BMX News has been long looking forward to a comprehensive sit-down interview with Johan and Ritz since before the Chula Vista Supercross in September. Johan, is CEO of GSX Events–the independent company that runs the BMX Supercross World Cup Series for UCI. And Tom is CEO of a GSX division called Elite Trax, which is responsible for building all SX tracks on the World Cup circuit, as well as the Olympic track in London.

Any time the riders, spectators, industry or other observers express an opinion or comment about BMX Supercross, threre is nearly a 100% chance it involves a decision one or both of these gents made at some point.

GSX is just about a year old now, and a lot has happened over the past 12 months. We talk about the dark days, when their original partner in the GSX venture–the National Bicycle League, imploded about a month in to the 2011 World Cup series. GSX was relying on the NBL for financial and back office support–and it was suddenly gone. Johan and Tom candidly address how that went down, and also talk about Stratesphere, Inc. a private equity firm, who is their new partner, after buying the NBL’s shares in GSX out of receivership in October of this year.

The guys also address popular hotbutton topics like track design, whether BMX Supercross as a whole helps, hurts or has no effect on “classic” BMX Racing, and whether we will see prize payouts rise dramatically in the 2013 season (after the 2012 games, next August).

It is a fairly long show, but we felt all of the content addressed was of interest to our audience, whether you’re an insider or a fan. Of the topics left on the cutting room floor, we salvaged three clips, which we present to you as “deleted scenes.”

Enjoy the Podcast…and, as always, we’ll be discussing the show over on VintageBMX.com, so come join the fun (and listen to the deleted scenes).

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Story and Photos By Mike Carruth

Day Two of the 2011 ABA Hoosier nationals came all-too-early for this reporter. In fact, as I was racing out of Starbucks and onto I-294 breaking the bonds of the 312, the first gate of Sunday racing was on-course.

No biggie, really, because I despise shooting in the rain–refuse to, is more like it–so I would have been just another soggy spectator had I been up at 6AM, as was the plan.

My hysteria about being late subsided as text messages were returned telling of the damp conditions. It was then that it dawned on me that sleeping in my own bed, and heading back to day-two of a national is not a condition I am at all accustomed to…THAT was the “off” thing for me today. Normally, it’s a four-hour flight, or a 10+ hr drive, check in to a hotel and catch-as-catch can for any kind of vegan fare that can be conjured up. But today, it was all the comforts of home–including the alarm clock I have not yet figured out how to use after 16 years (why do laptops last 18 months, and alarm clocks last 18 years?).

Indeed, I have not been to a national within home-sleeping range since Itasca BMX in 1982 (it rained that day too). Oh there have been nats here–at The Hill, and even Imagination Glen, but not since I got back into it in 2008. Rockford is just far enough away–at 94 miles–that a hotel is mandatory on Fathers Day weekend.

DID YOU KNOW…there has not been a BMX race in the Chicago City Limits in 32 years? (“The Great Race” at the Chicago Amphitheater, on the 1979 NBA/Schwinn tour). We need a world-class track in the Windy City-proper!

I rolled up to a grey-but-dry Imagination Glen, just as Justin Posey was taking home a first round win in 17-18x. Seemed like a fair amount of “second-verse, same as the first” happening in the age classes–though that was by no means guaranteed to stick.

The pro class had a little post-haste pow-wow and decided that the threat of rain was…well…threatening, so decided to ditch motos two and three and run the main at the top of the order going into second round. Of course, having just arrived on-scene, I was not clued into that until I noticed no pros gated up for third round. Thus, the final feet of the second lap, when Justin Riddell put the mega move on Andres Holguin in the last turn to win it held a special significance. Jon Jon Rapp was on the right-step for the second day in a row…nice work for a new pro card holder.

