when did you first hear/learn/see bmx??

[markyp]

i can remember being 8 years old,its a september saturday afternoon in 1981 and weve gone to visit family friends across town where we used to live.their son was spoiled rotten and was always the first to have everything i.e grifter,big track,crazy golf in his back garden ,you get the picture,anyways when we get there his dad says 'come and have a look at michaels new bike,its a bmx' a what i thought,never heard of it!! i think it was a team murray or something like that,i was made under protest to take it out for a spin,i wasnt interested in it all as it was too big and i was desperate for a raleigh strika!! when i got back  i was asked my opinion and didnt say much,i couldnt have given a monkeys about this bmx thing,what little did i know!!!

[Jaymz]

November 1984, I'd been happily terrorising the neighbourhood on my 3 Raleigh Tomahawks for a couple of years, I had three because my dad bought them at an auction, red, blue and puke yellow, for some reason I only ever rode the red one at weekends!! Any way On my birthday I was handed this, my first response was, but its not red!!! I was the first kid amongst my friends to get a bmx, an I soon recognised the enormous jumping potential of them and starting taking my dads wood from the shed to build ramps

[theRuler]

A lad round the corner from me used to race on a Team Murray back in 1981, so that was the first BMX I saw.

Then came ET.

[stu27]

i dont think i can actually pinpoint it,which is a shame really
remember doing jumps on me raleigh commando,looking,mooching in halfords,and some of the older lads getting them 1st,as they had paper rounds,and were self sufficient
especially the lad who raced for birmingham wheels,steve grice,fook me,he was good on a bike
suppose thats what started it all for me,a culmination of things

[lk_97]

Well I'd known about them since I was about 6 and my bother had one, but I only heard about skateparks and high end bikes when I was about 12, now it's my favourite thing to do

[markyp]

November 1984, I'd been happily terrorising the neighbourhood on my 3 Raleigh Tomahawks for a couple of years, I had three because my dad bought them at an auction, red, blue and puke yellow, for some reason I only ever rode the red one at weekends!! Any way On my birthday I was handed this, my first response was, but its not red!!! I was the first kid amongst my friends to get a bmx, an I soon recognised the enormous jumping potential of them and starting taking my dads wood from the shed to build ramps

jaymz i had tomahawks too,i had 2 of them before my strika!!

[Jaymz]

November 1984, I'd been happily terrorising the neighbourhood on my 3 Raleigh Tomahawks for a couple of years, I had three because my dad bought them at an auction, red, blue and puke yellow, for some reason I only ever rode the red one at weekends!! Any way On my birthday I was handed this, my first response was, but its not red!!! I was the first kid amongst my friends to get a bmx, an I soon recognised the enormous jumping potential of them and starting taking my dads wood from the shed to build ramps

jaymz i had tomahawks too,i had 2 of them before my strika!!

Whats even funnier is as a kid I always thought they were choppers, it wasnt until i posted an old pic on me on one recently that a member said thats not a chopper its a tomahawk

[Pooch]

My grandad bought me my first Bmx, black team murray and it didn't have bar across the handle bars!!! So that would have been an early one, I should think??? Tried to look it up but can't find it.. Then saw a guy around my cousins way and he was on an old pirranah!! It was red with blue pads and had metal mags on it.. They had about 4 straight spokes on them and I've looked for that one to and can't it!! Hooked

[Discostu]

i see jamez choice in jumpers hasnt changed at all!!   

[Jaymz]

i see jamez choice in jumpers hasnt changed at all!!   

Great taste in jumpers me!!!!!!!

[RATTY]

I was in the same class at school as Andy Ruffell, I saw the grifter conversions just before the mongoose invasion of late 1980

[deeman]

First bmx i ever saw was my cousins.He was a couple of years older than me and was one of thos ekids who had everything when it came out!it was a mk1 mag burner blue and yellow with skyways and black handlebars.i thought it was cool but didnt exactly want one,I had a raleigh STRIKA at the time.I can remember my cousin telling my dad about if you bend a SKYWAY mag you can put it in the freezer and it would straighten itself,and my dad not believing a word of it!I guess i was a bit too young,i didnt get into BMX til the second wave.

