You can’t thumb through a 25 year old Instagram video on the toilet. Modern riding and its coverage seems to ephemeral. It’s amazing you can see what happens around the world instantly, but at the same time it’s harder to know what’s going on.
Chris Job
Age?
48
Location?
Wivenhoe, Essex
Never stopped, New Starter or Comeback King?
I’ve never not had a BMX if that answers the question.
How did you initially start riding? What drew you to BMX?
I must have seen BMX on Blue Peter, someone jumped over the presenters in the Garden (the one Sol Campbell *allegedly* smashed up). It looked awesome. After much doe-eyed pleading I was taken to Halfords in Bury St Edmunds and came out with a bog standard blue Burner. £97. Stoked!
What was the early Wolverhampton scene like when you started out?
My first riding was in sleepy Suffolk, Bury St Edmunds. We had the humps on the waste ground that is now the cinema, I distinctly remember my first jump to ball crusher on the stem on those. BSE was so rural and quiet, most kids I knew on BMXs were the edgy ones in my class, a frisson of danger eh!
I moved (back) to Wolverhampton in 1983, when I say Wolverhampton you have to remember I’m the offspring of well-meaning Guardian readers so I was in a nice leafy village on the outskirts (Codsall, it’s where Barry from Auf Wiedersehen Pet aspired to live). A LOT of kids in my school and the years above and below rode so we had quite a good scene. They all wore Fila and Tacchini, I turned up from Suffolk with a homemade haircut and a donkey jacket from the market. I felt like an alien.
Anyway we had a big dirt mound in the village carpark that we dug a jump into, early Chad Herringtons we were as it was great for flyouts landing uphill on grass. I managed a flawless brakeless 540 tyretap on this thing one day. Phenomenal, never repeated. Rumours went round that Mark “Whoppa” Watkins who rode for Halfords turned up one day and jumped the entire thing.
That was probably where I rode for 4 years solid with the occasional trip as I got older into big scary Wolverhampton to ride the Civic Banks, the occasional race at Norton Canes Greyhound track and some equestrian centre.
My dad really couldn’t see why I loved BMX so much so it took a fair bit of bargaining to get taken somewhere (I now realise he was, like any parent, knackered and wanting to do his own things at weekends, like do up our crumbling house and grow raspberries, fair enough).
Numbers dwindled I would say from 1986 to three or four of us, so we went exploring a bit more.
There was a half-pipe made largely out of tree-trunks with no decks on one side in a youth centre in Low Hill, about 3 or 4 miles and a different world away. I was shitting myself the entire time I went there, it was slightly rough and I was a sheltered ginger kid who was now also a well-meaning Guardian reader. Met a few more Wolves riders there (Benbow and Stu to be precise) and started venturing up to Birmingham Wheels a bit more.
First time I went there blew me away. So many riders – I’d seen Eddie Keogh in ABMX doing kickturns at Aston University and there he was, along with seemingly hundreds of riders all on bikes I’d only seen in magazines doing all the new tricks. Again, Birmingham terrified me. I think I should have taken up cross-stitch.
Am I going on too much?
I can’t mention the 80s without getting onto my partner in crime, Wil Evans. In 1988 I was so into BMX. I was largely making my way through everyone who was quittings old bikes as I got bigger, slightly better and bikes stayed rubbish. There was Richard Evetts and James Cannons still semi-riding in my village, then Wil, from two villages over (Pattingham) swapped his Muddy Fox for a Rickman Freestyler. Fresh blood!
Wil had a certain level of drive that maybe I inherently lack and together we stepped it up a notch, getting to other places and starting to go to BFA contests and have the confidence to talk to riders from other places.
I’d done a ‘zine with Richard and James called Facial Contortion. Me and Wil did a bumper issue of that in ’89 and then decided to relaunch. “Epic of Gilgamesh” was poo-pooed as a muted title, so “Twenty” it was. There’s a couple of issues of that. I would say our approach was best described as Irreverent.
We got a good review of Mark Noble in the issue Invert where he had himself on the cover with the free friendship band, and that’s where I started to realise BMX wasn’t this big mysterious sport full of unattainable people, more a secret code of like-minded people who were stoked you were involved.
