History: A Penguin and a Mole — The history of BMX happens to be one of those tales that has many beginnings. With that precept I will now reveal a little of what I know personally about how we all came to be the children of the BMX bicycle. Words by TIM MARCH
Lets first of all get back to the basics and look at the history of Motocross, a pastime that our sport of BMX is named after. The first recorded organised and official off-road motorcycle event was in the UK and put on by the ACU (Auto Cycle Union) and took place in 1904. By 1909 the first Scottish Six Day Trial had taken place and the evolution of the motorcycle as an off road weapon of choice was well on its way. Soon the delicate balancing and strict scoring of Trials were dispensed with in favour of a flat-out race to be the first rider across the finish line. This was called a Scramble, as in ‘a rare old scramble.’ Scrambles quickly spread to the continent and this resulted in the birth of a new word. The French word for motorcycle (motocyclette) or Moto for short was combined in a portmanteau with ‘Cross Country’ and the name Motocross stuck for good. UK Scrambles launched the off road race phenomenon worldwide. The very first official Scramble took place at Camberley in the county of Surrey GB in 1924. The very first beginnings of the sport of BMX were in these young roots, from our little island where the young fans of Scrambling began copying their heroes. Speaking to my Dad recently (he was born in 1934) he remembers racing
around tracks, and jumping off piles of dirt on bicycles. He was doing this with big groups of mates in 1944, most of it done on 26 inch wheeled bikes with race plates. They used girl’s frames to make the bike slide easily as you could lean through the frame. This off-road bike ‘tracking’ had apparently been going on for years and he remembers his dad telling him that he was doing the same kind of thing around the turn of the century.
Now that takes care of how off-road bicycle riding would’ve initially started to imitate the motorcyclists but it does miss out another very important aspect of what the word BMX has come to encompass today. The stunt riding element that is now a whole lot more popular than BMX racing. Stunt riders need some roots, so here’s one of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ proportions. Circus was big business at the turn of the century with the owners always looking for unusual and crowd pulling death-defying acts. In Nimes, France, bicycle stuntman Allo “Dare Devil” Diavalo attempted and pulled off what he claimed to be the first ever ‘loop the loop’ in 1900, in front of a packed audience. He was an instant hero and a man in demand; the news reached Circus owners world-wide and within a year Diavalo performed his amazing stunt to another packed house in Madison Square Garden NYC. By 1905 there were several bicycle riding stunt riders who were performing daily in circus’s on ramps feasibly as big as Danny Ways’ mega ramp (not as wide but as big in transition). Lets not forget, all this is happening 105 years ago. These amazing feats of daring and courage were then repeated and expanded upon by the legendary ‘Ancillotti Brothers’, ‘D’ZiZZi’ and my favourite, ‘Volo the