The Man Who Brought BMX to Britain — Malcolm Jarvis

How did BMX start for you?

We had diversified from housing into import-export, and we sold some goods to Nigeria and nearly lost our money. So we thought, “Right, we’ll import instead.” A passing businessman said to me, “If you’re doing bicycles, import-export, you should look at BMX in America. It’s half the whole market there, and it’s bound to come here. That’s the way to go.”

That was in the autumn of 1979. I thought about it for a few weeks and then suddenly decided I would go to America, have a look, and try to find it.

Being a motocross rider, I knew the motocross magazines came from California, so I thought I could at least speak to those people when I got there and they would point me in the right direction.

I was very busy at the time with housing and racing cars and motorbikes, so I didn’t have much time to think about it. I finally got on the plane at Gatwick to Los Angeles and thought, “Well, on this 11-hour flight I can work out what to do and come up with a plan.”

On the flight, I thought, “How do you bring the sport back to Britain?” It occurred to me that colour magazines would be the key. The magazines in Britain were mostly black and white, but the Californian motocross magazines were in colour. I thought, “If there’s a colour BMX magazine in California, I can bring that back, distribute it in big numbers, and spread the idea.”

What happened when you landed in California?

When I got off the plane, I couldn’t find a hotel. Eventually we went a long way south from Los Angeles in a taxi and found a small motel. The next morning, I looked through the telephone directory and found BMX Plus! magazine listed, and it turned out it was just around the corner.

So I waited for my yellow Mustang hire car to arrive and then went to see Jim Stevens at BMX Plus!. He said, “Did you come on Concorde? Do you know the Queen?” We got talking, and I said I would like to import the magazine, perhaps starting with an order of 6,000 copies.

He said, “Great. I’ll give you UK rights for it.” But when he got the paperwork out, it actually said European rights, which was even better.

The only issue, he said, was that he had to pass it by “the mafia” first, because according to him the mafia controlled all print in America. He told me to come back the next day and we’d sign the deal.

And from there you ended up at SE Racing?

Yes. Jim Stevens told me the man I needed to see was Scott Breithaupt at SE Racing, the fellow who had really formed BMX in America. So I went over there and met the wild Scott and his whole band of pirates.

I looked at the bikes and ordered three bikes, frames and all the parts to go with them, and I was prepared to pay cash. Scott invited me to go to a couple of race circuits with him. The first was Azusa on the Wednesday, and then Corona on the Sunday with Stu Thomsen and others.

Corona was a brilliant day. I even tried the cruiser bike in the cruiser race, which was quite fun. Scott built himself a little ramp and came hammering down the hill flat out and jumped over it to create what he said was a new long jump record.

On the way back, Scott said, “You’re a racer. Shall we go go-kart racing?” I said, “Great.” So we went back to his place, where he had a 125cc two-stroke racing kart. I asked where the circuit was, and he said, “No, we’ve got these cones.” So we went out of his back garden into the road, blocked off three roads against traffic, and one person controlled the traffic, one did the timing, and one raced the kart. You can’t imagine doing that now.

You also went to see Bob Osborn and Bob Haro, right?

Yes. I went from there to BMX Action and saw Bob Osborn, and more importantly Bob Haro. Bob was working there at the time as the artist and graphic designer. He had a sprained wrist, but he made no fuss whatsoever. He got on the bike and rode, and I filmed it.

That footage still exists. Even though he had a sprained wrist, he never complained, and I thought, “This guy is fantastic.” I hadn’t seen tricks like that before, and of course his graphics and designs were just as important.

I also went to Mongoose and a few other places. Mongoose was the big factory. When I looked at the prices there, that was clearly the place to get the product from. I did order some bikes from SE Racing, but Mongoose was the bigger opportunity. So I placed an order on the spot for a container load of Mongoose bikes and equipment, on the basis that they might give us exclusivity in the UK.

So I came back from California with the bikes, the rules and regulations from the NBA, transparencies, promotional materials, and a lot of ideas. It was then just a matter of getting back and writing it all up.

What did you do once you got back to the UK?

When I got back in the middle of December, I got hold of a publication called Brad, which listed all the media outlets, television companies, newspapers, magazines, and radio stations.

