My BMX Racing Career

On one hand, this McDonald's commercial from the early 80's is ridiculous.  On the other hand, it sums up my early days of racing pretty well... except that I couldn't afford to eat at McDonald's when I raced.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I went to my first BMX race in Boise, Idaho in the fall of 1982.  That race, I watched my friends compete.  The next week, I raced myself and I think I got a third.  I started racing in Boise, Idaho, and I never made it out of the 17 Novice class.  When you stop laughing, you can read the rest of this post.

All of us BMXers from Blue Valley Trailer Park raced that last race of 1982, and then we had to wait all winter to race again in the spring.  We made snow jumps.  We cleared off a section of the frozen pond in the trailer park and did flat track-type slides across the ice.  In the spring, before our jumps dried up enough to ride, we made ramp to ramp jumps out of plywood and cinder blocks to practice on in the street.  By the time spring came, a few of the guys had lost interest.  The remaining few raced once every two or three weeks, as much as we could afford to. 

In the early summer of 1983, my family bought a house in town, and I left the trailer park scene.  Those guys got more into cars and girls.  None of them kept racing.  I kept riding every day and racing when I could.  Because the racing scene wasn't that big in Boise, I rarely got to race as a 17 novice.  I usually got bumped up to either the intermediate or the expert class.  The funny thing was, I usually got second or third no matter who I raced.  I won motos on a regular basis, but never won a single main.  If I raced four novices, I would usually get second.  If I raced two novices and two intermediates, I would get second or third.  If I raced three intermediates and two experts, I would get second or third.  I had some kind of mental block about winning, I guess.  But I routinely beat riders in the intermediate and expert classes. 

I raced through the summer of 1983.  Late in the year, the track officials announced that they wanted to redesign the Fort Boise track, and they would hold a contest to come up with a new track design.  As luck would have it, my dad was a design engineer, and we had a drafting board at home.  In those days, designs for products were actually hand drawn on paper.  Having grown up seeing my dad's drawings, and with some tutoring from him, I was a pretty decent high school draftsman.  So I put a lot of thought into the track design, I asked lots of riders what they did and didn't like about the track, and I asked the top riders what they liked about the tracks at triple pointers and nationals they raced.  Then I drew a big professional drawing of my new track design.  I also drew a second drawing which had a side view of each of the new jumps.  Most of the other design ideas in the contest were hand drawn by kids ages 8 to 12.  My drawings blew all of the others out of the water.  Why did I spend so much time on the track design?  For one, I wanted a better track to ride.  The second reason was that the winner of the contest got to race free the entire next year.  For a broke racer like me, that was a big incentive. 

When all was said and done, I won half of the prize, something like 22 free races for 1984.  Three younger guys who had some pretty good ideas, but did not have the drawing skills I had, split the rest of the prize, 6 or 7 free races each.  After the last race, we went to town rebuilding the track, and it was much better afterwards.  I'd gone from being a old, novice racer to being part of the organizing staff of the Fort Boise scene.  That felt pretty good, and was a faint hint of my future in the BMX industry

That winter I raced in nearby Caldwell, Idaho.  At first, the races were in a cow barn at the fairgrounds, and had wooden jumps.  There was no actual jumping in those races, it was all about speed jumping the clunky wooden jumps as fast as possible.  I continued to get seconds and thirds, usually racing intermediates and experts.  The other older riders usually talked me into riding 17 Open as well, so they had enough people to have a class. 

Later in the winter season, they brought in a tractor and actually built a new track each race in the cow barn.  After each race, the track was leveled, and a new design was thought up for the next race.  That was better than the wooden jumps, but it meant mostly tiny jumps and flat turns. 