In the semis-to-mains break in the action, attention turned to the finish line as ABA past-president Clayton John made a special appearance to honor Imagination Glen/Steel Wheels BMX Track Operator Jackie Altizer. If you go to a lot of nationals, you’ll recognize Jackie’s smiling face as you pick up the weekend’s T-Shirt at racewear in many cities. But we, in the Chicagoland scene, know her as our tireless TO who, along with an all-pro crew of dedicated volunteers, dodge-and-weave the Midwest weather from the outdoor to the indoor (sometimes in the same day ). Taking off my “business” bandanna, and putting on my BMX Dad hat for a moment, it really is a rare gift that we enjoy in the Tri-State (Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin) area. Year-round racing, even when the lake-effect snow is measured in meters, and 20-ton snow plows are doing 360s on I-94 (as on “Young Guns Challenge” day in 010). We love you Jackie, Ken, et. al!

The rain held off in such a fashion that we were getting pretty cocky about the fact we were going to get the whole thing done in-the-dry…”glad that RAIN held off” was a common replacement for “what’s up?” around the fenceline. Well, the object lesson is “don’t tempt Mother Nature.” Literally, as the first main event gate dropped, the sky-drip started.

It wasn’t a torrent, but just enough to make shooting uncomfortable (poor me), and a few riders to ditch the fogged-up goggles on the hill. Somehow, we all soldiered on

The girls classes had some serious “it ain’t over til it’s over” finish line action. Brelyn Swendseid came a micro-knobby away from shoplifting 15G out of the clutches of Shay Glynn at the stripe, but Shay kept her at bay for the win. Then, in 16G, Courtney Purcell put the hurt on Sam Brown just as Dan Rumple made the call. And in the next gate, Tori Hopperdietzel applied the afterburners just in time to best Michele Patterson out of a double. The Grasshopper also doubled up in Cruiser on the weekend for Extreme Team.

One thing I love about National BMX Racing is the fact that from five and under to 41-over, there is riveting racing to revel in. Six expert was a great example of that today, as Liam Elo had a commanding lead from the gate to turn two, when the Jedi, Zak Miller, came a callin. Saturday’s third place was not allowed to repeat, as Miller took the lead just out of turn two, and went wee, wee, weeeee, all the way home (or whatever sound little ‘Monkeys make when they are going all the way home). Elo ended up with the deuce, and it was Texan Kiel Ross for the third.

And that was only the fifth age class gate to fall. Plenty of pushin the limits to come, as it would turn out.

Jump it a few classes, to 8x, and it was on like Donkey Kong between day one topper, Kiegen Perlberg on the Mike’s Bikes Redline ride, and Kohl Piluso in the Hyper colors. Piluso scooted in for a Saturday second, and was not looking to go home with a double deuce. Perlberg led it once again til the final feet, when Kohl mounted a charge and edged past at the stripe. Third and fourth was a deja vu, with Nate Coyman and The G-Man, Gavin Freewalt rounding out the top four. Speaking of “The President,” Coyman also doubled up in 8 Cruiser for the weekend.

Over in 9x and 9C, it was all about Young Gun, Nathan Davids, who scarfed up a Double Double (if you’ll excuse the West Coast caloric reference in this Midwest context).

Bringin’ the heat in 14x, Ryan Zinzow, once again jumped out to an early lead, but Justin Knapper was not about to leave it at that. Out of turn one, he was on-the-gas-to-pass Ryan, and thundered down the second straight with a stretched-out lead, which stuck.

Cooley and Ceslok battled in 15x, with DC getting the day one win, and Big B taking it wire to wire for the day two honors. Chalk up a double for B in 15C as well.

No fight to the front in 16x on Sunday, as Tyler Whitfield put a solid showing in and took it to em for the double-double. But the intrigue isn’t always at the front, as demonstrated by Layne Gainer in the last turn. Hootman was running second to TyWhit, and took the prime line–when on the high-side, Gainer scooped over him and into the two-spot. That was a manly move, considering the carnage seen in that turn through the semis in many-a-class.

