A Legend Bike Co. rider page · BMX History Project

Woody Itson

Flatland Pioneer of the Hutch Trick Star and Diamond Back Strike Zone Eras

At a glance

Discipline BMX flatland freestyle (racer-turned-freestyler)
Teams Hutch BMX (Trick Star) · Diamond Back Freestyle Team (Strike Zone) · GT Bicycles (Freestyle Program Director, post-riding)
Known for Designing the Hutch Trick Star and riding its gold-plated signature version · AFA National Flatland Title, 1985 · NFA National Flatland Title, 1986 · Designing Diamond Back's 1988 Woody Itson Strike Zone
Riding partner Martin Aparijo, "The Chairman" — the two of them were, by contemporary accounts, close to the only top-level pros treating flatland as the whole point of their riding in 1982-83

Most people saw Woody Itson for the first time in BMX Action's "Hot Shots" pages, blasting an impossibly high air off a ramp at the Big O Skatepark. He'd started as a racer. He became one of the two or three riders who defined what a flatland specialist even was, in a sport that hadn't yet decided flatland was its own discipline. He designed the bike Hutch is still remembered for, rode a version of it plated in solid gold, then designed the bike that followed him to Diamond Back after Hutch went under. By the time he stopped competing he'd already changed what the freestyle side of two different bike companies looked like.

From the Big O to Hutch's factory team

Itson came up through BMX racing before freestyle had split off as its own thing, and USA BMX's own account of his career opens with that Big O Skatepark air — the image that put him on people's radar in BMX Action's Hot Shots pages. He also toured for Vans Skate Shoes early on. But it was signing with Hutch BMX that made him a name inside the sport. Hutch had built its reputation on show-chrome race frames and an East Coast factory-team program that punched well above its Maryland mail-order roots, and when freestyle started pulling riders away from racing in the mid-1980s, Hutch built a freestyle frame to keep up: the Trick Star.

The Trick Star and the gold bike everyone remembers

Itson designed the Trick Star and rode it as one of the public faces of Hutch's freestyle push, alongside vert rider Mike Dominguez and BMX Action Trick Team veteran Mike Buff. The single piece of Hutch freestyle marketing people still bring up decades later is Itson's completely gold-plated Trick Star — a bike that made every other rider's chrome look ordinary next to it. BMX Action's June 1986 issue ran him on the gold bike, and the frame has stayed a fixture of BMX Society and BMXmuseum.com collector conversation ever since, including debate over exactly when and where the gold bike first showed up. What actually happened to that specific gold Trick Star afterward is not settled — see below.

Itson wasn't only a Hutch rider. Voris Dixon's VDC shop, the Santa Ana contract builder that supplied parts and frames to half the BMX industry, also built a one-off VDC Freestyler specifically for him — a sign of how far his name traveled outside Hutch's own factory program.

AFA and NFA national titles, 1985 and 1986

USA BMX's own published career summary credits Itson with an AFA National Title for Flatland in 1985 and an NFA National Title for Flatland in 1986 — the two governing bodies running organized freestyle contests in the mid-1980s. That two-title stretch lines up with the years he was riding the Trick Star at the top of Hutch's freestyle program.

The SST Trick Team and Martin Aparijo

Itson's closest riding partner through this period was Martin Aparijo, "The Chairman" of flatland in his own right. Contest reporter Steve Emig, who covered both riders for Freestylin' at AFA Masters events, wrote that Aparijo and Itson together "invented a ton of the foundational flatland tricks all of us guys around the country started learning" through 1984 to 1986 — a credit that puts Itson at the center of flatland's actual trick vocabulary, not just its contest results. The two also rode together on Brian Scura's SST Trick Team, a GT-sponsored freestyle demo team built around shop showcases rather than contests, and Scura later named Itson among the riders he personally mentored. Itson and Aparijo also did stunt-riding work together on the 1986 Kevin Bacon film Quicksilver, and Itson appears in Steve Emig's self-produced 1990 video The Ultimate Weekend alongside Aparijo, Todd Anderson, and other riders of the era.

Diamond Back, the bankruptcy, and the Strike Zone

Diamond Back first approached Itson not long after signing Mike Dominguez to its own freestyle team. He turned the offer down — by his own account, out of loyalty to Hutch, telling Diamond Back he was happy where he was. What changed his mind was Hutch's bankruptcy. In a 2023 interview conducted over Facebook by BMX historian Brian Tunney, Itson explained it plainly: Hutch told him directly it would be in his best interest to look at what other companies had to offer, and he talked to both Schwinn and Diamond Back before signing with Diamond Back. Part of the deal was that he'd design his own frame. The result was the 1988 Woody Itson Strike Zone — built on the same basic geometry as his Hutch Trick Star, by design, closing the loop on the bike he'd already spent years riding. Dominguez, who by then had his own signature Strike Zone at Diamond Back, had to sign off on the new frame's design concept before it went into production. Itson rode for Diamond Back one more year, then took a year off to ride for himself before starting college — the same period that closed out his competitive career.

For that stretch, the Diamond Back Freestyle Team ran as "Mr. Air" and "Mr. Flatland" — Dominguez on vert, Itson on flat — a freestyle program serious enough to stand next to Haro's or GT's.

After riding: GT Bicycles and Satellite Sports Group

After college, Itson went to work for GT Bicycles, eventually running the company's freestyle program as Freestyle Program Director — juggling team management, marketing, and demo logistics, including driving Trevor Meyer around on tour — and stayed with GT until 2001. He later founded Satellite Sports Group, which books and manages BMX freestyle riders performing shows at more than 500 venues a year, a business that keeps him working inside the sport he helped shape as a rider.

Where Woody Itson fits in the bigger story

Riders: Martin Aparijo, Brian Scura, Todd Anderson, Denny Davidow. Brands: Hutch BMX, Diamond Back, GT Bicycles, Voris Dixon Bikes (VDC). Magazines: Freestylin'. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

USA BMX Hall of Fame biography page, usabmx.com/site/postings/179 — career summary including the Big O Hot Shots debut, the Hutch Trick Star, the 1985 AFA and 1986 NFA national flatland titles, the Diamond Back "Mr. Flatland" pairing with Mike Dominguez, the post-riding GT Freestyle Program Director role through 2001, and Satellite Sports Group. Brian Tunney, "Woody Itson: The Move from Hutch to Diamond Back," Medium, April 26, 2023 — a direct Q&A with Itson himself on the Hutch bankruptcy, the Diamond Back signing, and designing the Strike Zone off the Trick Star. bmxsociety.com community forum threads, including "1988 Diamond Back 'Woody Itson' Strike Zone" and "I heard the Woody Itson Gold Trickstar was a debut at the Os-bmx El Dorado show" (site: search per Legend Bike Co's standing primary-source protocol; snippets only, disclosed). oldschoolmags.com — BMX Action, June 1986 issue (archived PDF), the source of the gold Trick Star photograph referenced via Edward Koenning's "When Are You Going To Get A Real Bike?" blog, which also carries the two competing unconfirmed stories about the gold bike's fate. BMXmuseum.com — Hutch Trick Star and Diamond Back Strike Zone bike entries and forum threads. Diamond Back and Hutch chapters on this site, for the Itson-specific passages in each brand's own documented history.