The Birth of BMX Racing

In this trailer for Mark Eaton's 2005 documentary, Joe Kid on a Stingray, we see early BMX riders looking back on the start of this sport.  In 1970, a young motocross racer named Scot Breithaupt started holding motocross-style races for local kids riding bicycles in Long Beach, California.  Thirty miles north, and handful of other people started doing the same thing.  Bicycle Motocross racing, or BMX, was born.  Like surfing and motocross before it, BMX started with a small group of young people, a scene, who wanted to have fun and imitate motocross racers.  BMX played a huge role in my life, it was the activity/sport that pulled me away from traditional team sports that I hated.  It did the same thing for thousands of other kids, mostly boys, but some girls, across the U.S. and the world in the 1970's and 1980's.  BMX evolved and morphed into many different genre's, and heavily influenced mountain biking and freestyle motocross in their early days.  Like surfing and motocross, BMX turned into a series of activities, sports, industries, and many, many businesses.  It continues to evolve to this day.