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.