This was a question about the 80s Wolverhampton scene wasn’t it? In a nutshell, it was patchy.
You’d occasionally venture into town and meet some riders at the Civic Banks, but to my eyes it was scary and rough in Wolves (it probably wasn’t). So in the end my scene became the national scene – once me and Wil passed our driving tests we’d go to Birmingham Wheels and meet up with riders from elsewhere.
How did you view the organised contest scene back then?
I’m going to surprise you here. I bloody loved it. Contests were a place you were guaranteed to meet up with people, get to know more riders, swap numbers, fail to sell ‘zines, give them away, buy Bench t-shirts off Hild. I think we all viewed it similarly, I can’t remember many people taking the actual competing that seriously.
Hang on….But didn’t you actively rebel against the contest format? (I’m thinking American adventure here)
Not at all! I really wanted to be involved and was happy to enter. Problem was I wasn’t particularly good on a bike. I could do decades, double tailwhips and a few other tricks but I just liked riding in general. I grew a foot in a year so was 6 foot 3ish on terrible, welded up 80s frames with bent forks, my balance point was somewhere near Mars, our local mini had angle iron coping..
Those American Adventure runs I did, I ran out of flatland tricks fairly quickly. When it came to the quarter pipe runs, I’d never really ridden a quarter pipe before. We’d just met the St Neots lot (Jay Keen, Tim Bone etc), they stuck a full face on me.
So how to fill a run? It was more an improvised dickabout routine to mask my inherent shyness. I should have done some Dave Slade bike wrestling. Looking back, we were all awkward teenagers finding ourselves. I think we all helped each other out a little. Unfortunately Wil filmed most of it and Ross (Milne) insists on unearthing most of it and sticking it online!
Am I correct in think you were one of a handful of writers of incendiary fake letters to magazines?
Guilty as charged!
Any memorable examples?
I had one printed. I think it was 1995ish. My Nom de Plume was LC Carambano (thanks to Steff Evans for that, I think it was a Spanish translation of “Shiny and Chrome, Just Like an Icicle” from a Beastie Boys song for his Hispanic Mechanic Low Rider Company he ran for 25 minutes – “Chromo y Lustroso Como Una Carambano”).
I’d hit my rebellious phase, I think the chaps at Standard were to thank for that, and Ride had run a bike test on an S&M with a 1” threaded clamp-on stem fork. In my eyes that was just the most dreadful solution to the stem fork gyro problems we all had at the time. I think I already had an STA with an aheadset on it and had fitted a gyro to it in about 20 minutes thanks to a file, a dirt skirt made from an ice cream tub lid, and a drill down the side of the star-nut washer for the front brake. It was really simple to do.
George French was also producing some really good ideas, and some really bad ones. Steff had made an awesome solution to loosening headsets as an M.Eng project. Sophisticated but simple answers to crap bikes were out there but being overlooked (I think Mark had written that the S&M route was perfect for freestyle) so I just let rip under a nom de plume.
Some bits weren’t very PC either, certainly not with year 2020 hindsight. I was most entertained to see it printed, with another fake one underneath that I knew instantly was from Stuart King (I forget his pen name). We walked up to each other at the Backyard Jam that year and introduced ourselves by our fake names!
How did you initially start writing for the Magazines? Which mags did you initially write for?
My first article was in Dig issue 2. I’d been to the B.S. Finals in Chicago in 1993 and thought I’d do a write up. There you have it. I wrote it all down, handwritten, bad writing, posted it over to Will Smyth in Belfast. He typed it up (sorry!), it went in the magazine. Totally stoked.
It went from there. The energy and look of all the early issues of Dig was amazing. Their sporadic appearance (it took about 4 ½ years to get to issue 8) only added to it. I’d either write up something I’d been to or do some kind of opinion type article (Dig Your Own Grave type thing).
