A veteran of South Park's BMX track, Sean Ray knows exactly what he likes about bike racing.
"I like to get air when I jump," said Ray, of Jefferson Hills. "I'm pretty good."
Nearly 8 years old, he has been riding four years.
Ray is part of the next generation of racers at the BMX track, which is celebrating 25 years of racing.
The track was founded in 1977 by Bob Tedesco, of Whitehall, now managing director of the National Bicycle League, the organization that officially sanctions BMX parks.
Tedesco was introduced to the sport in 1976 when it was a mere fad. After a trip to California, where BMX was formed by kids mimicking dirt bike riders, Tedesco stopped at a local shop to buy bikes for his three children. The shop owner there mentioned they were starting races in North Park and asked Tedesco to help.
"I ended up being the track operator," said Tedesco, who still lives in Whitehall despite heading the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based National Bicycle League.
He said Allegheny County offered some land in North Park, where they stayed for a few years until the county offered a larger, more favorable site in South Park.
"Because I had some construction background and had seen a lot of tracks, I wanted to build what I considered a premier site for BMX," Tedesco said. "We built bigger and faster than anything in the country at that time.
"The county, when we first started, thought it was going to be a fad."
Indeed, the sport has had its ups and downs in popularity. When the sport was still new in the late '70s, the park received about 70 racers a week. But it boomed in the early '80s, before dying again in the middle of that decade.
BMX regained popularity in the mid-1990s and continues to ride the wave of attention gained by extreme sports that include snowboarding, in-line skating, and skateboarding. The ESPN network, which popularized the annual X-Games competitions, even broadcast annual events at the South Park track up until last year.
Tedesco ran the South Park track until about 1983, when he handed it over to a volunteer group of parents who continue to run it today.
Bill Dees, 36, a collision repair shop owner from Baldwin Borough, is the current track director. He said the South Park track averages 125 riders for their Saturday races, which are separated into age groups so diverse they range from 5 to 45 years old.
The track hosts its own annual national tournament -- called the Stars and Stripes National -- to be held the weekend before Independence Day this year, Dees said. That tournament draws about 1,000 racers from around the world, he said.
Regaled for its paved turns and downhill slope, the South Park track was named the best in the nation last year by Transworld BMX magazine, Dees said.
"A lot of tracks stay the same year after year. The pros go to these tracks and get bored with them," said Dees, who's managed the track for four years. "I tear the jumps down each year and rebuild them myself. We change the track each year so kids don't get bored with it."
Antonio Hill certainly isn't bored.
The 6-year-old West Mifflin boy has been waiting two years to race, ever since his mom, Ana, brought him to see his first race at the park.
"You better hold me," he tells his mom, who's balancing the bike as he prepares to take off downhill.
All of 4 feet tall, the little guy with skinny dreadlocks dangling from his black and silver helmet scoots across the hilly track about 10 times, a smile on his face every time.
"That was fun," he said. "I stomped on it pretty hard."
