Open any copy of Freestylin' magazine between 1984 and 1988 and the odds were good you'd run into Todd Anderson. He was on the cover of Issue #3. He was on the cover of Freestylin' II: The Book in 1987. He was one of the core riders in the Camarillo ramp crew out in Southern California, the backyard session that quietly set the shape of mid-to-late 80s ramp riding before anybody had even settled on the word "street." And he was one of the guys pushing the look and the technique of modern freestyle — the twisted lookback with the feet planted on the crank arms, a shape and a style that moved the bar for everyone. His influence runs a lot deeper than his trophy count ever showed.

He's also one of the underdocumented ones. Anderson isn't in the USA BMX Hall of Fame. He doesn't have a Wikipedia entry. His contest results aren't archived the way the racers' results are. What he has instead is the cover photography of Windy Osborn, the shared memory of every freestyler who ever rode the Camarillo ramp, and the steady word of his peers — Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparijo, Steve Emig, the whole Freestylin' generation — that he was one of the riders who mattered.

The Freestylin' Issue #3 cover

The single most famous image of Todd's career is the cover of Freestylin' magazine Issue #3. Windy Osborn shot it — the most important freestyle photographer of the era — in front of the SE Bikes office. Todd's mid-flight, blasting a one-footed tabletop clean over a convertible Volkswagen Beetle with a carload of BMX figures inside. Who exactly was in the car shifts depending on who's telling it, but the names that come up are Perry Kramer, Dino Deluca, Toby Henderson, McGoo, and Fred Blood.

For a certain generation of BMX kids — anybody who subscribed to Freestylin' in its first year — that image is one of the defining visuals of the whole sport. A young Todd Anderson, SE Bikes under him, jumping a Bug full of SE-era legends right in front of the SE Bikes office. The SE connection matters. Scot Breithaupt's SE Racing sponsored Todd as a freestyler in the mid-80s, right alongside Craig Grasso, Fred Blood, and Justin Bickel. People remember SE as a racing brand, and they're right — but when freestyle exploded in 1984–85, SE carried a small freestyle roster too, and Todd was on it.

The twisted lookback and trick innovation

By 1985, Todd had moved from SE Bikes to Redline, and that's the era when his trick innovation really came into view. The image that traveled farthest was a twisted lookback — feet planted on the crank arms, front wheel hitting his shin, bars and frame both wrapped well past anything anyone else was doing.

BMX writer and photographer John Povah described first running into that photo in a magazine outside a mock 7-Eleven next to the Faze 7 BMX centre in Waltham Cross, UK:

That's how trick innovation actually spread in the 80s. A kid in England picks up a magazine, sees a tweak nobody else is doing, and goes out and starts trying it — same as kids all over the world working off that same photo. Todd's lookback didn't stay Todd's lookback. Inside a year or two it was the baseline everyone else had to match.

The Freestylin' II: The Book cover (1987)

In 1987, Wizard Publications put out Freestylin' II: The Book — a full guide to freestyle techniques, tips, and the top pros of the day. The cover was another Windy Osborn photograph, and the rider on it was Todd Anderson on his Redline. The book ran technique breakdowns from Eddie Fiola, R.L. Osborn, Dizz Hicks, Ceppie Maes, Woody Itson, and a young Matt Hoffman — a who's-who of peak-era freestyle. Putting Todd on the cover said something plain about where he stood: maybe not the biggest name on titles, but one of the photogenic, style-defining riders the magazine wanted out front representing the book.

Designer Kurt Smith — the guy who made BMX Action look as sharp as it did — handled the layout. The book, like the cover, has held up as a collector item.

The Camarillo ramp scene

Southern California in the mid-to-late 1980s had a handful of backyard ramps that mattered more than most contest venues ever did. The Camarillo ramp was one of the most important. Todd was a core member of that scene — the legendary sessions, and the riders who built up the trick vocabulary out there: Martin Aparijo, Craig Grasso, Ron Wilton, Brian Scurra, Doug Randazzo, Steve Broderson, and others who rotated through.

Backyard ramp culture is an under-covered piece of BMX history, because the sessions weren't contests and nobody was tabulating results. But the innovation that came out of ramps like Camarillo — the tricks, the style, the attitude — is exactly what ended up defining how BMX freestyle looked in competition and on video. Todd was one of the riders whose trick development was already happening at Camarillo before the magazines ever ran it as a cover story.