Will was happy to run what I wrote, I think I could/can write quite well – he only edited the odd thing out, I had a particular paragraph I wrote about Chad Herrington at the 97 worlds that I’m really glad never made it to print! Reading some of my old articles is like looking in a mirror to a bit of a pretentious dick. But isn’t being a pretentious dick often a part of becoming the ever-changing you?
Was there a feeling that you were “sleeping with the energy” by writing for Ride?
I had to think long and hard about first writing for Ride. There was some definite friction between the camps back in the day (Bollocks with an X!), and a lot of my mid 90s Rides were ripped in half. But you know, time, age and experience is a mellower.
I think Mark asked me to write up a Bike Show contest I’d helped run from the early 2000s. I asked Will Smyth and he wasn’t that stoked on the idea. I qualified it by thinking that if I didn’t do it, nobody would, and Dig wouldn’t cover that kind of BMX thing. I think I did it by asking all the kids at the school I taught at to give me their feedback on the event, so it stoked all them by getting their names and words in print.
They’d better still be riding… come to think about it they are old enough to join Ride On now!
You also went onto write a book! How and why did this happen?
Will Smyth routinely punted anything he got asked about BMX that had an educational slant my way. This book was one of those times. A publisher in London wanted to do an Extreme Sports Series, pitched at school libraries and whatnot. I went down to meet up with them (took in Millwall vs Wolves as well, here was me thinking mid 80s Wolverhampton was scary). They showed me the format they were after, I went home and knocked out the first draft in 2 hours. I had to edit it down as I’d written too much (just like these answers), so I cut out all the interesting bits. Interestingly I had to further dumb it down reduce word count for the US version.
I was so aware of how bad books on BMX were in general, so I wanted it to look as good as possible – I got Steve Jackson to meet up with the publishers with his entire photo library and we got some really good images in there (he got some good money for it too). We all met up in London to look at the final draft and there was this dreadful backflip photo on the front cover! It was a copyright free image they had. We told them outright how bad it looked, Steve offered them any photo of his for free, but no, it was staying. I’ve had similar experiences recently offering advice to local councils about their skateparks.
How many copies have you sold?
No idea. I got a flat fee for writing it (£1200 if I recall) so I mustn’t grumble, it was dead easy. If Will Smyth wasn’t straight edge I’d owe him a pint or two. The next round of Laser Quest at Hastings Pier is on me!
Did you do a signing?
I signed a copy I gave to Chris Hamer if that counts…
You travelled to the US to ride during the 90’s/ How did this come about. Where did you go and what impact did it have on you?
I spent the second year of my degree at the University of Illinois in 1991/92. An amazing experience. I went expecting BMX everywhere, how wrong I was. The whole year on campus I met two guys in 2B tshirts at an Anthrax concert, none of us had a pen to swap numbers, and there were some awesome proper yokels riding Hutches with the full aerospeeds (non ironically) one day. I found a little ramp in the backyard of a church that was open two hours a week.
That summer though Wil Evans flew over, and with two university friends we hit the Amtrak USA rail pass with a vengeance. 10000 miles in 40 days, with a bike taken apart in an army bag. America is not non-car friendly to put it mildly, so every single place we arrived downtown and had to either carry these bags like Geoff Capes lifting those massive marbles onto plinths, trying to find a bus to get us to somewhere to stay, or build and ride with a big folded bag. Character building is the term for it.
We took the train to Austin and just walked into Trend, and were so stoked to be greeted as equals and taken under everyone’s wing. We go to know Sheps and Ruben, all the Homeless guys, Tina and Gregg at Trend let us help out for parts, it was just awesome. In San Diego I randomly went for a ride down the beach one night (once I got home and watched Aggroman I realised we’d stayed in the motel behind where Kevin Jones filmed his section and Eddie Roman did his footplant tricks) and met Richard Zabzdyr (RIP) and a guy called Sean who were both amazing at flatland, so we rode with them for a few days. It made me realise just what a connector BMX was wherever you were in the world.
A year later Will and I decided to go back for a bigger trip. Wil was always a bit more forward than me and basically invited us to stay at the Standard House by talking to Krt and co at the 93 KOC. We rocked up on a greyhound bus in Davenport, got a taxi to Rampage, and stayed for about a week.
