cruiser revolution

The hype factor has reached a fever pitch leading up to BMX hitting the Olympic stage today for the 2012 Summer Games,

The New York Times is doing features on Alise Post, Tory Nyhaug is showing up on Olympic TV spots in Canada and the list goes on and on.

It’s pretty amazing to see how far we’ve come.

And to think that much of modern-day racing has its roots with a guy in a vacant lot that wanted to hold some bike races.  That guy being Scot Breithaupt.

He didn’t just put BMX racing on the map…the “map” of BMX was basically set on its current course by much of what he learned holding those first few races in the vacant lot.

You could  say that Scot Breithaupt, figuratively and literally, wrote the book on BMX racing.

He also founded what could be called BMX’s first sanctioning body of any kind, the Bicycle United Motocross Society (B.U.M.S). Breithaupt…set up organizational features around his races very much as…the sanctioning bodies would base theirs; rulebooks, a point system, a skill level structure, a racing season, trophies and promotions of special races that were the prototype for Nationals. (Wikipedia)

Scot played a role in almost every aspect of BMX: as a promoter, manufacturer, sponsor, team manager and last, but certainly not least, as a racer.

Scot is also widely credited with bringing Cruiser classes to the various sanctioning bodies which also brought more adults to the sport in its early days.

So as we await those first few minutes of the Olympic BMX event, let’s take a minute to thank Scott “OM” Breithaupt for getting the ball rolling in those early days.

Little did he know that it would go from BUMS right up prime time coverage on the boob tube in so short of a time frame.