Steve Skibel

DG's Second BMX Team Manager, Confirmed by His Own 2017 Blog Comment

A Legend Bike Co. rider page · cross-referenced with our DG Performance chapter

At a glance

Role BMX team manager
Team DG Performance, Anaheim, California
Took over 1977, after Chuck Robinson left to run LRV
Known for Confirming his own identity in an October 2017 blog comment addressed directly to former DG rider Jeff Bottema

Steve Skibel doesn't have a stack of period magazine profiles behind him. He has one comment, left on a WordPress blog in 2017, and the fact that DG's own team-manager lineage runs straight through him. Chuck Robinson built DG's BMX program from nothing in 1976, signed Jeff Bottema and Stu Thomsen, then left about a year later to run the team at LRV before founding his own brand. Someone had to take the DG program over. That was Skibel.

The Handoff From Robinson

DG's own published history is blunt about the sequence: Robinson signed the team's biggest names, left for LRV in 1977, and "Steve Skibel, whos son Steve Skibel Jr. rode for DG, then took over as Team Manager." That's the entire public record of the handoff — one sentence on a fan-run history blog, dgbmx.wordpress.com, built and maintained by a DG collector rather than the company itself. No press release, no magazine announcement, nothing in the trade coverage we could locate. DG in the late 1970s was a fast-growing but still small Southern California outfit, and team-manager changes below the level of Robinson's profile simply didn't make the record.

What we do know is the shape of DG's business under Skibel's watch. The Green Duck Corporation acquired DG's manufacturing arm around 1979. Byron Friday signed with DG after leaving Redline and landed on the cover of BMX Action in January 1980, racing his DG at Corona Raceway. Friday went on to design the DG ZF-1, named for himself and teammate Sal Zuener. All of that activity — the Green Duck sale, the Friday signing, the ZF-1 — happened after Robinson was gone, which puts it on Skibel's watch as team manager, even though none of the sources credit him by name for any specific piece of it.

The Comment That Confirmed Him

Forty years after taking the job, Skibel showed up in public exactly once. On October 23, 2017, a comment appeared on dgbmx.wordpress.com's "History of DG" page, replying to a December 2015 post from Jeff Bottema himself, who'd written in to call his old DG Racer 1 "the best handling BMX Bike ever built." The reply reads, in full: "Jeff ?, . . It's Steve Skibel , . . Would you mind if I send you our old school catalog from 1977 ? = )"

It's a small thing — five sentences, a smiley face, an offer to mail a catalog. But it's specific in a way that's hard to fake: it addresses a named former rider directly, references a document (the 1977 catalog) that only someone close to the company would think to offer, and uses "our," placing the commenter inside DG rather than outside it. That's the entire basis for treating "Steve Skibel" as a real, verifiable person and not just a name on a fan blog. Nobody has found a reply from Bottema confirming the exchange continued, and Skibel hasn't resurfaced publicly since.

His Son, and a Bike That May or May Not Be Named for Him

Skibel's son, Steve Skibel Jr., rode for DG's amateur BMX and motocross programs as a kid in the 1970s — both sides of the sport DG itself straddled as a motocross-parts company that got pulled into BMX. Racer X's obituary for him, published in the December 27, 2024 edition of its weekly Racerhead column, describes a serious young talent: a Saddleback Park regular who "popped up often in Cycle News results of the big races there, including the annual World Mini Grand Prix," teamed with fellow minicycle racer Paul Denis, and became, in the obituary's words, "the youngest BMXer to ever be on the cover of Bicycle Motocross Action." Steve Skibel Jr. later worked in telecommunications and remained a moto enthusiast for the rest of his life. He died on December 23, 2024, at age 57, after Type 1 diabetes took its toll on his body.

Vintage BMX collectors on BMX Society's forums have circulated a bike they call the "DG Steve Skibel Replica" — a lightweight, mini-sized 20-inch frame built up with Sugino alloy cranks, a Stronglight alloy headset and bottom bracket, and Campagnolo track hubs, reportedly weighing around 19 pounds, dramatically light for the era. Forum posts describe it as built for a "pint sized mega fast racer" named Steve, with his father "Steve Sr." credited for sourcing the exotic parts. Whether that bike, and the model name attached to it, honors the team manager or the son he was managing on the side is not something we can resolve from what's public. Given that DG's own history describes the father as the manager and the son as the amateur racer, the more logical read is that the bike was built for, and eventually named after, Steve Skibel Jr. — but no source states that outright, and we're not going to guess past what's written.

Where the public record runs thin

Steve Skibel's birth and death dates, the exact date he started as DG's team manager, how long he held the job, and what he did after DG are not documented anywhere we could find. We also can't confirm whether he is still living. The Racer X obituary from December 2024 is explicitly for Steve Skibel Jr., the son — not for the team manager himself — and a separate BMX Hall of Fame social media tribute uses the nickname "Stevie Skibel" without clarifying which of the two men it refers to. We're treating the team manager and the amateur racer as two distinct people, per DG's own history page, and flagging that some tribute posts online may not make that same distinction. The naming source and exact production status of the "DG Steve Skibel Replica" frame — whether it was an original catalog model or a later collector build — is also unresolved.

Where Steve Skibel fits in the bigger story

Brand: DG Performance. Team lineage: Chuck Robinson / Robinson Racing. Riders: Jeff Bottema, Stu Thomsen, Byron Friday. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

dgbmx.wordpress.com, "History of DG" (about page), including the original team-manager sequence and the comment thread — Jeff Bottema's December 3, 2015 comment and the Steve Skibel comment of October 23, 2017. Racer X, "Racerhead #52: 15 Days to 2025 A1, RIP Don Stephenson, Dave Feeney, and Steve Skibel Jr." (racerxonline.com, December 27, 2024) — obituary detail on Steve Skibel Jr.'s minicycle and BMX racing career, telecommunications career, and December 23, 2024 death. bmxsociety.com community forum threads ("DG Steve Skibel Replica," "DG...I think it is a Skibel," "Cool early DG frame") — collector descriptions of the lightweight Skibel-associated frame, cited at the forum-snippet level; the site's JavaScript-rendered pages could not be loaded in full to verify thread content beyond what search indexing surfaced. bmxmuseum.com — "1977 DG Steve Skibel Replica" bike listing, title confirmed via search indexing. Legend Bike Co. — DG Performance chapter, cross-referenced for consistency on the Robinson-to-Skibel handoff and DG's company timeline. oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were checked first, per this library's research standard, but returned only general archive and forum-index material on Steve Skibel specifically, folded into the citations above.