There was a Rampage Jam, so many people who would be a Who’s Who turned up (Luc-E, Joe, Taj etc). Naturally I was intimidated as hell by the level of riding (have I said I am unblessed with bike riding skills yet?) and sat silently all day. Going to Denny’s or something that night got me out of my shell and again, I realised that everyone is just a person who rides, nobody cared how good you were if you were into it.
After that we rented a car and drove! 1800 miles or so to Sacramento for a really low profile 2 Hip where we rescued an abandoned Grant Smith and were subjected to a night at Mutt’s House (that’s an entire article on its own).
Somehow we ended up judging the vert and mini contest for Ron, I think that was my first judging experience).
Then we drove down through to SoCal, across to Austin in one go (27 hour drive), reconnected with the Homeless lot and loved John Yull’s hybrid Mansfield/Texas accent. From there we imposed ourselves on the Hoffman crew, and back up to Rampage, we bloody loved it at Rampage. I think the Standard crew “got” me and Wil more than anyone else. A lot of laughs. The 93 BS finals in Chicago rounded out an amazing 7 weeks where we spent $5 each on accommodation. Five dollars. Like I said already, BMX at the time was such a connector, like a secret code, and everyone we met was stoked that we were into riding, and had gone to the trouble to get to where we were, so were made to feel welcome.
The riders from those days, and in the UK too, have gone on to shape BMX into what it is now, and through what I have done in magazines and contests, I hope I’ve done my little bit to help.
Your Cheeky Monkey Video section is to this day one of my favourite bmx sections.
It captured the essence of having fun riding. Is this approach to riding something that has diminished in modern bmx? Why?
I can’t really speak with any great authority on modern riding, as I don’t ride with many younger people, but are people having less fun? Maybe. We just rode. A bit of flat, a bit of jumping off a wall, a bit of framestand down a hill. I’d just do what I could do, if it looked fun, that’s all the better. I certainly didn’t practise or have much drive, I wasn’t the most intense when it came to learning tricks, I’d rather enjoy myself and have a chat in between trying to pull something. I guess that’s why I moved over into writing and organising, a way to stay involved in what I loved being involved in!
You recently posted “To my mind the early 90s were the greatest times in BMX”.
What was it about that period that made it special?
It’s everything isn’t it? A perfect storm of being young. Not too young to have to get a lift everywhere, not too old to need to “settle down”, and having very few responsibilities meant you could pretty much take off and go where you wanted whenever you wanted. I guess riders in their late teens/early 20s have that today, but let’s be honest, BMX being absolutely dead was what made it so great. We had a secret society hiding in plain sight.
You knew that if you met someone who rode you were pretty much 95% guaranteed to be friends. Doing something that was viewed as so lame by the general public, but that was being pushed so hard by those that had kept riding just made it amazing. The camaraderie was brilliant.
A weeknight or 5 hour round trip to ride some awful miniramp in Reddish or Chapel-en-le-Frith? Let’s do it. Drive to Shrewsbury to sit in the rain and buy sweets from Ken Easom? My non-riding friends (I had a couple) and family didn’t quite get it, but it was the best.
Friends made for life. I think the Zoom BMX pub quizzes we did in lockdown showed that. Low-res squares of 40-somethings from all round the place making a question about a frame turn into a ten minute reminiscence of halcyon days. I really hope the younger riders today can look back (and I mean a proper one, not one done in an opposite air) can do the same.
I would probably say the same but does this just make us stereotypical old men (or old bmxers)?
Absolutely. But you know, I teach all these kids, and you only see a few that you know are stoked on what they do and appreciate what they’ve got. BMXers are the same, I see a lot at events who don’t look like they’re having much fun. Mike Hucker is the closest thing we have to a modern rider who sees BMX for how it should be in my opinion.
What were the first organised events you got involved with? Why did you feel the urge to contribute in this way?
