BMX in the 1990s

The 1990s was the decade in which BMX rebuilt itself after the collapse of the 1980s freestyle boom. With the big companies gone or shrunk, riders started their own brands, ran their own contests and filmed their own videos. By the end of the decade the sport had a television audience through the X Games, a thriving video culture and a new discipline, street, that would come to dominate it.

The collapse: 1990 to 1992

The early 1990s were the low point of freestyle BMX. Sales had fallen through the floor. Haro and GT kept small freestyle lines but had cut their teams. Hutch was gone. Freestylin' magazine was gone. The AFA contest series had ended. Skateparks built during the 1970s skateboarding boom had mostly closed, and many towns banned bikes from those that remained.

The riders who stayed were a small group who rode because they loved it. Many were teenagers during the boom and were now in their twenties with no industry to support them. Flatland continued in car parks. Vert riders built their own ramps. And a growing number of riders took to the streets, riding kerbs, banks and ledges because there was nowhere else to go. See rise of street riding.

The magazine that carried the sport through this period was Ride BMX, launched in 1992, which became the main print title for freestyle in the following decades.

Rider-owned companies

With the big brands retreating, riders filled the gap. Three companies in particular set the template.

S&M Bikes was founded in Southern California in 1987 by Chris Moeller, a racer and trails rider, with Greg Scott. Through the 1990s S&M built tough chromoly frames for dirt and street, marketed with a deliberately crude, anti-corporate attitude. It became the model for the rider-owned brand and remains independent today.

Hoffman Bikes was founded in 1991 by Mat Hoffman, the dominant vert rider of the era, after his previous sponsor stopped making frames strong enough for his riding. Hoffman also founded a contest series, Bicycle Stunt (BS), in 1992, and a promotions company that ran events and demonstrations. Hoffman's influence on the decade extended far beyond his own riding.

Standard Bykes was founded in 1991 by Rick Moliterno in Iowa. Standard frames were known for their strength and for sponsoring riders across street, flatland and ramps.

Other rider-owned brands followed through the decade, and the phrase itself became a badge. The idea that BMX should be run by people who ride, rather than by bicycle corporations, was a direct response to the abandonment riders felt in 1989. It shaped the industry for the next thirty years.

The X Games: 1995 onward

In 1995 ESPN launched the Extreme Games, renamed the X Games the following year, in Rhode Island. The network wanted action sports content for a young audience, and BMX was included with vert and dirt contests, with flatland also featuring in the early years. ESPN worked with Mat Hoffman's Bicycle Stunt series to run the BMX events, so the contest formats and judging came from within the sport.

The X Games changed BMX's economics. Television exposure brought sponsors from outside the bicycle industry, including shoe companies and soft drink brands. Riders who won X Games medals could earn a living that had not existed since the mid 1980s. Dave Mirra became the face of the sport through the late 1990s, winning medals in vert and park every year and becoming one of the most decorated X Games athletes in any sport. Mat Hoffman continued to dominate vert, and riders such as Jay Miron, Dennis McCoy and Ryan Nyquist became household names within action sports. See X Games.

Not everyone welcomed the attention. Many riders, especially in street and flatland, were suspicious of television and saw the X Games as a return to the sell-out of the 1980s. That tension between contest BMX and core BMX has never fully gone away.

Video culture

The 1990s was the decade when video replaced magazines as the primary medium of BMX. Consumer camcorders became affordable and riders began filming each other.

Props Video Magazine was started in 1993 by Chris Rye and Marco Massei in the Chicago area. Released on VHS several times a year, each issue mixed contest coverage, road trips, rider profiles and scene reports from around the world. For most riders in the pre-internet era, Props was how they saw what was happening. In 1999 Props launched Road Fools, a series in which a van full of professionals toured for a week or two and filmed everything. Road Fools was enormously popular and ran for many years.

Independent videos mattered too. The Plywood Hoods continued the Dorkin' in York series, documenting the flatland that Kevin Jones and his crew were inventing. The Baco videos, made in the American Midwest, captured street and park riding with a loose, funny style that influenced a generation of filmers. Companies began releasing team videos, and by the end of the decade a full-length video was expected of any serious brand.

Video changed how riders were judged. A rider could become famous through a video part without winning contests, which gave street and flatland riders, who had little contest presence, a way to matter. This shift set up the video-part culture that defined the 2000s and the web edit era that followed.

Street grows up

Street riding existed in the 1980s as a sideshow, but the 1990s made it a discipline. With skateparks closed and the AFA gone, riders rode what was around them. Pegs, originally for flatland standing and ramp stalls, were used to grind kerbs, then ledges, then rails. Skateboarding, which had its own street revolution in the early 1990s, showed what urban architecture could offer.

Scenes grew in cities with good spots. New York, Philadelphia and the north-eastern United States produced a distinct, raw style built around rails and ledges. California produced technical riding in schoolyards and skateparks. By the end of the decade street was the fastest-growing part of BMX, although it would not get an X Games event until 2008. The full story is in rise of street riding.

Bikes and parts

The 1990s bike was built to survive. Frames got heavier and stronger through the first half of the decade, as rider-owned brands reacted to the breakages of the boom era. Chromoly throughout, thick tubing, gussets at the head tube and 48 spoke wheels were standard. Bikes from the mid 1990s often weighed 15 kg or more.

Towards the end of the decade the trend reversed. Riders wanted lighter bikes for spins and technical tricks, and brands began to trim weight. The 14 mm rear axle, the three-piece crank and the cassette hub, which replaced the heavy freewheel and allowed much smaller gearing, all became common at this time. Pegs got longer and stronger for grinding. Brakes began to disappear from some street riders' bikes, an early sign of the brakeless trend of the 2000s.

Legacy

The 1990s set the structure of modern BMX. Rider-owned companies, several of which still exist, established the expectation that BMX brands should come from within the sport. The X Games gave BMX a permanent place in televised action sports and a path to professional careers that eventually led to the Olympics. Video became the primary medium and made the filmed part, rather than the contest result, the measure of a rider.

Most important, street emerged as a discipline in its own right and began the rise that would make it the dominant form of BMX in the 2000s. The riders, brands and videos of the 1990s are the direct ancestors of everything in the sport today.

Related

• Freestyle BMX boom of the 1980s
• Rise of street riding
• Web edit era
• S&M Bikes
• Hoffman Bikes
• X Games
• Props Video Magazine