Posted by nathan on 7/21/2005, 4:52 pm, in reply to "History of freestyle riding (LONG) part1" NOT VERT AND NOT YET FREESTYLE, BUT... Another harbinger of things to come...another advance in the complexity of what everybody back then called 'gettin' rad'. From the October 19, 1975 issue of BMX WEEKLY (published by Roy Gilbert), a photo of another true OG of BMX and freestyle, Stu Thomsen, doing a 360...an unbelievable move on a bicycle at the time. THE FIRST SKATEPARK IN CALIFORNIA OPENS... The first skatepark in California, Carlsbad Skatepark, opened on March 13, 1976. A retrospective blurb in the February 1980 issue of SKATEBOARDER magazine, referring to Carlsbad when it first opened, stated: "The park was found to be highly functional terrain for bikers. The carves in the bowl were as high and rad as those of their skating peers." Notice they speak of carving, but not of air. THE FIRST SKATEPARK BICYCLE AERIAL... Who performed the first skatepark bicycle aerial and when they did it was the single most difficult event to nail down for this history... Several weeks later Scot Breithaupt told us there was a photo of Perry Kramer getting air in an earlier issue of BICYCLE MOTOCROSS ACTION magazine. We found it in the June 1978 issue. It shows Perry getting air out of a banked runway at the SkaterCross Skatepark in Reseda, California. The picture was taken in December of 1977 by Bob Osborn. We were getting closer to the roots. Perry Kramer, VintageBMX.com website, February 2005, speaking of the December 1977 SkaterCross photograph: "I remember there was a bunch of us there and Stu may have been one. Byron [Friday] was also there and he rode the place pretty good too." Stu Thomsen, posting on the VintageBMX.com website in June of 2005, said of the photo in this advertisement: "I can honestly say that was not my first time. However, I can not recall or pinpoint a time frame." The following quotes are from Byron Friday, either on the VintageBMX.com website or in E-mails to Bob Osborn, spanning April, May, and June of 2005... Bike riding in abandoned swimming pools (1975). Stu Thomsen's aerial out of a vert skatepark bowl (November or December 1977). Quote from Byron Friday, VintageBMX.com website, June 2005: "Stu had some big balls!...In addition to his big airs he used to do these crazy Acid Drops. He would drop in straight down vert, the back wheel placed on the edge of the bowl, front wheel up, and like a Kamikaze drop right down the face of the vert bowl. RAD!!!" THE FIRST FLATLAND FREESTYLE TRICK... In the late 1970s Bob Haro was the staff artist for BICYCLE MOTOCROSS ACTION magazine (Wizard Publications) in Torrance, California. On weekends he would drive to San Deigo to ride bikes with his friend John Swanguen. The resulting article, TRICK RIDING...A WHOLE NEW THING, was published in the January/February 1979 issue of BICYCLE MOTOCROSS ACTION magazine. Here is a quote from the article: "Haro and Swanguen used to ride Skateboard Heaven in San Diego, trying to out-trick each other. Gradually the tricks evolved out of the skatepark bowls and onto the flatlands, where they were refined and improved to fit the new environment." AN INTERESTING NOTE... The Rock Walk article in BICYCLE MOTOCROSS ACTION magazine was the source of Bob Haro becoming known as the originator of BMX freestyle riding. However, in April and May of 2005, both Johnny Johnson and Bob Osborn interviewed John Swanguen, who, in talking about the Skateboard Heaven times with Bob Haro, said: "I'm not the kind of guy to toot my own horn...but...the only trick I FULLY claim...that I did first...is the Rock Walk." The year was 1977. THE FIRST FREESTYLE TEAM... R.L. Osborn soon joined Bob Haro during lunch breaks in the Wiz Pubs parking lot and the two proceeded to invent many new tricks. In early November of 1979 the BICYCLE MOTOCROSS ACTION Trick Team was formed. A month later Bob Osborn wrote the following EDITORIAL, which explains how the Trick Team came to be, and touches on the excitement freestyle was beginning to generate. The article was published in the April 1980 issue of BICYCLE MOTOCROSS ACTION magazine. THE FIRST FREESTYLE SHOW... Haro and R.L. at Chandler, February 1980.