My secretary and I went through it and ticked off 400 outlets we thought we should target. By then, thousands of magazines and promotional materials had begun turning up from America. We printed off large batches of black-and-white photos and transparencies, put together copies of the rule book, a press release, and something I wrote called “What Is BMX?” Then we assembled the whole lot into a press pack and repeated that 400 times.

We needed a van just to get everything to the post office. We sent those packs all over the country, mainly to media outlets. Within days, the phone started ringing. I was doing three or four radio interviews a week, television as well, and there was huge interest.

At that stage, the weather still wasn’t ideal for building proper tracks, was it?

No, it was still quite wet, and we couldn’t really build a proper dirt track yet. So I had my people build a temporary wooden BMX track out of plywood. I had a racing car transporter, and I designed the ramps to fit onto it so we could travel around with the setup.

We started taking it to places like Brands Hatch, Lydden Race Circuit, Brockwell Park, and other venues that invited us. We used it to demonstrate BMX and show people what the sport looked like.

I also had something from America called the Mongoose movie. It showed the downhill racing, the colour, the glamour, and the Mongoose factory team. We had that film put into suitcase-style cassettes and made three copies, so our salesmen could carry them around to dealers. They would walk in with a Mongoose bike, open the case, play the film, and by the time they left there would often be a crowd of kids outside. It proved the dealers wrong when they said BMX would never take off.

When did Halfords get involved?

Very early on. Around March or April 1980, David Duffield from Halfords phoned me and said they had been looking at BMX and would like to work with us. I said, “Fine. We need competition. Please help us.”

He said he would send his man down, and one Tuesday morning this fellow turned up on an old pushbike. I was expecting some executive in a Rolls-Royce, but instead it was Geoff Wiles from Halfords.

We went off for something to eat, and the only vehicle left at the house was Chris Cowan’s wife’s old rallycross car, which only had one seat. So I told Geoff he could sit on the floor and hold onto the roll cage, and off we went for lunch. I thought, “This guy’s all right.”

Halfords were a big help to us, and of course they built the first real track at Redditch. We had already built a track at Buckmore Park, but we held back because Halfords were helping us and we wanted to support them, so they got to host the first official race.

That was also when the backyard track really became a focal point, right?

Yes. As soon as it dried up in March or April 1980, we built a half-sized track in the garden at Tenterden. It wasn’t full size, but it had berms, jumps, a tabletop, plenty enough for practice and fun. The kids were on it all the time, and riders would come from all over to try it.

That’s when people like Andy Ruffell started to appear. One day I got a call: “Hello, my name’s Andy Ruffell. Can I come down and try the track?” I said yes, of course. He came down with Cav Strutt, and Cav’s mum brought them. Before long they had joined the team, along with Nicky Matthews, and things really started moving.

You got BMX onto television very quickly too.

Yes. Very quickly. We were on radio, television, children’s shows, and all sorts of media. We were on Swap Shop, Blue Peter, and more. They came to the house in Tenterden and spent the whole day filming.

I didn’t really stop to watch much of it at the time, because I was too busy making sure everyone was comfortable, that the track was ready, and then getting on with work myself. But it was hugely important exposure. That television coverage really helped make BMX visible to children all over Britain.

We also got invited into major indoor shows like Olympia and Earls Court. I asked how much space they could give us, and they gave us about a third of the venue. They even built the track for us if I designed it. At first they tried dirt, but it was too dusty, so I designed a full-width plywood race track with proper berms and transitions.

You always saw BMX as bicycle motocross in the truest sense, didn’t you?

Absolutely. The whole point was to replicate motocross on bicycles. That meant using berms and having some elevation. A flat track wasn’t enough. To make it feel like motocross, you needed a bit of a downhill and a proper flow to it.

That’s why I always preferred tracks that were more inclusive and fun, rather than overly technical and intimidating. Even now, I think modern BMX tracks are often too hard and too harsh for ordinary children. They may look spectacular, but they don’t suit a ten- or twelve-year-old who just wants to go to the local track and enjoy racing.

Whithaugh Park was one of the major early national venues. What do you remember about that?

They phoned up from Scotland and asked if we could build a track for them. I said yes. We went up on the Monday, hired diggers locally, and by Saturday we were racing on it. It was a bit of a panic to get it all done in time, but we managed it.

Whithaugh Park became quite an important venue for a while. It was one of the last tracks I personally built, I think, because by then things were becoming so busy that I had to stay home more at weekends and run the business.