Posey posted another win on Sunday in 17-18x. And as to the historical backstory we promised you from yesterday’s report…it was actually a national at The Hill in Elgin, IL about eight years ago that was the thing. It was the 9x main, and seems some joker took that opportunity to holler out “Justin…your tire’s flat” just as the cadence was started. JP did what any nine-year-old would do, and looked down to see what was up….SMACK! went the gate, and all the other guys got out with gusto. I guess that is the BMX equivalent of “Hey, your shoelaces are untied!”–which, of course, is something you only need to learn once. Notwithstanding lessons previously learned, all hecklers were silent on this trip to Chicagoland, and Justin did what Justin does.

If 16x was the nail-biter on Saturday, that designation was firmly held by the 19-27-exers on Sunday. Tony Favata was large and in charge, in true Wrecking Crew fashion down the first straight, and deep into the second…Egdorf was in tucked into the two-spot, if temporarily, and Chase Hines was scanning for some daylight in third. Max made a dramatic move to the outside entering the turn, and we could see a hi-low to glory from a mile away…but the “scanning” that Chase was doing was on radar-lock, and he made the move of the day, going from third to first to come out of turn two on top. For those following at home, mark your scorecards with Max in for the two and Tony for the tre.

The 404 crew was in full effect in 28-25x, and Charlie Hunt was not going to chill with Pats 605 flier Mike Weatherford doing a double on him. Great lap for the Morphine machine, and always good “english” on the bike, making for some prime photos.

Of course 404/ATL cannot be invoked without some due given to 36-40x. Doran Bradshaw doubled up in 36-40 Cruiser, but turned an off-podium fourth in class on day one. As different as the weather was between the two days, so, too, was DB100′s mojo in Sunday’s class main. Dude got it to the front and led it to a nothing-but-daylight trip for the 36-40 win. Long-time legend, Shan Hatfield scooted in for second, and Day One champ Pedro Brown was on the right step.

By the 41-over Ex main, the rain had stopped again, and the sun was making an effort to poke through the thick blanket of upper-strata-blah. Scott Moreland was, again, at max wattage to close it out with a Dan’s Comp double double…but not without an early challenge in Sunday’s class main by holeshotter, Jim Wahl. Wahl was second on Saturday and suffered a small serving of Sunday smackdown by Frank Nuccio who took the day-two-deuce.

(ok to exhale now…)

The crowd was out of the parking lot in a tidy three-hours-and-58-minutes, and headed to nearby MDW or ORD on the flyaway…and some to a local big-box store to snack-up for a double-digit Interstate date. “See you in Chula?” was the goodbye of the day (yes, by the way), and we were home and tuned in to the dreadful Bears game in time for the second half. A profound reminder of why it is so much more enjoyable to watch BMX Racing than mainstream sports. Each gate, you have a new opportunity to root for your favorite “player.” When will the world wake up?

Check out Sunday’s Photo Gallery!

We all know the adage “Be careful what you wish for…you might get it,” and nowhere does it apply more profoundly than in BMX Racing of the modern era.

Our sport has struggled with an identity crisis, almost from day one–with some of the earliest perceptions being that BMX was done with motors on bicycles (due to the improper pronunciation as “Bicycle MOTORcross”).

Jump a couple hundred calendar pages, and you’re in the early 2000s. What was previously known as “BMX Freestyle” had, by this time, decided it was too labor intensive to use the extra word, and claimed de-facto ownership of the term “BMX” by using it far and wide, to mean dirt, vert, park, street and flatland. Yes, period.

Um…EXCUSE us! We’re right over here (waving arms, as if stranded on a desert island, with a helicopter in view). I guess they couldn’t hear us.

Today, talk to any mom, dad or hip uncle at the soccer pitch, ice cream social or church car wash, and tell them your kid races BMX, and you will inevitably hear “oh, wow…he does all those flips and tricks?” You just KNEW they were going to say that, didn’t you? Even though you were careful to say “RACES” BMX.

