At the X Games Thursday night in Los Angeles, professional BMX
rider Chad Kagy will show off his high-flying vert ramp tricks to a
nationwide audience live on ESPN.
But the 26-year-old Gilroy native still remembers when his sport
wasn’t so well received, even in California.
Gilroy – At the X Games Thursday night in Los Angeles, professional BMX rider Chad Kagy will show off his high-flying vert ramp tricks to a nationwide audience live on ESPN.
But the 26-year-old Gilroy native still remembers when his sport wasn’t so well received, even in California.
Back in the day, Kagy would get fined for taking his bike out to the local skate park, where only skateboards were allowed.
“I used to go to the Gilroy skate park all alone at 8am and I’d get a $300 ticket. And this is what I do for a living,” Kagy said. “You don’t see businessmen getting tickets for walking down the street with the wrong type of suitcase.”
Since then, Kagy’s come a long way. Now, instead of shelling out greenbacks to other people for his BMX exploits, they’re paying him to do it full-time.
Kagy, who moved to State College, Penn. 4 1/2 years ago, is looking for gold in vert and the BMX freestyle very best trick competition at the 2005 X Games, which begin Thursday.
Kagy has competed in the X Games every year since 1997 and has made the podium twice, once in 1999 and again in 2002. Both times, he took bronze in park.
But just competing in last year’s X Games competition was an incredible accomplishment for Kagy.
At the 2003 Gravity Games, he over-rotated a double back flip and landed on his back, breaking his neck.
“I didn’t even know what happened. I just hit the ground,” Kagy said. “My legs lost feeling for a while, but I got up and rode my bike away.”
An examination a half hour later would reveal some bad damage: Stretched ligaments and broken bones. Kagy had two back vertebrae fused together surgically with two plates and four screws. A year later and after months of physical therapy, Kagy made his return to the sport at the 2004 X Games. He fought nerves to take fourth in vert and eighth in street.
“I did pretty good for having just returned from a broken neck,” said Kagy, who wanted to do a warm-up event prior to the ’04 X Games, but couldn’t because his bike was stolen.
Since his injury, Kagy has fought his way back to being one of the top BMX freestyle riders around. Lately, he’s been keeping a packed schedule. This summer, Kagy spent six weeks traveling with Tony Hawk’s Boom Boom HuckJam Tour and is also competing on the first-ever Mountain Dew Action Sports Tour, an event the rider said is “the best thing to happen in a long time” to the competition side of action sports.
Over the past eight years, Kagy explained, the competition culture has moved away from the small qualifying series that lead to larger one-go invitational events. Without the smaller series, it’s become difficult to qualify for the big events.
The Dew Tour, on the other hand, is a series of five competitions over five months. The first two are qualifiers and whichever riders are the top 18 points earners in each event get to stay on for the final three tour stops. Cash prizes are awarded after each competition, but at the end, the top points leaders get a $75,000 bonus and a truck.
“The Dew Tour combined everything,” Kagy said.
Through two stops of the Dew Tour, Kagy is in second place in the points rankings behind training buddy and good friend Kevin Robinson in BMX vert and in seventh in BMX park.
The X Games, which started in 1995, may be the most well-known action sports competition. The event has been largely responsible for making action sports and names like Tony Hawk, Dave Mirra and Los Gatos’ Ryan Nyquist household names.
Kagy praises the format but has doubts about the competition’s authenticity.
“It’s wild,” he said. “(The X Games) is a weird thing. It’s more of a TV show than a competition, almost like made-for-TV competition.
“It’s an odd set-up, but we’re trying to break the mold and get all of us more coverage.”
Kagy added that rivalries that don’t really exist are often played up by the network.
“Drama and controversy excel on TV,” he said.
Still, the rider knows the X Games have been huge for him and his action sport colleagues.
“It allows me not to have to get a standard 9-to-5 job, which I do not want,” Kagy said.
Since 1997, the year he turned pro, the only job Kagy has had is riding his bike.
Garlic City roots
Growing up in Gilroy, Kagy started out racing at the Gilroy BMX racetrack, which has since shut down. But then he found freestyle and the vert ramp, which he liked because of its creative nature.
“It was more of an outlet for me to be an individual on the bike rather than the racetrack, where you start and go around the track and finish and do exactly what everyone else does,” Kagy said.
When he was young, he copied the tricks his older brother Scott did. As he got older, he met other friends who also rode freestyle. Because there were no local places for them to ride – the closest was the now-closed San Jose Ramp Club – Kagy and his buddies would head out to Christmas Hill Park with their shovels and build their own dirt jumps.
The City of Gilroy was not particularly fond of Kagy and his crew’s ramps.
“They’d get torn down by the city about once a year,” he said.
Kagy’s pro career started almost by accident. At the time, freestyle wasn’t very popular and in his first competition he was placed inadvertently in the pro class, which was still small. Kagy wound up finishing sixth and won $400, more than he could make in a month working part-time at Gilroy’s Sunshine Bicycles.
“I thought, ‘That’s kind of cool. I can do this,'” Kagy said.
Also at that competition, Mat Hoffman, a legend in bike stunt riding, saw the 17-year-old Kagy perform. Hoffman liked what he saw and offered to sponsor Kagy by giving him bike parts.
As Kagy improved, so did the sponsorship. Today, the Gilroy native is sponsored by Mountain Dew, Specialized, DC Shoes and other companies, and even has his own limited edition Mountain Dew can coming out.
Hoffman continued to kick in more financial support and sent Kagy to competitions all over the country and as far afield as Australia.
After graduating from Gilroy High, Kagy attended Gavilan College. But travel for competitions caused him to miss too many classes and he chose to drop out.
“(I thought) well, my head’s still going to be here in 10 years so I might as well take the time to fly around and ride my bike,” Kagy said. “It was an opportunity. I took a chance and it’s working.”
Fighting through adversity
Shortly after he turned pro, Kagy went through some tough times in Gilroy. His parents split up and moved out of town. His brother Scott died in 1998. Additionally, Kagy was having a tough time finding local facilities to train at. But then Robinson invited him to come train at Woodward Park in Pennsylvania, the country’s top BMX camp. Kagy didn’t really want to leave California, but he needed a new start.
“I sure as hell didn’t move to Pennsylvania for the weather,” Kagy said.
Since then, Kagy’s career has taken off. In the past three years, he’s had multiple top 10 finishes, including a gold medal in vert at the 2003 Latin X Games.
As far as style goes, Kagy said he’s known for going bigger and faster than other riders.
“There’s other riders that are more technical,” Kagy said. “I try to go really fast and do really large tricks that most people think are (crazy).”
He was the first person ever to pull this gravity-defying trick in competition: A back flip with a double tail whip. To execute the trick, Kagy whipped the bike around his stationary body – while upside down – before grabbing the seat, bringing himself and the bike right side up and landing on the wheels.
“All of that going 35 miles per hour and jumping (45 feet) isn’t usually normal,” Kagy said.
The NorCal rider is looking forward to performing his heart-stopping stunts in front of a local audience in September. The Dew Tour’s fourth stop is the Toyota Challenge at HP Pavilion in San Jose from Sept. 8-11. He’s been back to the area to visit friends and family, but hasn’t competed here since his big accident in 2003.
“It’s gonna be pretty cool,” he said. “Now I actually get to come back to NorCal and ride.”