The Ammaco Mongoose team became one of the iconic teams of the 1980s. How did you approach that?

We wanted it to look professional, very American, really. We bought some of that image directly from Mongoose to begin with, and then copied and adapted a great deal from America. I borrowed heavily from the colour, the graphics, the presentation, and the style of promotion.

But more importantly, we tried to make it a real team. We wanted it to feel special. We treated the riders with tremendous respect. I had a theory that if you treated riders like they were important, like they were the experts and the stars, then they would rise to that level.

The only rule I really gave them was: ride all the way across the line. Don’t stop pedalling two yards short.

That approach worked. Andy Ruffell, Tim March, Pete Middleton, and many others all knew what they were doing. My role was not to tell them how to do it, but to support them, treat them properly, and help create the environment.

You also involved the riders in developing the bikes.

Very much so. I’d sit down with Andy Ruffell and ask him what he wanted, what cranks, what head angle, what chainstay length, and so on. We tried to design Ammaco bikes around what the riders actually wanted.

The same applied in road racing too. When we worked with Tony Doyle, who was world champion on the track, we involved him in the bike design. The rider is the expert. They know what they want the machine to do.

When did BMX really take off in terms of sales?

Very suddenly. The sales growth was extraordinary. We went from around 750 bikes to 7,500, then to 15,000, then 27,000. It was a huge boom in a very short space of time.

At one point we were saying to ourselves, “We won’t have another 400% increase this year.” It just couldn’t go on like that forever.

But then things changed just as suddenly. The dollar became a problem, and we couldn’t buy from the better manufacturers in Taiwan at sensible rates, so I began looking at Europe. Eventually I placed a large order, 8,000 bikes, with Batavus in Holland, and after we had paid a substantial amount, they went bust.

At the same time, our dealers had been ordering bikes at a tremendous rate, something like 1,500 a week, and then suddenly realised children were spending money on electronic toys instead. One week it was 1,500 bikes. The next week it was three. Then nothing.

That was around late 1984. Suddenly we had 6,000 bikes left over. Raleigh had hundreds of thousands. The boom collapsed.

That must have been incredibly hard after building it all so quickly.

It was difficult, yes. We didn’t go bust, fortunately, but only because we sold the house and cleared the banks.

Eventually I sold the business for what I could get, stayed with the company for a while, and helped bring Ammaco back into profit with road bikes and mountain bikes. But by then I wasn’t the owner anymore, and once I had done what I needed to do, I walked away.

I had lost the position where I could simply make decisions and act quickly. That freedom had been one of the joys of BMX in the early days.

Do you think BMX changed your life in bigger ways than people realise?

Yes, absolutely. BMX changed Sue and me quite a bit. It changed our family life and, in the end, our marriage. It was an incredible time, but it was all-consuming.

That said, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the buzz. I’m a racer by nature, and I loved the design and the marketing side of it. BMX had all of that. I don’t regret any of it.

When you came to the British BMX Hall of Fame event in 2022, what was that like for you?

I thoroughly enjoyed it, though it was quite emotional. I arrived at the hotel on my own before the rest of the family, and I was looking around not recognising anyone. Then this chap walked past me, and there was something about his walk. I said, “Pete?” It was Pete Middleton. I hadn’t seen him in forty years, but I knew him from the way he walked.

That event triggered a lot of memories. It was a shock in some ways, but a very enjoyable one.

What do you think of BMX racing today?

I think the modern tracks are too hard and too severe for ordinary youngsters. They may be spectacular, but they’re not inclusive enough. I’d rather see softer dirt tracks, proper berms, and something closer to motocross, tracks where young kids can race without feeling frightened or getting hurt all the time.

BMX was supposed to be bicycle motocross. It was supposed to be fun.

Looking back, what are you most proud of?

I think I’m most proud of the way we treated people, especially the riders. We treated them with respect, let them enjoy themselves, and trusted them. We didn’t need to shout at them or burden them with pressure. We created an environment where they could thrive.

I’m also proud that we helped bring BMX to Britain in a serious way. We designed the tracks, built the image, got it into the media, got it into shops, onto television, and into people’s imaginations.

We did it because it was fun. We loved it. We had the money, we put it in, and it paid off. I’ve never looked back with regret.