This weekend marks the first of many steps leading up to the 2012 London Olympics–the “Test Event.” This is an honest-to-goodness UCI BMX Supercross World Cup event, big time Olympic qualifying points, and even more big time than all that: network coverage on NBC. BMX News reported this back on July 25, but in case you missed it, this is real-deal NBC, not the only-seen-in-a-handful-of-homes Universal Sports. This means that BMX Supercross will be on the same media stage as last week’s Dew Tour event in Portland, which is awesome, and something we have been longing for in this sport.

See what I just did there? I said “BMX Supercross,” not “BMX Racing.” And in that statement, lies the point of this editorial.

To those of us way up in it, BMX Racing and BMX Supercross are…shall we say…fraternal twins. Possessed of similar DNA, but not identical either. What Maris, Connor, Arielle, Mariana and the rest of our best are doing this weekend is BMX Racing–and yet it isn’t. So, how do we convey that to a TV audience? Is anyone in charge of conveying it? Is it even important it BE conveyed?

To really answer that last question, we have to look at the long-debated topic of “growing the sport.” Now, that is a topic much too thick for this discussion, but let’s pull one of the low-hanging fruit off that very-broad topic and do a bit of role-play (which would be fully realized by about the fourth post of any Vintage thread, so we are just fast-forwarding reality here);

“We need BMX Racing on Television.”

OK…why?

“So it can grow the sport.”

“How will it grow the sport?”

“People will see it, get stoked on it, and want to do it”

Ah-HA! You’ve finally said it (well, I said it for you, but you WOULD have said it). The reason we want media coverage for the sport is so it might grow the sport, and that is accomplished by people seeing BMX Racing and wanting to do it.

If that is true, we have to ask, in follow up to that: Can showing BMX Supercross to a few million people on NBC help with growing the sport? Yes, if people understand there is a disconnect between what they are seeing, and what they or their kids will be doing when they go down to the local track…that is, if they even KNOW there is such a thing as a local track.

The bottom line to all this is that this is a “test event” for us too. BMX racing is squandering a massive opportunity to further its cause if the producers of the NBC Olympic coverage are not properly schooled on the differences between “classic” BMX Racing and the BMX Supercross they will be showing.

BMX Racing needs few two-minute “vignettes” that can go into their coverage to show the world how these superheroes got started in the sport. It wasn’t on a 30-foot-high starting ramp, it was on a modest dirt track in Happy Valley or Las Vegas, San Diego, Bakersfield or any number of other local tracks where, tomorrow, your son or daughter could start an Olympic dream of their own–in BMX Racing.

If this is not done, and we just let the audience figure it out for themselves, we will have missed the golden opportunity for another four years– by which time, it is highly likely that BMX Freestyle (now known most simply as “BMX”), will grow into our Olympic and media sandbox like creeping charlie invades my lawn.

But that’s tomorrow’s problem. Today’s problem is to create proper messaging to prevent BMX Racing from losing its identity yet-again, to BMX Supercross.

We have wished for BMX Racing to be on network television. And now we are going to see that wish realized. What will come next, as we look back on this granted wish, in a couple years?

—Mike Carruth, August 17, 2011

Join the discussion: We are talking about this topic on VintageBMX.com. Click here to have your opinions heard

Johan Lindstrom has been a man in the background, making the proverbial trains run on time, in the BMX Supercross scene for many years. A few months back, he made the jump from working stiff at UCI to CEO of the newly-created Global SX Events, or GSX.

GSX announced, concurrent with its formation, that they would be acquiring the rights to promote the UCI BMX Supercross World Cup events, beginning with the 2011 season. This was a very important announcement, because the World Cup series is the gateway to the Olympic Games and, if that were not enough, carried a fair amount of prestige on its own.

With the UCI SX deal inked, the group came out of the gate strong, and soon announced GSX was to be the promoter for the NBL’s “NationsTour” — a five-city tour of events (later cut to three cities), which promised unprecedented payouts of $40,000 per event, with $8,000 to the winner of Elite Men.

Unfortunately, the NationsTour started to show cracks early in its trajectory. The first event in Primm, Nevada scheduled for March 12 was abruptly canceled two weeks before the event date (citing problems at the location and/or a disagreement with the landowner).

