Roots Racing
by Lance Maguire
“On the gate, riders ready—watch the light!” The cadence of an ABA BMX race raises the adrenaline of the participant and inspires fear in the heart of the parent involved.
Since the inception of the American Bicycle Association, racing on a bicycle has not quite been the same. With the same bicycle you rode to school, you could also compete as a hurdler, with mounds of dirt as your obstacle, under your own power and with your own leg speed as your motor. The process finds you pushing body and mind to a speed where confidence in equipment and value of training are equally rewarded. This is BMX racing!
The state of Oregon is proving throughout the nation that BMX racing is not just alive and well, but thriving and, as the sport dictates, sprinting to the front of the pack. For example, the Descutes County Fairgrounds will host a National race on the 4th, 5th and 6th of April; Smith Rock BMX in Redmond recently received the prestigious award for Innovative Marketing in the western region; and Eugene offers an indoor facility for training and racing at the Lane County Events Center throughout winter as well as an outdoor facility that has hosted many national events. Ranging in age from 3 to 60+, racers from all over the globe look to Oregon for some of the finest venues and facilitators in the sport.
Most of us began on a bike mom and dad created out of thin air from a pocketbook that might have been stretched thin already. We rode—to the store for mom to get milk, for a living tossing papers, with our friends to the river, or in my case, down the beach to catch a wave. Our bikes were things we created using the handlebars off the mini-bike we could not afford to fix and the “sissy bar” that some people use, but still makes no sense to me.
Today, we are “roadies”, “freestylers”, “park riders”, “mountain bikers”, sometimes “downhillers”. Yet, most of us started the way I describe. We ride in “crits”, “motos”, and “heats” today, but in our hearts we are riding through a field over jumps we built with the broken shovel dad lent us, racing our buddy to prove we were faster!
From the outside, BMX racing is all we were. From inside it is all that we are. Today’s race bike is a finely-crafted engineered tool. The sport has also grown and developed. In Oregon alone, multiple riders are ranked National #1 by age group, World Champions by class, even a select few are members of the World team for Team USA.
If you have not been to a BMX race lately, perhaps you should. We have tracks throughout Oregon, in Newberg, Mollala, Eugene, Roseburg, Grants Pass, Medford, Klamath Falls, Bend, and Redmond. You can find us all at ABABMX.COM. The racing is diverse, the participants anxious and its exciting enough that even the spectators will feel free again.
2008 signifies an evolution in BMX racing, as a first-ever Olympic event at the Summer games in Beijing, China. Along with the velodrome and road events, BMX takes to the world stage as it should, and where it belongs. BMX is a sprinter’s sport with the diversity of obstacles, hurtling to the front of a genre that had somewhat lost its roots.
Possibly Related
- July 2008: "Perfection in the Process"
- November 2006: OBRA's sweetest volunteer retires after 25 years
- June 2007: Between the lines
- April 2007: BMX cruisers
- March 2007: Speedskating is great for off-season training
Makes you want to get out of the “big” chair and ride like the wind….Keep these great articles coming
2008 is going to be insane for BMX, there already was that massive art show in beijing where they showed off all those Haro number plates that had been redone by various street artists. Its probably going to be a lot of peoples’ first ever glance at BMX.