spinal cord injury in his neck.
• 2007 onward — Stay Strong grows from a T-shirt slogan into a BMX brand with race and freestyle teams.
• 2012 — ESPN reports on his use of eye-control technology.
• 2017 — publishes Staying Strong: An Immensely Human Story, launched at House of Vans, London; appears on the True Geordie podcast.
• 2019 — Stay Strong and Vans release a limited-edition shoe collaboration.

Where this sits in the bigger story

British BMX in the 2000s produced two riders who went to America and beat the Americans at their own contests. One was Jamie Bestwick on vert, out of Nottingham. The other was Stephen Murray on dirt, out of Newcastle. They left for the same reason — the ramps, the trails, the contests and the money were all in the United States and none of them were in England — and they arrived within a couple of years of each other.

Dirt jumping has always been the least institutional part of BMX. There is no federation behind a set of trails. Somebody digs, somebody else brings a shovel, and the standard rises because riders keep showing each other what will go. That is the tradition Murray came out of, and going first is the whole job description. Mat Hoffman did it on vert a decade earlier and paid a similar kind of price for it.

Stay Strong is the part of this chapter that the rest of the sport should sit with. BMX had no safety net in 2007 and largely still does not. A rider gets hurt and what happens next depends on what the people around him decide to build. What got built here is a brand that pays riders, a jam that fills a field, and a phrase that turns up on bikes in countries Murray has never ridden in.

Two other British names belong alongside this one and do not have chapters yet: Ben Wallace, who rode for Stay Strong, and Will Smyth of Belfast, whose JIVE label led to co-founding Dig BMX, the magazine that covered riders like Murray from a British desk.

Sources

Wikipedia, "Stephen Murray (BMX rider)" — date of birth, English nationality, the seven expert British championships and six UK national championships before sixteen, the BMX Dirt gold at Summer X Games VII in 2001, the Gravity Games golds in 2001 and 2002, the first double backflip in competition, the 360 and turndown backflips, the ESPN rider of the year nomination, the date and place of the 2007 crash, the 2017 book with John F. McDonald and Lee Martin, the True Geordie podcast appearance, and his residence and custody of his two sons. Ride UK BMX, "Stephen Murray," rideukbmx.com — the 22 June 2007 date, the Dew Action Sports Tour dirt final in Baltimore, the move from Newcastle to the USA, the X Games and Gravity Games golds, the first double backflip, and the growth of Stay Strong from a T-shirt into a brand sponsoring race and freestyle teams and running the Bangers and Mash dirt jam. Ride UK BMX product and feature coverage — the Stay Strong and Vans limited-edition shoes, the ODI and Stay Strong grips, the Staying Strong book launch at House of Vans, the ten-week Staying Strong series, and the Nitro Circus clip of his son Seth. Stay Strong (stysrg.com), "Stephen" — the campaign's own account of 22 June 2007, the three gold medals, the move from Newcastle at nineteen, his age of twenty-seven at the time, and the quotation used on this page. Note: that page carries the campaign's original text but the domain now also hosts unrelated third-party advertising. ESPN, "Paralyzed Murray utilizes eye control technology," espn.com, 2012. Stephen Murray with John F. McDonald and Lee Martin, Staying Strong: An Immensely Human Story, Gatecrasher Books, 2017.

Checked and unreachable at the time of research: bmxsociety.com and bmxmuseum.com.

Last reviewed: August 2026. If Stephen Murray or his family would like anything on this page corrected or removed, we will do it.