BMX Racing History · Rider Profile · Legend Bike Co

Turnell "Tuni" Henry

Harbor BMX, and the ten-year-old who showed up

Before any of the titles, Tuni Henry was the guy running BMX clinics at Harbor BMX Track in San Pedro, California. One of the kids who showed up was ten years old, name of Bill Ryan — the same Bill Ryan who'd go on to found Supercross BMX and co-found Legend Bike Co. Bill has said flatly that Harbor BMX, and Tuni's clinics, are where his life in BMX took hold. It's a claim that comes straight from Bill himself, not from a magazine or a record book, and it's the kind of detail that doesn't show up anywhere except from the person who lived it.

Team Jag to the NBA No. 1 plate

Henry got into racing around 1977 and spent 1979 through 1981 on the infamous Team Jag. He turned pro in 1981 and rode for a run of West Coast brands afterward — Nomura, KHS, Redline, and Brackens, the last of which ties back to Tommy Brackens' own frame line. In 1982 he took the NBA No. 1 Pro Cruiser title, beating out Brent Patterson. He doubled at the USBA World Championships, doubled again at the 1986 Pro Spectacular, and won the ABA's Porsche Series in 1988. A broken collarbone pushed him out of pro competition in 1987, though he made a brief comeback in 1989 riding for Redline.

La Palma Cycle Center, and the coach who became a boss

Here's the part of the story that turns a coaching memory into a career. Tuni went on to co-own La Palma Cycle Center with Richard Schaeffer, a CPA who also worked as Henry's coach and manager. Years later, after Bill Ryan left GT Bicycles, he went to work for Tuni at that same shop — the same man who'd taught him to ride at ten years old — as an employee, not a partner. A secondary source had listed Henry as co-owner of La Palma Cycle Center alongside Bill Ryan from 1987 to 1989; Bill has corrected that firsthand. He worked at La Palma. He didn't own it. Coach, then boss. Bill has pointed to that arc more than once as one of the things that shaped how he thinks about the sport — the shop counter as the place where BMX careers actually get built, a theme that runs through the whole bike-shop chapter of this history.

KHS, the comeback, and the shop life after racing

Henry went to work for KHS as Service Manager starting in 1989, around the same stretch as his brief Redline racing comeback. He returned to the ABA Masters class in 1992 and competed in the Vet Pro ranks. For years afterward he ran City of Bicycles in Las Vegas, a shop built around the local BMX racing scene, where regulars could find him working the counter and talking bikes with anyone who walked in.

Still racing, still coaching, today

Tuni never really stopped. He owns Colorado River BMX, a race track in Bullhead City, Arizona, runs a team there, and holds a USA BMX coaching certification. He's still lining up at the gate himself — at the 2020 USA BMX Grands, in his sixties, he rode a 26-inch Supercross RS7 Fastback cruiser in the 61-and-over class and beat riders decades younger. It's a small full-circle detail: back in the early 1980s, Henry raced a 26-inch Nomura frame — one of the West Coast's other homegrown BMX brands from that era.