The History of Freestyle BMX — How It Started on a Torker | Torker Racing

The sport of BMX freestyle — every flatland trick, every halfpipe aerial, every street move you've ever seen at the X Games or a skatepark — traces its origins back to a small company in Southern California called Torker. This is the complete, documented history of how it happened.

Before Freestyle, There Was Racing

To understand how freestyle BMX began, you have to understand where it came from. BMX — Bicycle Motocross — grew out of the same Southern California youth culture that produced motocross racing. Kids were doing jumps on dirt bikes, watching AMA motocross on television, and then trying to replicate those moves on the only thing they had: their bicycles. By the mid-1970s, formalized BMX racing had arrived, with tracks, sanctioning bodies, and a growing industry of companies making purpose-built frames.

Torker was founded in 1976 in that exact environment. Steve Johnson had grown up watching his brother Doug race BMX — and wanting a better frame than what was available, their father John Johnson, who had already been running a company called Texon since 1975, helped create the first Torker prototype. Steve renamed the company Johnson Engineering, then Torker. His mother Doris served as bookkeeper. His brother Doug ran a sister company called MAX, which launched in 1980. From the very beginning, Torker was a family operation rooted in authentic Southern California BMX culture.

The early Torker MX — a large Pro-size frame with forward-facing dropouts — quickly established the brand as a serious player in BMX racing. By 1978, Torker had introduced the Low Profile (LP) frame, designed for smaller and expert racers with refined geometry. The LP would become one of the most important BMX frame designs ever made — and the foundation on which freestyle was built.

The BMX Action Trick Team — Where It All Started

The precise moment that BMX freestyle began is documented. In 1978, two employees of BMX Action magazine — R.L. Osborn, a test rider, and Bob Haro, the magazine's resident artist — began experimenting with trick riding on their BMX bikes. They had been asked to do a demonstration at a motocross race; the show fell through at the last minute, but the idea didn't.

According to the BMXmuseum.com documentation of the BMX Action Trick Team — considered the definitive historical record of early freestyle — the team's first public performance took place at the ABA Winternationals in February 1980. Bob Haro was a founding member. The frames they were riding? Torkers.

The BMX Action Trick Team is considered by BMX historians to be the origin point of organized freestyle BMX. What R.L. and Bob Haro were doing in parking lots and at motocross events in 1979 and 1980 — spinning, hopping, lifting the front wheel, developing the vocabulary of movements that would become the sport — they were doing it on low-slung California BMX frames. Torker frames.

Bob Haro and the Torker LP — The Founding Frame

Bob Haro's connection to Torker is not incidental — it is foundational. In 1982, as his profile in the sport exploded and the idea of a dedicated freestyle frame became commercially viable for the first time, Bob Haro and the team behind the Haro Freestyler went to Torker to manufacture it.

The first Haro Freestyler — the frame widely credited as the world's first purpose-built freestyle BMX frame — was manufactured by Torker. This is confirmed by the BMXmuseum.com Serial Number Guide for Torker frames, which documents that the company built the first freestyle-specific frame in 1982 with a serial number ending in "F." Torker's own production records, documented by the frame's serial number system, place this definitively in 1982.

This matters enormously. The Haro Freestyler is often cited as the birthplace of purpose-built freestyle BMX. And that frame was a Torker. The company that made the first freestyle-specific frame in the history of the sport was Torker, operating out of Southern California, using the same manufacturing expertise that had made the LP and MX frames trusted by racers across the country.

Eddie Fiola — The King of the Skateparks

If Bob Haro was the founder of freestyle BMX, Eddie Fiola was the man who took it to the world. Born September 28, 1964 in Bellflower, California — deep in the heart of Southern California BMX country — Fiola began competing in BMX in 1980 and rapidly became one of the most famous freestyle riders in the sport's history.

In the critical early years of his career, Eddie Fiola was sponsored by Torker. The BMXmuseum.com Eddie Fiola interview lists his early sponsors as: "Vans, Oakley, GT, Kuwahara, Max Leathers, Torker, Haro, SE, Redline, Odyssey, Skyway, Shimano, Local Motion, G&S, and probably 50 others I can't remember." Torker came early — when Fiola was first emerging as a force in the sport, before the corporate sponsorships and the magazine covers, he was riding Torker frames.

The BMXmuseum.com forum records specifically document a 1982 Torker LP Eddie Fiola, noting that "Eddie Fiola was sponsored by Bob Haro and the Torker low profile frame was a popular frame to use for flatland and ramp riding." This connects all three threads: the LP frame, Bob Haro, and Eddie Fiola — all centered on Torker during the sport's formative years.

Fiola became known as the King of the Skateparks. He appeared on magazine covers , like BMX Action Magazine ( His first cover was on a Torker ) across the country and was one of a small handful of riders — perhaps eight to ten pros in the entire world, by his own account — who made a living from BMX freestyle in its golden era. When he says it, the scale of what Torker's frames were part of becomes clear: this was the ground floor of an entirely new sport, and Torker was there for all of it.

The 1984 Freestylist — The Rarest Torker Ever Made

By 1983 and 1984, freestyle BMX had gone from a curiosity to a cultural phenomenon. Magazine coverage was exploding. Riders were appearing in films. The BMX Action Trick Team was touring all 48 states and more than 15 countries. And Torker — still a family company in Southern California — was trying to keep pace with the sport it had helped create.

In 1984, Martin Aparijo designed the Torker Freestylist. It was the first frame Torker built specifically for Torker-branded freestyle riding — a purpose-built freestyle BMX frame under the Torker name, following the foundational work of the Haro Freestyler built on Torker's manufacturing line two years earlier.

The Freestylist is historically significant for one devastating reason: very few were made. In November 1984, Torker filed for bankruptcy. Production of the Freestylist was cut short almost immediately after it launched. The frames that exist today are among the rarest in all of old-school BMX collecting. An original 1984 Torker Freestylist is a piece of BMX history — tangible proof of the moment when the sport of freestyle was being born, in real time, in Southern California.

A Complete Torker Timeline — The Golden Era

The Legacy — Why It Matters in 2026

Eddie Fiola said it best in his BMXmuseum.com interview, when asked whether other companies should market to the old-school crowd: "Who are the mom's and dad's of today? Kids of the 80's and 90's, that's who's buying the bikes so give them something they're used to seeing."

He's right. The riders who watched the BMX Action Trick Team at ABA nationals are in their 40s and 50s now. They have disposable income. They remember. And they're looking for something that connects them back to that feeling — the feeling of seeing Bob Haro do something on a bike that nobody thought was possible, in a parking lot in Southern California, on a Torker frame.

That's what Torker Racing is building today. Not a museum piece. A rideable piece of history. The Freestylist reissue, the EK GEN II, the Barbarian GEN II, the MX26 and MX29 — every frame we make carries the same twin top tube DNA, the same Southern California heritage, the same family-built character as the originals.

We're not claiming that freestyle BMX was ours alone. We're saying, with documented historical evidence, that the bike that made the first moves was a Torker. That the frame Bob Haro built the Haro Freestyler on was built by Torker. That Eddie Fiola's early career was on Torker frames. And that 50 years later, we're still here.

Freestyle was born on a Torker. Now you can ride one.