Retired Sanger athlete was a superstar in his sport. Now he’s going to BMX Hall of Fame

Randy Stumpfhauser didn’t start out a champion.

He was just a kid who liked BMX.

“I just rode because I wanted to have fun,” says Stumpfhauser, a Sanger native and one of six athletes being inducted into the BMX Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Oct. 29.

Sure, the competitive nature of the sport appealed to him — to this day watching any kind of race gets Stumpfhauser’s heart rate going — but he also liked the dirt of it all. He remembers getting home from school and heading straight to the homemade track in the backyard of his family’s home. In the summer, he’d ride until the calluses came off and his hands bled.

Until his retirement in 2010, his own home had a one-acre maze of trails and banked corners, ramps and bumps that Stumpfhauser put in by hand. It’s flat dirt now.

As a sport, BMX started in the 1970s as a kind of motocross spin-off. It swapped the motorbikes for what looked like child-sized bicycles in sprint races that would be over in less than a minute.

Stumpfhauser started riding in 1986, the summer a BMX course called Apacheland opened in Sanger.

He was 9.

By the time he was 19, Stumpfhauser — known on the racing circuit as Stumpy or Stumpdog — had racked up an impressive resume as an amateur rider, including an American Bicycle Association national title.

At the height of his professional career, he was earning six figures and traveling nationally and internationally to compete in championships riding specialized bikes that cost more than $1,000 apiece.

In an interview with The Fresno Bee, Stumpfhauser said he’d lost track of how many season-long titles he has won, but he thought it was seven.

His was a career of consistency — and longevity.

While most pros age out the sport by their mid-20s, Stumpfhauser was competing, and winning, up until his retirement in 2010 at the age of 33. He won his final championship in 2009, making him the oldest rider to hold the pro title.

Stumpfhauser says he had the benefit of being relatively injury free and having a good support system, both from his family and the sponsors paying the bills.

He also had an immense work ethic.

BMX requires riders race from a dead stop at the starting gate into a first straightaway as fast as they can. Doing that again and again over a race weekend is physically demanding, Stumpfhauser says, in a way that spectators might not understanding. He non-race routine involved twice-daily sessions at the track, along with weight work and time on his road bike. He would practice his race sprint-outs on the street.

“I would train in the morning and then I would need a nap,” he says.

Then, he’d be back to training in the evening.

Stumpfhauser doesn’t follow the sport much anymore. After his retirement, he dedicated his time to his his family, his faith and his career as an educator. He’s married with four children who never got into the sport themselves. They’d rather play football or basketball. After working as a teaching for a decade, Stumpfhauser is in first year as principal at Kings Corner, a “small and intimate” Christian school in Sanger.

The way Stumpfhauser puts it, “life got really really busy really quick.”

He doesn’t know how to put it into words the feelings that came with new of his induction into the Hall of Fame and won’t speculate on why he was nominated and ultimately chosen.

“That’s for other people to have opinions on,” he says.

What he will say: “When I was done with my career I was satisfied.”

In announcing Stumpfhauser’s induction, USA BMX made sure to highlight courses in the Fresno area, where it hopes the next generation of kids will get started in the sport.

Air TIme BMX is a nonprofit volunteer-run race track operated in Reedley. It offers weekly open practice session, classes and sanctioned races.

In Fresno, races, clinics and classes are run at the city-operated BMX course at Woodward Park.