History
The BMX boom began, as many of the recent extreme sports have done, in California. Moto-Cross was big business and teenagers inevitably wanted to join in but simply didn’t have the money to but the machines, and so the next best thing was it’s human-powered equivalent.
Tracks began to spring up across the US as the sport’s appeal to a group who were hungry for low cost competition exploded.
A governing body for the sport in the USA was created in the early 1970s as BMX racing took off properly. It swept across Europe in the late ‘70s and in 1981 the International BMX Federation was founded, and the first world championships were held in 1982. In 1993 BMX became fully integrated into the International Cycling Union (UCI).
Olympic History
On 29 June 2003, the International Olympic Committee decided to include BMX in the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China.