[MartyC]

1979 at Harrow Skatepark, I used to skate there all the time (one of the original Harrow Boys) and used to see Andy Ruffell, Cav Strutt and a few others on their Mongooses.  Got to know them all a fair bit and had a ride and was hooked, I never looked back; within a few months I had saved enough to go halves with my mum and step-dad to buy my own Scorpion TX and off I went.

[Spen69]

In the summer of '81 me and Hootski were tearing about at the "bomb-hole" which was a big empty balancing pond for the newly constructed housing estate. I had my Grifter and he had his Halfords Tracker (or Trackstar?) which was a 24" racer with straight bars. My schoolmate Daz arrived one afternoon on an already secondhand red Mongoose Motomag with red coaster Tuffs and proceeded to jump twice as high and twice as far off our ramps as I could on my Grifter and that was it. Clear as day I remember that bike as the coaster was fooked and used to slip but it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen! Can't remember how he'd got it now, but it had come from the US I'm sure and I think his dad had been there working and found it?

Spent the next 6months regretting the Grifter choice from the previous christmas until some local rich-kid got brand new Supergoose for christmas 1981 and his parents sold me & Hootski his TWO (did I mention rich-kid?) old BMX's, an Ammaco 202 and a black Cycle-Pro with yellow OGK's... The rest is a history of stupidity, inuries and probably the best days of our lives (well, up until girls, parties and booze of course!)

And it's been in my blood ever since and still is now!

[Pooch]

Are we all mad!!

[mattuknc]

Are we all mad!!

There's a fine line between madness and genius! 

[donnydresser]

2010 its only just hit donny  but we are a bit behind up north  sta press and y cardigans

[griff]

can't remember when I first heard about about BMX (think it was something on the news on TV), but way before i got my first one I used to pore over the magazines that my newsagent got in
I had already 'modified' my second 2nd-hand chopper with grifter grips, a knobbly back tyre and mudguard removal  as I wasn't able to get the grifter I so badly wanted at the time. I just rode that over whatever jumps I could find.

13th birthday came along in october 1983 and i was the first kid in my area not to have a burner, got my silverfox which I loved to bits - remember the ad in BMX Action and thinking how lucky I was to have a 'real' BMX (because it had been in an american magazine! )

[Gatters]

Early 80's, my mate turned out to play on a piranha.. then my other mate turned up on a piranha   whilst I was on some home made contraption? Anyway lot's of kid's p*ss take later and an eventual snapped frame, Dad got me a Baracuda BMX from our LBS which was a spoked wheel version of the.....yep piranha.....anyway I loved it until I cracked the frame an realised that it was sh*te and drooled over the ammaco freestyler which was in our price range. I never bought that bike as the diamond back took my eye on the day and that was that, sold on BMX!  

[Pooch]

This should have been a good thread...

[snoopy72]

i can remember being 8 years old,its a september saturday afternoon in 1981 and weve gone to visit family friends across town where we used to live.their son was spoiled rotten and was always the first to have everything i.e grifter,big track,crazy golf in his back garden ,you get the picture,anyways when we get there his dad says 'come and have a look at michaels new bike,its a bmx' a what i thought,never heard of it!! i think it was a team murray or something like that,i was made under protest to take it out for a spin,i wasnt interested in it all as it was too big and i was desperate for a raleigh strika!! when i got back  i was asked my opinion and didnt say much,i couldnt have given a monkeys about this bmx thing,what little did i know!!!

suprised a Team murray didn't scar you for life 

[kang]

'80/'81 I think, I can still clearly remember my mate Terry wheeling his new Diamondback across the playground one morning at school. Chrome and black and decals glinting in the sun. That's where it began for me
 

[bobbbbsy]

i cant remember what happened last week 

[Devilock]

I borrowed a BMX in 1983 from Christopher Biggins.

[meticulous]

Winter time 1977-78,  I msde friends with a Canadian guy that came over to stay with his aunt (Peter frank Andrews) and he brought over his bike,  looked like a motorbike (front and rest suspension) without an engine,  that's the first time i Heard of Bmx,  was 3 years later when all the tin murrays landed....