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A photo taken in August of 1975 by Warren Bolster of Pee Wee Castro riding the San Marcos pool in San Diego on a Schwinn Sting Ray was published in SKATEBOARDER magazine in 1975. Interestingly, Castro is nowhere near the coping in this photo.
A photo of Randy Davila riding a Sting Ray in the San Marcos pool in San Diego was taken in August of 1975 by Warren Bolster and published in SKATEBOARDER magazine later that same year. Interesting here is that Davila is riding the same Sting-Ray as Castro (probably the same photo session), and is within inches of the coping, a significant progression in pool riding for skaters or bikers.
In the March/April 1979 issue of BICYCLE MOTOCROSS ACTION magazine we found an article and photos of Stu Thomsen getting air out of a vertical-sided bowl at the Runway Skatepark in Carson, California. The photo was taken by Bob Osborn in December of 1978. For a while this seemed to be the first documented pool or skatepark bicycle aerial.
Stu Thomsen, Runway Skatepark, December 1978.
A few weeks after we found the PK photo, Byron Friday told us about an advertisement in the April 1978 issue of BICYCLE MOTOCROSS ACTION magazine featuring a photograph of Stu Thomsen doing an aerial. This photo became our earliest published, and thus time-documented, aerial. It was taken by Bob Osborn in late November or early December of 1977.
Advertisement in the April 1978 issue of BICYCLE MOTOCROSS ACTION magazine featuring Stu Thomsen. This is the first published bicycle skatepark aerial off a vertical-sided bowl...and a one-hander, no less!
But the poor quality of the SkaterCross advertisement photo left it unclear whether the aerial was off a bank or vert.
And then Stu located the following photo taken in the same SkaterCross bowl as the above ad photo, probably during the same photo session. This photo clearly shows the bowl transitioning to vert.
Stu Thomsen, vert air, SkaterCross Skatepark, November or early December 1977.
"One thing that sticks out about that point in time... bikes were finally being built with better quality and we were finally able to start pushing the level of riding to the next level!"
"I think an important detail that needs to be considered is Stu is riding true vert. The bowl that PK is riding is a mini bowl and not true vert.
"I had been riding SkaterCross for a while... when Stu showed up and started popping like three or four foot airs [out of a vert bowl]. I couldn't believe my eyes! Seeing Stu perform that stunt really blew my mind and to this day it is one of my favorite BMX memories."
"I have to say that Stu is indeed the first full-fledged 20-inch BMX vert rider...[to] pop big air!"
The first skatepark bicycle aerial out of a vert bowl is an important milestone in the development of freestyle...important enough to reiterate the documented points of its evolution. They went like this...
Bikes carving the coping in pools (1975).
John Palfryman's Kick Turn on the coping of a pool (1975).
A VARIATION ON VERT...
Stu Thomsen, Runway Skatepark. Photos taken December 1978 by Bob Osborn and published in the March/April 1979 issue of BICYCLE MOTOCROSS ACTION magazine.
Bob Haro doing a Rock Walk in the Jan/Feb 1979 issue of BICYCLE MOTOCROSS ACTION magazine.
In September of 1978 Bob Osborn saw Haro doing a Rock Walk in the parking lot outside the Wiz Pubs offices during lunch break. Osborn immediately photographed the trick.
The Rock Walk was not just a step up in difficulty over stunts kids had been doing on bikes for decades, it was an evolutionary leap...and it was BMX-bike specific...meaning it is highly improbable that this trick could have been invented on any other kind of bicycle existing at the time.
For the above reasons, and because our research turned up zero evidence of any earlier flatland tricks, the Rock Walk is hereby entered into this history as the first documented flatland freestyle trick.
John Swanguen, 1977
On February 9th, 1980, as a result of the discussion mentioned in the above article, the BICYCLE MOTOCROSS ACTION Trick Team, consisting of Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn, put on the first freestyle show ever. It was at the ABA Winternationals in Chandler, Arizona, and was covered in the May 1980 issue of BICYCLE MOTOCROSS ACTION magazine.
Those BMXers lucky enough to have attended the Chandler Winternationals that year watched history being made. The shock waves from that show spread out through the BMX community and around the world, changing the face of 20-inch bicycle riding forever!
Freestyle was born!
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