The story nobody wants to report

My friend Jack Baruth, using the pen name Jim Boswell, wrote this article for BMX Basics years ago. BMX Basics was his site and he had some very interesting articles in it, including this one. I learnt a lot from Jack and I am glad to have him as my friend, even though we have never met in person.

Recently, there were some posts in Facebook about high-end BMX frames. Some pretty influential riders were praising these frames to the skies. This sends the wrong message to kids just starting out in racing. I should know. I started out with a crappy bike but I won races with that bike. I think Lance Armstrong was right...its the rider, not the bike. I thought it would be great if I posted this article up because it is very relevant. Hopefully, someone will learn something from it

The story nobody wants to report.

Did you ever play 'make-believe' as a kid? If you did, or even if you didn't, let's play it together, now. Let's make-believe that we are the people in charge of a large bicycle company, selling BMX, trail, and flatland bikes. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year buying advertising, paying for our factory team, bribing the color mags to keep them from trashing our products in print, and promoting our brand in general. It's tough work. Worse yet, we long ago lost the battle for "coolness" to the Standards and S&Ms of the world. About the best thing anybody has to say about our bikes is that they are a good value.

Still with me? Okay, good. Let's pretend it's World Championships time. We pay to fly our top riders to the Worlds. Our Pro rider doesn't make the main - oops! That's yet another main event in which we won't be represented. In fact, it's hard to find a main event which features our bikes. Looks like another wasted weekend, right?

Except... We receive an email stating that one of the World Champions used one of our bikes to win! And better yet, he used the cheapest bike we make of that type, a bike that originally sold for under two hundred dollars! Best of all, there were photos and videos taken that clearly show our bike winning the whole thing! What are we going to do? Should we sponsor this guy? Should we buy ad space? Should we even verify that the email is true?

Well, if "we" were pretending to be Seattle Bike Supply, doing business under their brand name "Redline Bicycles", we would probably do anything but what Redline has done - that is, sit on the information and not breathe a word about it to anyone. Oh, yes - that is what they have done.

As reported earlier on the BMX Basics front page, Raul Ruiz Astorga, my friend and houseguest, won the World Championship Challenger Cruiser class on a Redline 444. For those of you who aren't aware of what a Redline 444 is, it is a tri-moly cruiser weighing a solid thirty pounds and retailing in most shops for around two hundred bucks, maybe less. With the exception of the hard-to-find Huffy Radius 24", it's probably the cheapest "race-ready" cruiser to be sold in the past five or six years.

I purchased two used RL444s from a BMX Basics reader last year, a 1998 and a 1999 model, for the princely sum of $200 - and I really thought, after looking at them in the cold light of day, that I had paid too much. Only my general sense of Redline-related nostalgia permitted me to justify the purchase. "I'll have some backup frames in case I break my PL-24," I told Mrs. Boswell, but truth be told I figured the bikes would spend the rest of their lives in my basement.

When Raul told me that he wanted to race Cruiser in the World Championships, I offered him the free use of either of my 444s, an offer I also made to Andres Barrios. Neither of the bikes had a functioning crankset, so Raul and Andres installed some used cranks, some new grips and brake pads, and they were ready to rock - on bikes that weighed half again what their competition would be riding and didn't have Super Box Stays, Monocoque Construction, Mono-Tubes, True Temper OX Platinum Tubing, or any of that other good stuff. I figured that Raul and Andres would use their Cruiser laps as warm-up laps for their "real" rides in 20" Challenger.

They both made the semis with little difficulty. Andres put a foot wrong in his semi and didn't make the cut to the main, but Raul sailed through, lined up for the main, and blew everyone else away to take the World Championship (for the NBL, anyway).

It took a couple of hours for the significance of Raul's win to sink into my mind. He had won the Worlds on an entry-level bike, a bike built in Taiwan at a raw cost of under a hundred dollars, a bike that most local-track 15 Cruiser riders wouldn't be caught dead on! Not since Shannon Williams won the ABA Grands on a steel Team Murray frame - that his father cut apart, added two inches to the top and down tubes, and welded back together - has there been such a Cinderella story in this sport. This was great news for Raul, and great news for the Bolivian team, and great news for his new sponsor, Kami Racing, but it was also great news for all of us out there in Average BMX Rider-Land. It conclusively demonstrated that my constant mantra here on this website, "Spend money on your riding, not on your bike," was correct. It was news that could put hope into the heart on every kid out there on a cheap bike.

I contacted Redline. I emailed BMX webmasters all over the world. And I sat back and waited for the news to be posted, for Redline to give Raul a new Proline in exchange for the World Champion RL444, for BMX Mania! to mention it... and I waited... and I waited... and heard nothing. This news, for better or for worse, would be blacked out.

I could understand why some of the BMX news outlets would ignore it - who cares what kind of bike somebody's riding? I knew the color mags would pretend it never happened - after all, they depend on ads, and nothing pays for ads better than selling $400 aluminum frames that cost $125 to make. But why would Redline ignore it?

Perhaps they ignored it because it simply didn't fit in with the industry worldview - that Winning Costs Money. To win, you need a $1500 bike with titanium washers and triple box stays. You need a personal trainer, a forty-five-week schedule, full factory support, and a brand-new neon racing outfit. The idea that a rider could come to America, play Nintendo 64 eight hours a day, ride around my house a little bit, and win the Worlds on a $200 bike was so far over their heads they had to pretend it didn't happen. The problem is, it did happen. Raul and Andres proved once again that anyone with the right talent and dedication can win it all. No factory support needed.

I'm not saying we should all go out and buy old Redline 444s. I let Raul and Andres keep the bikes, and I don't know where to find any more. What I'm saying is that BMX is about riders, not bikes. It's about heart, not factory box vans. It's about you, not the GT Bicycles Marketing Department. If you aren't winning, stop blaming the bike, your parents, the track operator, the phases of the moon - look inside and see what you need to do to win. Assuming, that is, that you really want to win. I've been very happy in BMX with nothing but local wins to my credit.

If you do want to win, though, what better way to do it that on a four-year-old, tri-moly, bargain-basement bike? Congratulations to Raul and Andres yet again for proving me right. I think it's the first time