The whole BMX racing scene in our area died at the end of
the summer in 1984. We all had our
reasons to be done with it, but the reality was that the fad that had started a
few years before had simply run its course.
BMX freestyle on the other hand was booming. Laid back.
No rules. Complete freedom to
ride how and where you wanted. A liberty
of sorts to flaunt your own style. A fun
and flashy two wheeled BMX revolution. Race
coverage was taking up less and less space in the BMX magazines. This new trick riding trend was taking over
at breakneck speed. Our magazine heroes
were RL Osborn and Mike Buff, the BMX Action trick team from California. They spent their summers touring, traveling
to perform shows, introducing the world to this new way of riding BMX bikes. They were living the dream. Our dream.
So very far from the epicenter of this new BMX movement, we
also wanted to start our own trick team.
But how could a small bunch of kids living in a tiny Atlantic Canadian rural
town like us make that happen? We didn’t
have any money. We didn’t have our driver’s
license. After carefully contemplating
our options, we approached the owner of our local supermarket asking for
permission to use his parking lot. He
gave us the go ahead. Now, all we needed
to do was to plan our demonstration and hope that some people would show up to
watch. Luc seems to remember it as being
part of the official opening of the new Saint-Antoine Save Easy. My take is that we followed the BMX Action trick
team’s lead and simply made hand written posters and put them up around town,
kind of like posted signs announcing a yard sale.
The thing that we both remember for sure is that our very
first demo was on a cloudy Sunday afternoon in September of 1984. Back when stores were closed on the last day
of each weekend. I’m really not sure how
many people came to see us because they saw our posters or even from word of
mouth. Save Easy was on Main street and
I remember people driving by and simply stopping to see what was going on. That and the fact that kids actually played
outside in those days, naturally migrating to where others were gathered. Add each of our families and we had a small
audience worth performing for. We were so
pumped!
Luc, Paul Arsenault, the late Danny Cormier (RIP my friend) and
I rode in that show. We had practiced
our routines and planned out the sequence of our tricks. A local photographer showed up. I’m not really sure how he knew about what we
were doing. These pictures were all
purchased from him. In the next year,
Paul and Danny would slowly lose interest in BMX. But for Luc and I, a seed had been
planted. We definitely wanted more of
this. We had become BMX freestyle artists...
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