The Rise of 1980’s UK BMX Teams – by Chris Carter

Factory Raleigh – Andy Oldham 

Stand at the back of the start hill at any BMX race, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the people queuing for their races in their brightly coloured gear are all equals. But any kid that followed the BMX magazines in the pre and boom years of the eighties will tell you that there was always a hierarchy. Moto winners come and go, even mains can sometimes be won on a fluke – but no one gets sponsored unless they really have the right stuff! Let’s talk teams! Or more specifically, let’s talk eighties teams!

For most racers, the team with which they spend the bulk of their racing careers is Factory Mum and Dad. The cost of bikes, travel and gear, the pre and post-race pep talks, the pit crew, changing gear ratios between motos – all are met by the funds raised from the old man trudging to the office in the rain each day. The kit might bear the name of little Johnny’s favorite manufacturer, but there are a couple of very special words missing from the race jersey.

But for the lucky few, for the greatest talents in our sport, their jerseys bear the word “team” somewhere in their design. National Team, Factory Team, Support Team – to have these simple phrases emblazoned on the back of your shoulders or across your chest is a badge of honour, a mark of respect, a statement that this man is not as other men – a declaration that this rider has arrived!

For the new racer, lining up on the gate next to a team rider can be an intimidating experience. There stands the novice, maintaining a wobbly balance while trying to effect a two-pedal start. Next to him is the “team” rider – balancing motionless, his gate lose yet powerful, his gaze fixed on the track ahead, his eyes betraying nothing except a calm assuredness that his vast experience will secure a solid victory. Behind the start hill there was no hint of nervousness. He seemed to know almost everyone. And absolutely everyone knew him!

To arrive at the track wearing full race team livery has historically been the goal of many aspiring racer. Indeed winning a place on a team would, for many, take precedence over winning a race on any given day.

But how can a sport that is essentially a solo one have ended up with such a team-orientated culture? To find the answer, we have to go back in time to the very dawn of BMX in the UK.

With the rise of BMX in the eighties, and the promise for manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of increasing returns so long as the sport kept growing, BMX race teams proliferated at an unparalleled rate. By the mid-eighties, at least three prominent UK colour magazines had appeared, and companies were vying with each other to get as much publicity for their brands as possible. One of the best ways to do this was by having a well-known rider splashed across the cover or centre spread wearing the company’s brand logo.

But it wasn’t just the companies that benefited from this incentive. In many ways the magazines, both then and now, are ultimately democratic. Magazine photographers have the sole aim of putting talent on the page in order to attract readers. Some riders can provide the talent but can’t afford decent bikes or gear or to get to the events, while some riders can get to the events but can’t ride well enough when they get there.

Enter the BMX race team!

With a little corporate backing, kids that otherwise could only afford to shine at local races were given the chance to shoot for a top national ranking. In exchange, the company footing the bill would want their pilot to turn in respectable results and hopefully generate some publicity.

The first BMX team in the UK was set up by ex-motorcycle trials rider Don Smith and fellow BMX enthusiast Richard Barrington. That team was called Team Ace.

Around 1980, Barrington had set up a shop in Walthamstow and sponsored some local riders to get the whole thing going. For Barrington and Smith, this was about more than just pushing a team – they were attempting to push the sport itself into some kind of stable existence in the UK. Those early team riders included Nikki Matthews, Pete Middleton, Tony Waye, Steve Gilley, Andy Ruffell and Cav Strutts. Ace even went as far as producing a frame and fork set, though production was limited. Today only one of those early Ace frames is believed to have survived.

Andy Ruffell (Riding for Ace) at Harrow Skate Park with Ace boss who is unfortunately no longer with us, Richard Barrington, in the background.

At around the same time, Malcolm and Sue Jarvis, Chris Cowan and Malcolm Williams launched an import/export business called Ammaco. Jarvis had been a successful property developer and had heard about BMX in a passing conversation with a colleague. As the father of five young children – Alexia, Holly, Sam, Russell and Julian – the whole idea of BMX appealed to Jarvis. So without any real BMX knowledge, he hopped on a plane to the USA to investigate the possibility of importing these crazy new bikes to the UK.

Jarvis’s shrewd business instincts led him to California where he met up with, amongst many others, Scot Breithaupt and Bob Haro. Convinced of the commercial viability of BMX, Jarvis returned to the UK and prepared an information package about the fledgling sport which he distributed to hundreds of media outlets. Off the back of that, says Malcolm, “The phone didn’t stop ringing.” By the end of 1980, he had persuaded Halfords to also get on board in supporting this exciting new sport.

Soon after, Jarvis did a deal with Skip Hess in the USA to import Mongooses into the UK. What he needed now was a vehicle to promote the brand to UK kids. The answer – a BMX race team.

Drawing from his own stable, Malcolm started by putting his own kids on the team. But he needed more, particularly in the older age groups. With the newly formed Ace team having already gathered some heavyweight talent in one place, Malcolm had the perfect opportunity to go headhunting. Pete Middleton and Andy Ruffell took the senior places on the Ammaco squad, with Wayne Llewellyn and Steve Greaves bridging the age gap between the older and younger riders.

Ruffell of course would grow to become a sponsor’s dream and stayed with Ammaco Mongoose until the end of 1984. In that time, an enormous amount of money was spent on him traveling all over the world promoting both BMX as a sport and Mongoose as a brand. Yet there can be little doubt that the publicity he generated translated directly into sales for Mongoose that far exceeded the company’s investment in him.

In 1985, UK manufacturer Raleigh decided it wanted a more prominent share of the team pie. Raleigh had previously sponsored a number of well known riders, such as Andy Oldham, Jamie Staff and Kev Riviere, but now they were planning a huge publicity push. And being such a large firm, their strategy was simple – buy the cream of the crop and put them on a Raleigh bike.

