The people who did tricks on bikes before BMX freestyle

You've probably seen videos or her, dressed in much more attractive clothes, doing tricks on You Tube, Instagram, or maybe on TV.  But here's Viola Brand in an actual artistic cycling competition, in a long, and flat out amazing, routine. 

One of the biggest, and longest, adventures in my life was the 20 years my world revolved around doing tricks on a BMX bike.  I got into BMX in a trailer park, outside of Boise, Idaho, in the summer of 1982, and entered my first race that fall.  BMX changed my life, pure and simple.  I learned my first trick from a magazine how-to, the Haro bar hop, in early 1983.  BMX freestyle became the main theme of my life up until 2003.  It only stopped then because I started working 7 days a week as a taxi driver, and there was no time for anything except work.  I've been trying to get my life back on track, so I can start riding again, in the last few years.

But before that, back in 1978 or 1979, I was a kid living by a lake in rural Ohio.  I didn't even know BMX existed then.  In those days of very little media, and almost no alternative media, word of BMX racing hadn't made it to me and my friends in Ohio.  I had a banana seat three speed bike, with a T-shifter on the top tube.  My friend Tom, who lived about half a mile away, had a similar bike.  One day I rode to his house, and he told me he made a little bike jump in the edge of a field.  We would ride down a small hill on the two lane country road, dodge the potholes, and swerve to the side, where the tractor entrance to a farmer's wheat field was.  Tom had built a little jump, maybe 8 inches high, at the edge of the field.  We took turns, riding down the hill, swerving off the road into the edge of the field, and hitting the little jump.  In 1978, that was a big jump to us.

As we were hitting the jump, a younger kid, Mark Cofer, came riding up.  That was pretty weird, because the kid was about 7 years old, and he lived a mile and a half away, on a farm.  We'd never seen him ride up our way before.  Mark was the youngest of 4 brothers, I think, all of whom road dirtbikes.  They had a sort of motocross track on their farm, a trail through their cow pasture with small jumps and whoop-dee-doos.  Anyhow, Mark had a beach cruiser-style bike, but it was a 20 inch.  It had a big triangle seat, like all cruiser bikes did then.  Mark saw what we were doing, and started hitting the jump as well.  Riding was in his blood, thanks to his older brothers, and he jumped as well as we did, on his weird bike.

Then one time he came back up to the top of the hill and said, "Watch this."  He pedaled a little bit, then he climbed one foot up onto his top tube, and then to his seat.  Much to our surprise, Mark stood up on the seat of his bike, then took his hands off the bars, riding down the hill, standing straight up on his seat.  He somehow swerved around the potholes, and leaned to swerve into the pasture.  He hit the jump in the seat stand, and flew away from his bike, landing in the grass, as his bike tumbled to stop.  Tom and my minds were blown.  We'd never seen anyone even try to stand up on his seat before.  But he not only rode down the hill on his seat, he managed to hit the jump, too.  We were 12-year-olds who just got shown up by a first grader.  He did the seat stand, and hit the jump three times, I think.

I think Tom's mom called him into the house at that point, and we all went home.  I watched Mark Cofer ride down the hill, standing on his seat, in 1978 or '79.  That was 3-4 years before I got into BMX.  That was about the same time that Bob Haro, way out in  California, was riding skateparks and learning his first flatland tricks, before he did the first BMX "trick riding" demo at a race.  BMX freestyle was just being invented.  That was about 15-16 years before Viola Brand was even born.

I got into BMX in 1982, and wound up in the industry in 1986, and watched the best riders in the world for the next couple of decades.  I did framestands, and short bar rides ( jumping off, never landing one) myself.  I saw riders do surfers, and really good bar rides.  Jeff Cotter, and a few others did Pop Tarts, jumping up into bar rides.  But for over 30 years, I never once saw, or even heard of, a rider standing up and riding while standing on their seat.  Not until I saw a video of  Viola Brand two or three years ago.  She does a seat stand at 2:23 in the video above, the first person I saw do that trick since little Mark Cofer.

BMX freestyle is its own thing, actually several things now.  It's split into dirt, park, vert, flatland, street, and mega ramp genre's.  BMX freestyle came along at just the right time, along with the other action sports, to grow exponentially into a worldwide sport and lifestyle thing.  Then it faded some, as mountain bikes took over much of what BMX riding once was.  But there were people doing tricks on bikes long before BMX bikes were even invented in 1970.

Artistic cycling, what Viola is competing in above, officially goes back to 1956 for men, and 1970 for women, in Europe.  But unofficially, there was an artistic cycling competition way back in 1888.  Pedal bicycles, as we know them today, were invented somewhere around 1875.  I've always thought that bicycle trick riding was probably invented about 15 minutes after the first bike was invented, when a hot girl walked by, and some guy tried to impress her.  But that's just an educated guess on my part.  We know bicycle trick riding goes back to at least 1899, because Thomas Edison shot movies of it.  Yeah, Edison, the guy who invented the light bulb and the movie camera, among other things.  Here's the movie.


To put that in perspective, the first airplane (invented by bike shop owners and riders, Orville and Wilbur Wright), was invented four years after this video above.  Here are a few other photos of bicycle trick riding 100 or more years ago.  Old School BMX freestylers in the 1980's created the BMX freestyle scene, that we now see around the world.  But we didn't invent bicycle trick riding itself.  We were lucky enough to get into it at a time when the world was ready for it to grow into a worldwide, pretty popular sport/lifestyle.

 Dennis McCoy may be middle aged now, but he didn't invent footwork.  He just rocked it.

 Grandma did trackstands.

 Ow.  Just ow.

 Mega Ramp, circa 1905.

 Circus people have always been crazy.  I worked on five Cirque du Soleil tours, trust me on this one.

It took about 100 years, and Morgan Wade, to repeat this trick.  Think about that one for a minute.  This guy  has no helmet, no emergency rooms.  Hell, they didn't even have chromoly frames back then.. 

The most popular of my bike memes.