BMXers aren't all bandits, this is an athletes' sport

Tom Ritzenthaler has spent a lifetime battling the impression that BMX riding is a past-time for young hoons.
"Just recently I was talking to a gentleman with an equestrian background who thought BMX riders just weren't athletes and I had to bite back a laugh, I told him that I thought that the horses were the athletes in his sport, which didn't go down too well."
Ritzenthaler has nothing against equestrian as a sport but he can't believe that BMX still has to put up with that kind of prejudice.
"It's degrading at times ... they think we're a bunch of troubled kids who listen to punk rock music," he said Ritzenthaler, a native of Columbus, Ohio has designed and is building Whangarei's new BMX track at Pohe Island - a project that will give Whangarei the country's top BMX course for the nationals next April.
"It's a big boost for the club to have the best track designer in the world basically helping to create a world class facility out of what was the town dump," Whangarei club spokesman Stu Bell said.
The genial American is an expert in a young sport that began developing in the late 1970's and for many reached maturity just recently, when it was made an Olympic sport in Beijing this year.
"In the early stages (of the sport's development) at our World Cup events you could pick the rider who you thought was going to win and he'd probably win, now you can't pick it - competition has improved so much," he said.
Ritzenthaler has moved with it and is now the world's pre-eminent track designer - demonstrated when he was chosen to build the Olympic track in Beijing.
"I got together with (Olympics BMX cycling coordinator) Johan Lindstrom in California and we drew the whole track up on bar napkins, the whole facility, buildings and all, so it wasn't all my design but probably about 90 per cent," Ritzenthaler said.
The design was a stunning success and the Whangarei track is sure to be just as successful when it is completed early next month. Ritzenthaler doesn't use a complicated design, it all just comes naturally. He was a BMX nut from an early age, his father owned a construction company and the family started building BMX tracks in the early 1980s.
"I've carried on from there, I mean I've been on a Bobcat since I was nine," he said.
The track will be a combination of a club track and one that will challenge elite riders with tandem straights - or straightaways - giving it two levels of difficulty.
"Worldwide, there are only a few tracks in each country that are up to international standards and what we want to do is ... make it possible for everyone to have access to those tracks so it helps the development of the sport," he said.
The designer said there are already a few promising riders from New Zealand and he was impressed with the standard he saw at the Whangarei club.
"I've seen most of the elite riders today grow up competing as little children and that's why I still enjoy going to the local club meetings," he said.
"You never know when you're going to see the next Marc Willers (New Zealand champion) coming out of a club meet, and why not from here?"
Why not indeed when you have the top course in the country to practise on.