I used to chat to Roy and Diane a lot at the later BFA contests and really appreciated the work they put in, and slowly started to help out. I qualified as a teacher in 1998 and bought a knackered house (let’s not mention slightly toxic relationship) and this took me out of the loop a lot more than I realised, plus my shoulder kept dislocating every time I looked at a bike, and I had a classic 90s BMXers’ glass back. So riding had a back seat, and getting involved in contests was a great way to help me stay in the sport – just watching something didn’t do it.
Zach (Shaw) and Shaun (Scarfe) were starting up four-1-four to help run events. Zach asked me to judge King of Street initially, from there we ended up doing the Bike Show contests, the Urban Games from 2001 til it ended, Board X, NASS and a few more. BMX chameleon that I was, I ended up doing all the flatland at these events. From this I ended up helping Whiteski out with Level Vibes, all sorts.
Stephan Prantl asked me and Shaun to go judge the BMX Masters in 2005, we were shown to a room with some paper, a printer, and some clipboards. Ah, I thought, we’re running the whole riding side of this. I fired up someone’s laptop and co-ordinated the whole thing. Barely saw the outside world(s). I seemed to then do that for the next 12 or so years until it went small again and I could go really enjoy hanging out at the Jugendpark again.
What did you feel you brought to events that organisers seemed to lack?
For a starters we all rode/used to ride, so we knew what we were talking about and could stick our oar in with the infrastructure.
Zach was very good doing that(!). I could bust a mean excel spreadsheet out so as well as judging we would do all the processing of scores – this lead to us actually looking at the nuances of scoring, judging, processing, and realising there was a lot of things wrong with simply watching and plucking a number seemingly out of thin air.
I’d also end up commentating when Grotbags or DJ passed out/lost their voice, or couldn’t make it. It’s just like being a teacher, you switch it on when the mic comes on.
What were the challenges you both faced when setting this series up?
It’s essentially easy to organise a contest series. Email or call the parks that you want to use, they were generally stoked to be on board. Some more than others. Sponsors are generally very obliging, again it helps that you all know each other from years back. I am by nature not very pushy, whereas Zach is, so he got a few more eclectic sponsors on board compared to me (The Vimto energy drink that I’ve forgotten the name of, and getting a round of the vert series on Regent’s Street as part of Gumball 3000 spring to mind).
The hardest part is the actual contest – blue arsed fly time. Ensuring you have enough judges, prize bags, sheets, processing scores, MCing, finding a bloody plug for the speaker, inevitable printer and microphone malfunctions. It’s knackering, but rewarding, and the time when I’d really love to ride a bike is after the contest but I’m always done in by then.
Tell us about the judging system you developed and why you thought there was a need for it?
As mentioned before, processing scores and well as judging meant you looked at how what you had watched ended up on paper. One year at NASS all the numbers came out and we saw the rider who ended up in first place based on averaging scores had actually been placed second by four judges and first by one, but that judge had big gaps in his numbers that outweighed all the other scores. Now you could try and train all the judges to use “similar numbers” but that’s essentially nonsense.
Me, Shaun, Grotbags and Effraim sat in a sweaty tour bus by the dirt jumps and hashed out a system based on rankings, so each judge’s opinion is weighted equally, and scores can be essentially just for them. We’d top and tail the highest and lowest rankings out to iron out anomalies, only using all 5 judges’ scores in a tie. My brother-in-law wrote a program for it, it was awesome but a little glitch, we used it for years.
Next up was the scores themselves. Judging is SO hard. Especially qualifying. Once you go above 20 riders it’s rubbish. There is now way you can remember what everyone has done and fairly give someone a score and compare that score to someone 30 or 40 runs previously. The human brain literally can’t do that. Making notes on a run is nigh on impossible. You watch judges writing notes, they miss tricks. People are always swayed by emotive situations, so if someone sticks something big at the end of a mediocre run it can easily bias a score.
Zach first tried scoring everything he saw, adding it up at the end 1-16 per trick, transfer, line, add it all up at the end, stick it through the ranking system. Jenny (Pugh) wrote an amazing google sheet so we could run it real time at contests. Such a good system. We could have judges who never took their eyes off the riding and judge everything in front of them. It didn’t matter if you couldn’t remember a run from an hour before, it had been judged using the same method. I could go on. I won’t.
