Cheri Elliott

I crashed big time in Mammoth, Ca. I walked away from the crash. However, I didn’t know I broke my back until a couple days later when my right leg started having partial paralysis. Several x-rays, MRI’s and months of physical therapy later, I decided it was time to hang up the wheels. I felt I dodged a bullet, and I didn’t want to dodge any more. I never had surgery, but most likely will need surgery later on in life.

During her racing career—and while in the sixth grade of junior high school—Elliott was asked to play "first string"' on the varsity senior high school Basketball team. She helped that high school team win a championship. She continued pursuing other sports during her BMX career, and after leaving the sport in 1986.

When there weren't enough girls in her age group at a particular BMX race to form out a separate class, she often raced with them, winning "Motos" (the qualifying heats) and "Opens" (the class that was open to both male novices and experts, and where girls were free to race each other). She would frequently make the "Mains"—the race final that would decide the winner for the day—in the boys division. Even when there were enough girls to form a class, she still often participated with the boys in the United Bicycle Racers (UBR) "11 Expert" class, complaining that the girls were "too slow". At a 1981 UBR National held in Laguna Seca, California, she raced in the 14-and-over girls' competition, despite being only 11 years old at the time, "because the 12-to-13 is too easy".

UBR rules at the time stated that if a girl raced in the boys' expert classes, she could not race in the girls' class. As a result, she mostly raced in the boys' Expert and Open classes. She also frequently participated in, and sometimes won, the "Trophy Dash"—the final event of a race, in which the winners of two closely related age classes and the three skill classes participate in an exhibition race that has no effect on the rider's yearly ranking. Unlike the UBR and the National Bicycle League (NBL), the ABA did not allow girls to compete in the boys' Expert Class until 1984. The ABA did allow her to run in the Trophy Dash and 12-and-under Cruiser Class. She often won on the local level, occasionally beating the male Experts—the highest amateur class. In the 1982 ABA Grand National, she placed second in the Cruiser Class, beaten by only Danny Steplight. She also won a few Trophy Dash races on her 20-inch bike at the national level; she won the 11-12 Trophy Dash at the 1983 ABA Cajun Nationals in Shreveport, Louisiana in January 1983, overpowering 12 Expert winner Jason Griggs, who had dominated his age class throughout 1982 and 1983. She was, at the time, the only girl to win the Trophy Dash at an ABA national that anyone could recall.

Retiring from BMX did not cure her entirely of the racing bug. After college and a five-year retirement—nine years, if you do not count her two races in 1989— she went on to mountain bike racing (MTB) in 1994.

A few years after she retired from Mountain Bike competition, she considered another comeback in BMX, despite her career-ending back injury. She contemplated coming out of retirement for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China, where BMX racing was making its Olympic debut:

Elliott retired from competitive racing during the 2001 Mountain Bike season, becoming a Realtor in California; she bills herself as "The Broker on a Bike". She is also a public speaker, a helmet-safety advocate for children, and co-owns and runs her own sports management company, JED Sports Management.

In mountain biking, really the "same" feeling. In 2001 I was 31, and I was ready to be home. I crashed one too many times my last couple years of MTB, and I was just physically and mentally done. The last two years of MTB I was already phasing into my new career with studying for the California Real Estate Broker’s Exam. So, I was definitely ready when the time was right.

Over her cycling career, Elliott has won 14 major world and national titles, including four National Off Road Bicycle Association National Championships and two ESPN X Games gold medals. However, she did not race in the revived NBL "Supergirls" class, its professional girls' division, when it was recreated in 1997, dedicating her time to Dual Slalom and Downhill MTB.

As she was starting her MTB racing career, she obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Business (with Honors), concentrated in Real Estate and Finance, in 1994.

After almost four years, Elliott came out of retirement on the national level on Saturday October 28, 1989, when she raced the ABA's Fall National in Yorba Linda, Californiaapparently for the fun of it due to her ABA BMX Hall of Fame induction the following November. She probably thought she would be at the ABA Grand Nationals anyway for her acceptance speech, why not race as well? Other reports have it that Elliott was lured out of retirement by the Bicycle Center bicycle shop as a "spoiler" to better position other Bicycle Center racers to take various titles. Whatever the reason, prior to the Fall Nationals she was seen practicing at the Roseville, California Oak Creek BMX track. She dominated the 15 & Over girls' class at the Fall Nationals on Saturday. However, she slipped her pedals in the Main and finished in seventh place—last, in this case—in the main. On Sunday, she again came in last (out of six) in the main.

