BMX Racing History · Chapter 10 · Legend Bike Co

The Tracks That Built BMX

Somebody's dad raked a vacant lot into a race track, and that's where the sport was born. Brands got the catalogs. Riders got the trophies. But BMX itself was built on dirt — flood basins, landfills, motorcycle parks, the empty ground at the edge of town. Most of those tracks are gone now. Houses sit on some. Grass grows over the rest. This chapter is for them: what the record still shows, where it falls silent, and an open door to the people who raced them and can fill in what's missing.

Four Official Tracks

When the sport's first magazine, Bicycle Motocross News, printed its first track list, there were exactly four official tracks in the world: Palms Park, Escape Country, the BUMS lot in Long Beach, and Dominguez Park. By Scot Breithaupt's own count, ten or eleven spots were already running races by 1972 — Escape Country, Malibu, Saddleback, Soledad Sands, Fountain Valley, La Palma, Dominguez, and his own BUMS lots among them. By the end of the decade the whole region was covered. Rider-compiled rosters remember more than 35 tracks across SoCal between 1969 and 1985. They came and went fast. Some lasted forty years. Some lasted two summers.

Palms Park — the disputed first

Ron Mackler was a park attendant who'd done motocross, and he organized races for the Sting-Ray kids at Palms Park in West LA. He kept them running all the way to 1984. The start date is the most argued-over fact in early BMX. 1969 is the year you'll usually see, but Breithaupt pointed to a 1974 magazine piece covering Palms' second season awards and figured the real start was closer to 1973. Surviving flyers prove racing by May 1973. Mackler went into the USA BMX Hall of Fame in 2015 — and whichever year you settle on, Palms Park was running weekly before almost anyone else, and it kept running for over a decade. The whole account — Mackler's decision to organize the kids instead of running them off, the date fight, and the three different cities the record puts that park in — is in our Palms Park track file.

Saddleback Park — the first pro purse

At the famous Orange County motorcycle park, Breithaupt built a BMX track and, in 1975, promoted the first-ever Pro BMX race: $5 entry, a $200 purse, won by Thom Lund of Rick's Bike Shop. Paying riders to race changed what the sport could become. Saddleback closed in 1984, mostly buried under liability lawsuits.

Indian Dunes — the NBA's backyard

Ernie Alexander ran motorcycle motocross at Indian Dunes in Valencia, watched the Sting-Ray kids show up, and founded the NBA in 1973 — the sport's first national sanction, run from next-door Newhall. The Dunes had its own BMX track too. The start date is disputed — 1972 by one account, 1975 by Breithaupt's correction — and we give you both. The park closed in the mid-1980s.

Western Sports-A-Rama — where GT was born

The Orange track with the pro shop that changed everything: Pedals Ready, which sold Gary Turner's hand-welded frames as the Pedals Ready/GT before GT Bicycles existed. Greg Hill started his career right here in 1974, with GT/Pedals Ready as his first sponsorship. A track, a shop counter, and a guy with a welder. That's how the biggest brand in BMX history got started.

The South Bay — where our own story starts

The South Bay had a scene all its own, and it was thick with tracks. I raced it. Entradero, Ascot, Alpine Village, Harbor BMX — they were all part of it. Harbor BMX in San Pedro is where Legend Bike Co's story really begins, because that's where I started. I was 10 years old, learning the basics in clinics run by Turnell "Tuni" Henry — who'd go on to become an NBA #1 Pro Cruiser and a USA BMX Hall of Famer, and who later became my partner at La Palma Cycle Center. The written record on Harbor and Alpine Village is thin. Years, operators, sanctions — still being pieced together. And like every track on this page, we'd rather tell you that than make something up.

The Track Files

Nine tracks get their own full pages, built from the coverage of the day, the firsthand accounts that survive, and the memories of the people who raced them:

• Palms Park — Ron Mackler's weekly program, the oldest claim in the sport, and the two arguments the record never settled.
• Corona Raceway — the steepest downhill in the sport, the Big Mama, and BMX Action's first cover.
• The Orange Y — forty years on a converted landfill; the World Famous Mecca of BMX, where Pistol Pete and Bill Ryan raced as kids.
• Ascot — BMX on the most famous motorcycle dirt in America; Spike's track, and the South Bay's main track after Entradero closed.
• Azusa — Rich Long's track, site of the ABA's first national in February 1978.
• La Mirada — the fast start, the big downhill, and the 1977 Boys' Life feature.
• Entradero — ground zero for the BMX Action crew and the South Bay scene, and the track Bill Ryan learned to ride at. The printed record is thin — help us fix that.
• Pipeline — the Upland skatepark that added a BMX track, hosted King of the Skateparks, and ran a schedule alongside Azusa under the Hoffman family in the Badlands.
• Apple Valley — a 1974 high desert track that's still running, and the only one here to have raced under the NBL, the ABA, and USA BMX.