The system received some criticism from some riders. How did you feel about this? What was their issue?
Never any complaints when we ran it at the BMX series. We put on the 2016 and 2017 worlds at NASS, and ran the system then. Jose Torres from Argentina won Pro Park in 2017 and it all kicked off! He was amazing. But not that well known. How could someone unknown win?? That’s what put people’s noses out of joint.
We had a solid team of judges with years of riding experience, and they loved the system. For once in their judging lives they weren’t having to use some crystal ball. But naturally some riders involved were not happy and RideUK ran a load of stuff about it. If you took the time to watch over the runs, Jose clearly won, but I think James Jones did some mad high flairwhips, and Webby ripped it up, but with nowhere near as complete a run as Jose, who went under the radar as he wasn’t known.
If you watch as a spectator, or as a mate of a rider, or are another rider in the event, you won’t watch as closely as a judge, and you’ll be swayed by a big trick or two with the loudest crowd reaction (which for NASS isn’t that loud!). I think Jose then winning BMXCGN Spine a week later, and the Simpel Session that winter was something of a vindication of our methods.
Whats the story with the series currently? I understand that Zach has stepped back from it? How come?
We had a break for a bit, the worlds definitely burnt us out. Before COVID I did the first of a new vert series for the year, and sacked off the judging. Jams for each group, prizes for everyone. So much nicer, a lot less hassle. Zach is having a longer break, we have other lives! He’s always welcome back.
Has your enthusiasm for organising and setting up events been reduced by the reaction of riders?, press? venues? Sponsors?
The park series was disappointing in terms of rider support. Sometimes it was amazing – Stourbridge springs to mind, it was West Midlands Massive, but other times it seems people just couldn’t be bothered to come. We have a hardcore of riders who would come all the time, and they get what we were doing.
It wasn’t so much the contest for them, it was the social side of it, an excuse to meet, which is what the old comps were for me. Press is kind of non-existent now isn’t it. If you wanted it covering, you had to do it yourself. I’m not into self-promotion all that much. I can’t fault some venues – Mount Hawke is the greatest park in the UK, that’s all I have to say. One that rhymes with “Sock Nitty” isn’t!
I’ve always been stoked on the support from sponsors – Trev at Grind, Ian at 4down, Stu at Seventies, Mark at CSG, Ronnie at Total, Grant at BSD. Always down to help even if it’s just a niche vert event. I was always stoked on how the riders that came to events reacted to the comps, I would have liked it if a few more riders got past the idea of a “contest” and came to just enjoy themselves!
How often do you ride?
Embarrassingly little.
What are the barriers you face to riding on a regular basis?
Age shouldn’t be a barrier, but I guess life surrounding being older is the barrier. I love riding bikes full stop, and to be honest a weekend in North Wales on an MTB does me more good than a weekend at a skatepark.
BMX hurts so much more than it used to and the disconnect between my brain knowing what to do and my body carrying out the instructions grows with each gap between riding session
I’ve got two kids and the best wife in the world and they are in every sense my priority in life. Tessa likes riding and Dougie is getting into WCMX, which I’d love to help grow as a sport, but I will never push them into anything. If my spare time is taking Tessa to football or Dougie swimming, or going canoeing as a family then I am happy. BMX will always be there, I don’t care how often I physically get to ride to be honest.
How has the rise in digital culture changed the bmx scene? (for good and bad)
Less chance for nostalgia. You can’t thumb through a 25 year old Instagram video on the toilet. Modern riding and its coverage seems to ephemeral. It’s amazing you can see what happens around the world instantly, but at the same time it’s harder to know what’s going on. 26 years ago we ALL knew the worlds were in Cologne and used Roy Winfield’s hand-drawn map to get there. Now if you don’t know where to look, you might not even know what is happening.
What do you miss about the BMX scene of times gone by?
Laughs and talking nonsense.
What’s next for you?
Keep on doing a few events in time, help my kids find what I found in BMX with whatever niche they want to find.
Any last words?
I think I’ve said enough xx