AFA contests, tours, and General Bikes

Todd competed on the AFA (American Freestyle Association) Masters Series circuit — the dominant freestyle contest series of the era, grown out of Bob Morales and Eddie Fiola's earlier ASPA. Video footage from the 1985 AFA Masters Series contest in Huntington Beach shows Todd riding in the 17-and-over Expert category, running the kind of ramp-heavy routine that defined the time.

After Redline, Todd moved to General Bikes. General had an odd arc in BMX: a smaller, independent shop that built bikes, sponsored a modest roster, then pivoted out of the bike business entirely. The General deal put Todd on factory-rider tour duty, and a real chunk of his riding life in that stretch happened out on the road.

He also toured a lot with Eddie Fiola under the Vans banner, part of the shoe brand's long investment in BMX freestyle through the late 80s and into the 90s. Vans would later put a number of BMX figures (Todd Lyons, Steve Veltman, and others) into team-manager and promotional roles. The Vans tours with Todd and Eddie are remembered as one of the tightest pairings of ramp pros on the road.

He competed in the 2-Hip series too — Ron Wilkerson's King of Vert (KOV) and Meet the Street events, the two alternative contest series that ran next to the AFA and eventually outgrew it in influence. The 2-Hip series is where the late-80s vert generation — Mat Hoffman, Dave Voelker, Brian Blyther, Dominguez — made their names. Todd was part of that scene.

The session history and still dabbling today

Todd's name turns up in dozens of first-person accounts of Southern California riding sessions from the late 80s into the early 90s. Photographer and rider Steve Emig documented a 1990 session at Martin Aparijo's house where Todd, Aparijo, and Jess Dyrenforth were already riding when Keith Treanor and John Povah showed up. That one memory — four pros plus a teenage unknown, all sessioning a 6-and-a-half foot under-vert ramp in a backyard — captures how freestyle actually worked at its peak: rolling crews, private ramps, riders who knew each other's style from hundreds of sessions nobody else ever saw.

Todd still rides. He's been a regular at BMX reunion events, including the 2019 Birth of the Freestyle Movement book signing party in San Diego, where he turned up with Eddie Fiola, Mike Dominguez, Brian Blyther, Rich Sigur, R.L. Osborn, and Martin Aparijo. He was there, as the Block Bikes Blog put it, "representing the Camarillo Ramp crew." That role doesn't come with a trophy — but it's the right one. The guy who keeps the memory of a scene alive by showing up.

Media appearances and legacy

Todd showed up in a number of BMX instructional and promotional videos of the era — the 101 Freestyle Tricks video, BMX Plus! productions, and the Woodward camp-related Ride Like A Man. He's also in Steve Emig's self-produced 1990 video The Ultimate Weekend, one of the first rider-made BMX videos, alongside Josh White, Martin Aparijo, Woody Itson, Gary Laurent, Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, Dave Cullinan, and Keith Treanor.

In 2024, Todd was the subject of a full-length interview on the Union Tapes Podcast (Episode 25), running his whole journey from seeing freestyle at a race meet as a kid, through SE Bikes, Redline, General, the Vans tours with Fiola, the 2-Hip events, and his life now. It's probably the most complete single interview about his career anywhere. The podcast notes also lay out the long list of riders he shared sessions, contests, and tours with — a who's-who of late-80s and 90s freestyle that reads as direct evidence of the circle he was in.

Legacy

Todd Anderson's place in BMX history is a specific one: he's one of the riders who gave freestyle its look during its most visible commercial peak. The Freestylin' magazine cover images, the trick innovations that propagated outward through magazine photos to kids in England and Germany and Australia, the Camarillo ramp sessions that set the vocabulary for backyard ramp culture — those are the contributions that don't show up on a Hall of Fame plaque but shape what the sport actually is.

BMX freestyle in the mid-80s was a sport figuring out what it was in real time. The AFA was barely established. Ramps were being built in people's driveways. The magazines were defining the visual language of the sport issue by issue, and which riders got photographed doing what tricks on which surfaces was actually determining what kids everywhere would try next. Anderson was one of the riders whose style and tricks got picked up and copied, and that's a different kind of influence than winning contests.

The under-documentation is, itself, a piece of the story. Freestyle BMX in the 80s didn't have the stat-sheet infrastructure that racing had. The NBA, NBL, and ABA tabulated races to the semi-final placement. The AFA held contests but the results weren't preserved in the same way. The real record of who mattered in freestyle lives in photographs, magazine covers, backyard memories, and the testimony of peers. By all of those measures, Todd Anderson mattered.

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