Then, last month, the NBL announced it was in financial distress, ultimately leading up to the announcement that an agreement had been reached to merge the NBL with the ABA to form USA BMX. With 51% of the shares in GSX owned by the NBL, and the Papendal World Cup event rapidly approaching, you can imagine that there were some serious questions as to whether the NBL’s collapse would also take down GSX, and with UCI SX series down with it.

NBL CEO Gary Aragon was the face of all of the above news. And then, two weeks ago, the Papendal World Cup event grabbed BMX headlines with an innovative-but-extreme track–a near-replica of the track being built in London for the next stop on the UCI BMX Supercross World Cup tour and, of course, the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.

We had been hoping to get Johan to join us on the Announcers Tower Podcast when he moved to Ohio from his UCI gig in Switzerland, in February. The stars never quite lined up, and the interview never happened.

Last week, Johan reached out to us saying that he could take some time for an interview to bring BMX News readers up to date on a variety of issues. From the current GSX situation vis a vis the NBL, BMX Supercross track design, the London Olympics, BMX Racing’s likely future in the Olympic Games, how BMX Racing might be affected by BMX Freestyle’s entry into the games, and much more. We enjoyed doing the interview, and wish to thank Johan for taking the time to join us. We also made him promise to come back on again after the London SX in August, so keep an eye out for that.

Technical Note: Not sure if it was our Skype or Johan’s phone, but there is some pretty severe digital distortion (at times making Johan sound like Max Headroom). Just know that we are aware of it, and tried to fix it twice while recording yesterday.

link

iPhone users: Use this direct-listen link

We saw Donny riding through the parking lot on Friday afternoon in Guthrie. He had just finished the first in a series of talks at middle schools as part of the Donny Robinson “In Motion” Mentoring Program. We had been aware of the program, and the visit, by keeping up with Donny’s Twitter updates. But we wanted to know more. So, we asked him if he would be our guest on this week’s episode of “Announcers Tower.” Donny graciously agreed and, in addition to the full scoop on the mentoring program, he also tells us about the forthcoming Hyper “Donny Robinson replica” BMX Racing bike to be test marketed in Walmart stores across the US this March.

In the second half of the interview, Donny talks about his views on equity between the mens and womens Elite classes in BMX racing, his plans for the 2012 Olympics in London, married life, and his “little quirks” when it comes to cell phone use and laundry.

This is a double episode, with a running time of 31 minutes. Thus, we are offering it as a “full-track” listen, and also in two parts.

We hope you enjoy the interview.

Listen to the Full Interview
Full Interview

Part One
Part One

Part Two
Part Two

Photos:

Donny addresses an auditorium of students from the Guthrie (Oklahoma) Middle School on how to lead a clean life, in bounds and overcome challenges and setbacks through goal setting and self discipline.

The Hyper “Donny Robinson” BMX Race bike will be test marketed in 314 Walmart stores across America this March. The $99 model is, according to its namesake, a perfect starter bike for kids interested in BMX racing.

BMXNEWS met up with John, Geff and their main man Josh Meyers for a chat on the Ssquared product, how it differs from other frames on the market, and also some of the long-view vision for the company.

at_011_s-squared_bicycles.mp3

Be sure to visit John and Josh in the Ssquared pits at the ABA Sooner nationals for a firsthand look at the goods.

Lucky us that we not only got the Arielle interview we have been jonesing for, but we were also in the perfect place at the perfect time to break the news of her fresh new factory ride with Intense BMX.

Listen to the interview by using the controls below…
AT_012_arielle_martin.mp3

The Thursday Elite Practice at the 2009 NBL Grands took place at my absolute-favorite time or day to shoot—dusk!  Lots of opportunity for action-blur and cool sky lighting tricks.   Keep your eyes on BMXNEWS.COM for thousands of photos and other scoop from Louisville throughout the weekend.

Click here to view the photos