Elliott was on the verge of winning her 15 & Over girls' Main at the 1989 ABA Grand Nationals in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; however, fate bit her again as it did at the Fall Nationals. She fell doing a trick over a jump. She landed badly, and crashed. The rest of the pack passed her, and her chance of being the Grand National winner went with them. Mapuana Naki won the National number one girl title for 1989. Elliot was not in contention for the title, since she didn't resume racing until October 1989. After racing one or two more times on the national level, Elliott continued her BMX retirement in February 1990.

Elliott's BMX career was relatively short, lasting only six years. Elliott retired from twenty-inch BMX racing early in the 1986 season, right after the ABA Supernationals (which were held on January 26 and 27). Explaining the reason for her decision, Elliott said "I did all I wanted to do. I wanted to quit last year, but I thought about getting ABA No. 1 two years in a row. And I did it—that was my goal." (Elliot misspoke about-or BMX Action misprinted-the number of consecutive number-one plates she was going for. It was three years in a row, not two.) She also wanted to pursue and concentrate on scholastic sports, like basketball.

Elliott told BMX Plus!, in their June 1986 issue, that Skyway Recreations, the factory racing team that sponsored her, dropped their racing team after the 1985 racing season. The year 1986 was known to racers as "the year of no sponsorships" because some bicycle manufactures who sponsored racing teams, like Torker and JMC, went out of business—due, in part, to low cost Asian imports. The teams sponsored by Diamond Back and Redline were pared back, and Skyway dropped their sponsorship altogether, in favor of either creating or expanding BMX Freestyle teams.

Elliott did race in one National in 1986: the ABA Supernationals in late January, where she placed fourth in the 15 & Over Girls class. As the BMX periodical BMX Action put it, "after being casually released from Skyway, [she] decided it was easier to just quit the sport while on top than shop for a ride." In 1996, she would co-author a book called The Athlete's Guide to Sponsorship during her subsequent mountain-bike racing career.

The NBL introduced the girls' pro class in the 1985 season, and continued it through the 1987 season. Elliott did not turn professional, because she retired at age 15 when the minimum required age to turn pro was 16. She did express interest in the pro class: "There needs to be a pro class for the girls so we will have more interest in the sport."

She was happy when the NBL's Competition Congress authorized a pro girls' class in late 1984: "I think it's great that they finally passed it... Now girls will have something to stay in the sport for." When the pro Girls' class started at the beginning of the 1985 season, only girls 16 years of age and older qualified to compete in it. Elliott was only 15 years old on April 17, 1985.

When I retired from BMX in 1985 [sic], I was ready to go live a normal teenager life. I had been racing since 9 years old, I was 15 and felt I had missed a lot. I was absolutely exhausted. My career may not have been long, but it was intense and filled to the extreme. I was ready to pass the torch to the other women. I was ready to be home.

Elliott's BMX career lasted from 1980 until 1986, and saw a brief comeback in 1989.

MTB, a sport similar to BMX that uses bicycles with 26-inch wheels similar to the "Cruiser class" bicycles in BMX circa 1980, has courses that are much longer and on steep, downhill slopes, with certain events—especially snow racing—resembling downhill skiing. Races could last up to 10 minutes (compared to BMX's 30 to 40 seconds), with speeds hitting 70 miles per hour (110 km/h) (compared to BMX's 25 to 35 mph (40 to 56 km/h) for Experts and Professionals). In her first year of racing mountain bikes, Elliott became the National Dual Slalom Champion, the first such championship of many.

Cheri Elliott (born April 17, 1970) is an American former champion female bicycle motocross (BMX) racer in the 1980s, and a champion Downhill and Slalom mountain bike racer in the 1990s and early 2000s. During her BMX career, she spent most of her racing career on the national circuit with the Skyway Recreation factory team. She had a relatively short BMX career, but she is a four-time national champion and four-time world champion, including three consecutive National Number One girl-racer titles for the American Bicycle Association (ABA) from 1983 through 1985. She also held the regional UBR Number one girl racer title in 1982. She was the first female racer inducted into the ABA BMX Hall of Fame in 1989, and the first female BMX racer inducted into the United States Bicycling Hall of Fame in 2008.