BMX Racing History · Rider & Brand Profile · Legend Bike Co

Wade Nomura

From motorcycles to a bike shop for the neighborhood kids

Wade Nomura's speed came from motorcycles first. Growing up, he raced flat track and motocross with his family and fell for the feeling of catching air. Years later, working a landscaping job in Santa Barbara, he became the guy the neighborhood kids on the job site wanted to talk to — first about the work, then about his motorcycle racing. He finally took them to the track. They wanted bikes of their own. Motorcycles were too much money for kids from working families, so Nomura had another idea: open a bike shop, sell BMX bikes to the kids at wholesale, and use it to bring in a little extra income alongside the landscaping business.

The Father's Day race that started it

He bought two Diamondback racing bikes and started taking his crew of kids to tracks up and down the Central Coast and into Southern California. He was 26 at the time and never planned to race himself. Then, one weekend, the kids talked him into entering a Father's Day race at the Monrovia track. He won it. Soon after, he learned the National Bicycle Association was opening a new class for competitors 26 and over, and he entered the Grand Nationals in Las Vegas — his first official title race. He won that one too, earning his first national title and the Number 1 plate. "After I won and got the Number 1 rank," he said, "everybody knew me."

Building the Nomura Racing frame

Racing changed what Nomura wanted from a bike. His early races were on a Gary Littlejohn cruiser — fast, but over 30 pounds. He decided he could build something better, even though he'd never built a frame from scratch. Working from his own bike shop, he charted the dimensions of more than a dozen bikes on the market — angles, wheelbase, tube length, materials — and used what he learned, plus aircraft-grade aluminum, to build a frame with a short rear end and a long top tube. The first one he raced was a 26-inch cruiser that weighed 19 pounds. In 1980, the same year the brand launched, the Nomura Racing factory team swept all six Number 1 titles across every age class, from age 10 to the Pro Class to Nomura's own 27-and-over group — a sweep no manufacturer has repeated since. He later moved the shop from Santa Barbara to Carpinteria, where he and his wife Roxanne still live.

Racing pro at 30

Nomura kept winning through the early 1980s, collecting national titles in the 26-and-over class across sanctioned BMX circuits from 1979 to 1982. His daughter Lisa raced too, and won her own national championship at age five on a bike that weighed barely over 10 pounds. In 1982, at 30 years old and with five national titles behind him, Nomura made the jump to Pro — a one-way door in BMX, since amateurs can't return to open competition once they turn pro. He was roughly a decade older than most of the field.

The crash that ended it

The pro ranks were rougher on his body than the amateur ranks had been. He raced part of one season on a broken foot without realizing it was broken. Then, in September 1984, at a pro race in Las Vegas, he hit a step-up jump wrong when a soft spot in the dirt sent him more than 16 feet into the air — high enough, he said, that he was looking down on the roofs of the motorhomes in the parking lot. He came down hard, shattering his shoulder blade, breaking his collarbone and several ribs, and puncturing a lung. A few weeks later he re-injured the same shoulder in a fall at home, then broke the collarbone and shoulder again in a final crash at a race in Azusa. That was the end of his competitive racing.

A shared thread with Turnell Henry

Nomura's frames traveled beyond his own team. Turnell "Tuni" Henry, the BMX Hall of Famer who later co-owned La Palma Cycle Center with Bill Ryan, raced a 26-inch Nomura frame in the early 1980s — one small overlap among the West Coast's homegrown BMX brands of that era.

After racing — landscaping, Rotary, and Carpinteria city hall

Nomura's post-racing career has run in a completely different direction. He's president of Nomura Yamasaki Landscaping, the company he built more than 40 years ago, and has spent more than 26 years on the Carpinteria, California city council, including a term as mayor. He's held leadership roles across Rotary International's humanitarian projects worldwide — water, sanitation, and community development work spanning more than 50 international missions — and in 2001 the Japanese American National Museum inducted him into its Hall of Fame for his BMX racing and for building the Nomura Racing bike. In 2020 he published a memoir, Creating Destiny, covering his family's World War II internment history, his racing career, and his public service.