A few weeks ago, I mentioned that BMX would be making its Olympic debut at Beijing this summer — alas, only as an exhibition event. But considering that road-racing, track racing, and even mountain biking have been medal events forever, it’s kind of surprising it took this long.

This article about British BMX sensation Shanaze Reade gives a nice historical summary of how BMX developed in the early 70s, and then got upstaged by a lot of “freestyle” silliness (RAD, the movie — anyone?), and finally buried up to the neck by mountain bikes.

But the X-Games and Dave Mirra brought back BMX streetstyle, and this extended a lifeline back to BMX racing on dirt. Fascinating!

Photo: (cc) Creative Commons by Conductive, http://flickr.com/photos/41992302@N00/

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Racing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.