Most of the exciting BMX action was being performed by teenagers. Though younger kids might be nagging their parents to buy them a bike, it was invariably off the back of looking at photos of older kids in the magazines. And so, with a suitably corporate no-nonsense approach, Raleigh simply made sure that the most prominent rider in each age group over fourteen would ride for Raleigh. And such was the ubiquity of the Raleigh Burner as a first bike for thousands of kids, that it was almost a money-no-object corporate takeover.

In the fourteens, Kuwahara’s Stu Diggens had been unstoppable for two seasons, so an offer, reputedly into four figures, was made to entice him onto the team – not bad for a school kid back in the mid-eighties! In the fifteens and sixteens, Raleigh already had the number one guys in the form of Craig Schofield and Martin Jose but added Jason Maloney for good measure. Now they set their sights on the big boys.

Though Ruffell was actually beaten to the number one plate by Tim March in the first year of superclass racing in ’84, Tim couldn’t quite topple Ruffs from the top of the publicity charts. Despite being number two, it was Ruffell and not March whose fame extended beyond the boundaries of BMX, and it was Ruffell who got to see the colour of Raleigh’s money!

When Andy was eventually headhunted, Raleigh knew he wasn’t going to come cheap. In his last year at Mongoose, he had appeared in the Sunday Times Colour Supplement in an article which estimated his earnings at around £20,000. Bear in mind this was 1985 and twenty grand was an awful lot of money in those days, especially for a kid still in his teens! Though the details of his deal with the UK cycle giant were never disclosed, it’s not unreasonable to suppose, based on the figure in the Times article, that Raleigh had an even greater figure in mind when they approached him.

Plainly Raleigh felt that those thousands spent on Ruffell would equate to even more thousands in terms of sales. They were almost certainly right. Andy Ruffell, BMX publicity machine, was the ultimate team rider.

Although Ruffell’s fame may have extended further outside BMX than March’s, in a curious irony, it was March who managed to pull sponsors from outside the sport into BMX. In 1983 his primary sponsor was Lee Cooper, a jeans manufacturer. In 1984 he started his now legendary MRD outfit, but it was in 1985 that Tim really raised the bar. Somehow he managed to persuade grocery chain VG to enter into a joint team venture with his own March Racing Developments. The result included a fully liveried VG/March double decker bus for transporting the new MRD team to races. During MRD’s time on the race scene, the fortunate beneficiaries of Tim’s vision included Steve Bigland, Mark “Whoppa” Watkins, Anthony Howells and Ashley Davies.

Craig Schofield, Brian Jones, Julian Jarvis, Don Smith, Andy Ruffell, Russ Jarvis, Malcolm Jarvis, Chris Young, Sean Day, (Unknown) Sam Jarvis.

But not all teams have been based on the multinational model of hard cash for hard promotion. Many teams were smaller affairs in which bike shops or importers would either set up their own team or else strike a deal with manufacturers to help out riders in their locality. Names like Edwardes, Youngs, Hotshot-Redline, Shenpar-JMC, Alans-Robinson and Bunneys-GT all came to be recognized as heavyweight team entities in their own right. And more than a few big names got the extra push they needed by riding for them: Geth Shooter, Sarah Jane Nicholls, Tony Holland, Charlie Reynolds, Dale Holmes, Karen Murphy, Dylan Clayton, Dean Iddiols and Gary Llewellyn to name but a few.

Other teams operated with tiered grades of team membership with riders aspiring to be, as it were, promoted internally. Kuwahara ran a successful national team as a first rung on its factory team ladder, though this sometimes made for complications if the factory star stayed on the team for too long. In 1983, for instance, rising star Darren Wood was on the Kuwahara National squad, but with Diggens taking the factory place in the same age group, and showing no signs of slowing down, Wood eventually had to jump ship to Skyway to secure a full factory ride, in turn leaving the way open for Lee Alexander to join the Kuwahara National Team for ’84.

From around 1986, the BMX magazines began to evaporate as the sport reached its peak and then began to decline in popularity. Without a ready media in which to get promoted, the corporations that had financed so many teams began to walk away from the sport.

In their place emerged a new kind of team run along altogether different lines. Team management moved from being a commercial concern to a more altruistic one. Managers were now helping talented riders meet the high cost of competition simply for the love of the sport and its riders rather than the pursuit of a tangible increase in sales or publicity.

Never was this more apparent than in teams such as Rainbow Racing or Alan Sopp’s ASR outfit. Both became enormously credible teams, yet they had nothing to promote – no frames and forks, no number plates, no clothing line – not so much as a baseball cap. And yet they helped support the race careers of such talents as David Barnsby, Mark Sopp, Kev, and Mike Riviere, Tom Lynch, Warren Godfrey, Brad Smith, and of course the late great Winnie Wright.

Today the heady era of the eighties boom is behind us, but the allure of the place on a team is as real as ever for many riders. Moreover, the digital revolution and the advent of new social media has enabled the creation of entirely new team opportunities and operating models for those sufficiently imaginative to find them. These teams help to support a wide range of riders – from gifted hopefuls at the grassroots of the sport, up to national racers in the elite categories. Whilst at the extreme end of corporate sponsorship, HSBC’s multi-million-pound commitment to British Cycling has enabled the riders at the very top of today’s sport, such as Beth Shriever, Kye Whyte and Quillan Isadore to become truly professional athletes on the global stage.

Though the team ride will remain an elusive dream for the majority of racers, there can be little doubt that the BMX Race Team itself is here to stay.