When the spring of 1984 finally came, I started racing my free races at Fort Boise.  Around the same time, the organizers decided to build another track in Boise, so the points chasers could race seven days a week in that area.  I was tapped to design the new track, which I did.  The thing everyone hated about Fort Boise was that it was basically a race to the first turn.  It was hard to pass on the narrow Fort Boise track.  On the new track I designed a wide, fast, nearly flat first turn.  That led into a huge "step double" jump.  I combined the idea of a step jump, with a double jump.  Any jump with a deep gap scared me, so I came up with a cross between a step up and a double jump, which didn't scare me.  I know that's lame, but it worked.  I also designed the track with two berms back to back, which basically formed a dirt spine jump.  I wanted to learn 360's, and that berm jump was the perfect place to do it.  Before mid season, I was doing 360's in my motos, and still qualifying for the main.  I'd read that Eddie Fiola did 360's in races, and I wanted to emulate him.

Just as I was settling into the 1984 racing season on the two Boise tracks, the track operators decided to stop giving away trophies.  They wanted to cut expenses to favor the points chasing racers.  I didn't have the money to travel and race every day, so I was mostly in it for the trophies.  Around that same time, BMX freestyle entered the picture, and I faded out of racing even though I had six or seven free races left that season.  From then on, I was a BMX freestyler.  After a year and a half, my BMX racing career ended.

The Blue Valley Posse invades Fort Boise Track

In the last post, I wrote about the first time I went to a BMX race in late 1982 in Boise, Idaho.  The four of us who went to the race were psyched when we got back to the trailer park, and we told the other guys all about it.  The three guys who raced showed off their trophies.  By the end of that night, we all wanted to race.

There was one race left in the season, and we all planned to be there.  Problem number one was how to get us all there.  We were all in high school or junior high and none of us had our own car.  It was a trailer park after all, and we were broke.  As luck would have it, my dad drove a full size Ford van at the time, and he agreed to let me take it, and everyone who wanted to go, to the race.  Then we all had to come up with money to race.  I think it was three dollars or something then, so we each scraped up the money, plus a little for the van's gas tank.  Then we rode our asses off that week.  We did standing starts with each other.  We practiced speed jumping our jumps.  We carved our little berms as fast as we could.  We did soda can slaloms on the street and slaloms on the dirt to practice our flat turns.  We jumped our cheesy little jumps to flat and hit the tiny double jump we had.  Finally Saturday morning came and we were ready.  We piled bikes and bodies into the van at my house, and headed to the track in near downtown Boise.  We were about the first ones to arrive, that's how excited we all were to race.  We were determined that Blue Valley Trailer Park would make its presence known at the track.  We practiced as much as we could at the track, and coached each other on how to take the turns and jumps.  We practiced our gate starts... ON A REAL GATE.  Holy crap!  We couldn't believe how cool it was that there were actually BMX races in Boise.

Then came the races.  Since only three guys raced the weekend before, we were all novices.  But we soon learned that if there wasn't enough for a novice class, that we got thrown in with intermediates.  The races started, and one thing soon became clear.  Even with our piece of crap bikes, we were as fast as most of the experienced racers in our classes.  Our posse started winning and getting seconds in most of our motos.  I think nearly all of us made it to our mains.  I can't remember exactly how everyone placed, but almost all of us took trophies home.  What I do remember is that there were seven shop teams at that race.  We figured out that if us guys from the trailer park had been an official team, we would have got second.  Oh yeah, Blue Valley kicked some butt at that race.

The local racers kept asking each other where these fast guys on completely lame bikes came from.  Those local racers weren't used to getting beat by guys in jeans with paper plate number plates.  A lot of the locals got pissed off because we messed up their points in so many classes.  Points?  Racers get points?  We had no idea.  None of us had seen an ABA paper at that point.  We were new and we were in it for the trophies.  We had a blast.  We won a bunch of trophies.  Then we sessioned the tabletop jump for a about an hour after the race with all the locals.  We drove home to the trailer park stoked at how we had done, and bummed out that there were no more races until Spring.  We unloaded the van at my house, and everybody headed home to show off their trophies.  We weren't just dirty kids in a trailer park anymore... we were BMX racers.