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.
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