Todd Lyons is a BMX racer and dirt jumper from Ohio who turned pro in 1990, built a two-decade racing and dirt jumping career under the nickname Wildman, then joined SE Bikes in 2003 as a sponsored rider. He became SE's Brand and Product Manager in 2004 and is SE's Director today.

How did Todd Lyons get the nickname Wildman?

He earned it doing backflips and other tricks in the middle of BMX races, a habit that made him the first rider on record to land a backflip mid-race.

What did Todd Lyons win in BMX?

By his own account he won the BMX racing World Championships three times and the BMX Dirt Jump World Championships once, was USA National Champion twice, and competed at the X Games ten times.

Todd Lyons — Wildman, World Champion, and the Voice of Modern SE Bikes

Q: When did Todd Lyons join SE Bikes?

He signed with SE as a sponsored rider in 2003. In the summer of 2004 he was hired as SE's Brand Manager and Product Manager, and twenty years later, in 2024, he became SE Director.

Todd Lyons

Wildman, World Champion, and the Voice of Modern SE Bikes

A Legend Bike Co. rider profile · primary sources: SE Bikes, bmxultra.com, and the University of BMX Hall of Fame archive

At a glance

Nickname Wildman
Hometown Ohio, later Huntington Beach, California
Started racing 1981, age 9
Turned pro 1990
Titles Three-time BMX racing World Champion, one-time BMX Dirt Jump World Champion, two-time USA National Champion, ten X Games appearances
SE Bikes Sponsored rider from 2003 · Brand/Product Manager from 2004 · Director from 2024

Todd Lyons has been racing, jumping, and now running a BMX brand for more than four decades, and almost none of it happened in California. He grew up in Ohio, got his first race bike from his uncle at nine years old, and did not turn pro until 1990, the same year he moved west. Everything people associate with him today, the SE Bikes office, the Huntington Beach dirt jumps, the Wildman nickname stitched into two decades of BMX history, came after that move.

A Redline MX II and an uncle who paid for it

Lyons started racing BMX in 1981 at age nine. His uncle Jim bought him a Redline MX II and took him to his first race, and by his own account he was hooked immediately. That is the entire origin story: no factory connections, no family bike shop, just a kid in Ohio who got a bike and never really got off it. He turned pro in 1990, right before relocating to California, and spent the 1990s racing and dirt jumping at the same time, at a point in BMX history when very few riders tried to do both at a serious level.

The Wildman years

The nickname came from exactly what it sounds like. Lyons has said plainly that he earned it doing all kinds of crazy stuff on and off the track, backflips and other tricks in the middle of actual BMX races, at a time when nobody else was doing that. He is credited as the first rider to land a backflip mid-race. The most documented version of that habit going wrong is from the 1993 IBMXF/FIAC World Championships in Schijndel, Holland, where Lyons crashed out of a mid-race backflip attempt in front of French rider Olivier Prosper. The crash made Dig BMX and BMX Plus, and Lyons has since told the story himself, more than once, with the same sense of humor he apparently had crashing upside down at a World Championship.

That international racing stretch ran through the European Challenge Cup circuit organized by Gerrit Does out of Ponypark Slagharen in Holland, where Lyons raced alongside a run of American and European pros in the early 1990s, and he competed at the 1989 World Championships in Brisbane, Australia as well. By the late 1990s his sponsor list read Huffy, Arnette, Knucklebone, ODI, JNCO, Powerbar, DK, Odyssey, and CTI, covering both his racing and his dirt jumping.

Joining SE Bikes

Lyons had a history with the SE name long before he worked there. Back in the early 1980s in Ohio, his brother's friends raced and did freestyle tricks on PK Rippers, which by his own telling was the first time he ever saw an SE bike. In the mid-1980s he raced against SE factory rider Brian Lopes. And after he moved to California in the early 1990s, he drove to SE's shop to pick up Landing Gear forks for his own bike.

The formal relationship started at the end of 2002, when Lyons went to the Interbike trade show in Las Vegas to meet the new owners of SE, Advanced Sports International, about a sponsorship. He was SE's only sponsored rider for 2003 and 2004. During that stretch it became clear he could bring more to the brand running it than riding for it, and in the summer of 2004 he was hired as SE's Brand Manager and Product Manager. Twenty years later, in 2024, he became SE Director, the title he holds today.

Per SE Racing's own chapter on this site, Lyons has now run SE's marketing and design from 2004 to the present, second only to Perry Kramer on pure tenure at the company. Kramer helped Scot Breithaupt start SE in 1977 and is still an SE sales rep today. Between them, Kramer and Lyons cover SE's entire history end to end, one from the founding, one from the modern era.

Every Big Ripper, every Vans collaboration, every reissue SE has put out since the mid-2000s has gone out the door under Lyons's direction. It is, by any measure, one of the longer second careers in BMX: a kid from Ohio who saw his first PK Ripper as a bystander ended up in charge of building the next fifty years of them.

What we could not verify: Bill Ryan's own archive includes a period magazine scan described as Todd Lyons at Sheep Hills on a red Supercross frame. Sheep Hills, the Huntington Beach dirt jump spot, is a place Lyons has ridden for decades and still names as one of his home spots, and the timing lines up loosely with his move to California around 1990. But nothing in SE's own published history, Lyons's own interviews, or the period BMX press turned up in this research confirms a Supercross BMX sponsorship, team tie, or specific frame connection for Lyons. We are leaving that detail off this page rather than guess, and flagging it for Bill to confirm directly.

Where Todd Lyons fits in the bigger story

Brands: SE Racing. People: Perry Kramer, Scot Breithaupt, Brian Lopes. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

SE Bikes, Todd Lyons rider Q&A (sebikes.com/pages/todd-lyons) and SE Crew feature (sebikes.com/blogs/news/se-crew-todd-lyons). bmxultra.com, Todd Lyons interview (June 1998), for his racing start, pro debut year, and period sponsor list. University of BMX Hall of Fame archive (universityofbmx.com), World Champion Todd Lyons page, for the Slagharen/European Challenge Cup racing record and the 1993 Schijndel Worlds backflip crash, corroborated by Todd Lyons's own Facebook recollections reposted there. bmxmuseum.com, Todd Lyons reference and user pages, for general community documentation of his racing-era bikes. Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, coverage of BikeCo brand leadership (April 2020), for SE ownership context. oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were checked first per this library's standing research order; neither surfaced dedicated period coverage of Lyons's pre-SE racing career, so his own interviews and the University of BMX archive served as the primary record for that period.

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