Texas Toast Jam

Texas Toast Jam was an annual BMX contest held in Austin, Texas, from 2011 to 2014. It was started by Taj Mihelich of the parts brand Odyssey with the local Austin scene, and it was deliberately set up as an alternative to televised contests. The event combined street, park and trails style events with a jam format, and in its short life it became one of the most talked-about contests in the sport.

History

By the start of the 2010s, the biggest BMX contests in the United States were the X Games and the Dew Tour, both run by broadcasters with courses and formats shaped around television. Many riders and brands felt those events did not reflect how most people rode. Austin, home to a large and active BMX scene, several brands and some of the best-known trails and street spots in the country, was a natural place to try something different.

Odyssey's Taj Mihelich, a pro since the 1990s, started Texas Toast in 2011 as a DIY event in Austin, and Odyssey's sister brand Sunday Bikes was part of the same circle. Courses and features were built for the weekend (the 2014 edition was held at Quest ATX). It was open to the local scene and built around the idea that the people designing the contest should be the same people who ride.

Texas Toast ran four times, from 2011 to 2014, and then stopped. The organisers did not continue it beyond that period, and no direct successor took its place, although its approach influenced later brand-run events.

Format

Texas Toast was structured as a weekend of separate events rather than a single competition.

1. Street. A street course was built from ledges, rails, banks and wall rides, designed to resemble real street spots rather than a competition layout. It was ridden in a jam format with riders scored on their overall session.
2. Park. The park contest used the skatepark's bowls and transition, with riders judged on flow, speed and use of the terrain as much as on tricks.
3. Trails style dirt. A dirt line of jumps was built in the style of a set of trails, with a focus on style, boost and the shapes riders could put on the bike, rather than on flips and spins over a competition-style set of tabletops.
4. Judging in every event leaned towards style, originality and how a rider used the course, and the events were run as sessions in which groups of riders rode together.
5. Best trick and highlight awards were included in some years.

The courses were designed with input from the riders who would compete on them, and the atmosphere was closer to a large session with a crowd than to a formal contest.

Notable moments

• Texas Toast became known for its trails style dirt event, which was unusual for a contest and gave riders from the trails world a chance to compete in a setting that suited them.
• Austin's own Chase Hawk, one of the most respected transition riders of his generation, was closely associated with the event and its park and dirt sessions.
• Leading street riders of the period, including Garrett Reynolds and Dennis Enarson, rode the street course, and footage from the event spread widely online.
• The event's web coverage, released as web edits and in brand videos, reached a far larger audience than attended in person and shaped how the contest was remembered.

Full results by year are not well documented in accessible sources and are not listed here.

Significance

Texas Toast Jam mattered because it showed that a brand-run contest could draw the best riders in the world without television money. It put the design of the courses and the format of the judging back in the hands of riders, and it treated street, park and trails as equally valid ways to ride rather than as television categories.

Its influence can be seen in many events that followed. Contests designed around real street spots, jam formats judged on a whole session, and dirt events that reward style over rotation all became more common in the years after Texas Toast, both in the United States and in Europe. The event also cemented Austin's reputation as one of the capitals of American BMX.

Although it only ran for a few years, Texas Toast is still cited by riders as an example of what a contest can look like when the sport runs it for itself.

Related

• Odyssey
• Sunday Bikes
• Dew Tour
• X Games
• Street
• Park
• Trails