Kyle Mallot

KYLE MALLOT

There at the Beginning

Long before organized BMX reached Kansas City, Kyle Mallot was already riding bicycles in the dirt.

Growing up in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, he was thirteen when he began racing in 1974. His first track was Fast Eddie’s in Grandview, one of the places where the earliest Kansas City riders discovered that the riding they had been doing informally was becoming an organized sport.

When a team that included Tom Hand and Mark Poole was formed through Gary’s Bike Mart, Kyle immediately wanted to be part of it.

“I jumped at the chance to join.”

Gary’s Bike Mart, located at 10505 Blue Ridge Boulevard in Kansas City, became Kyle’s first sponsor and an important center of his early BMX experience. Racing also took place at the shop’s location, which became the team’s home track in 1975.

BUILDING A RACE BIKE

Kyle’s first true racing bicycle was a 20-inch Webco.

His favorite bicycle was a 1976 Redline equipped with a Sachs Duomatic two-speed automatic shifting hub. The unusual equipment reflects the experimentation of BMX’s earliest years, when riders and bicycle-shop mechanics adapted available components to the demands of dirt-track racing.

His favorite jersey was the team’s second version. When Nick Sistrunk joined the three existing Gary’s Bike Mart riders, the group went all out and had custom jerseys screen-printed. The team was soon required to change sponsors following the sale of Gary’s Bike Mart, making the jersey representative of a brief but important period in their history.

A WAY OF LIFE

During those early years, Kyle spent most of his time outside of school on his bicycle.

Before he was old enough to obtain a driver’s license, the bicycle provided transportation, recreation, competition, and independence. Riding was not merely an organized activity reserved for race days.

“It really was a way of life.”

Kyle and the other riders searched for new places to ride, traveled to compete at other tracks, and accumulated trophies along the way. The races mattered, but so did the exploration, friendships, road trips, and shared experience of discovering a sport while it was still being formed.

FIFTY YEARS LATER

Looking back after fifty years, Kyle recognizes how close he and his friends were to the beginning of something new.

He compares their experience to the young skateboarders of California who took an informal activity and helped develop it into a recognized sport and culture.

Today, BMX riders perform and compete at a level the earliest Kansas City racers could scarcely have imagined. Watching events such as the X Games allows Kyle to see how far later generations have taken the sport.

For him, that progress makes the past more meaningful.

“It’s awesome to have been part of the whole thing.”

THE RECORD THEY PRESERVED

Kyle, Tom Hand, and Kyle’s father, Tom Mallot—a teacher and local wedding photographer—all took photographs during those early years. Kyle and his father captured many of the best images, which the riders developed in the Mallot family darkroom at Lakewood and later at the family’s first house on 87th Street.

Tom Mallot also loaded a camera for Tom Hand to carry on a trip to California. Hand used it to photograph BMX racing at Corona on March 16, 1976.

Tom Hand preserved the surviving photographs and negatives.

Those images now document more than youthful recreation. They show a group of Kansas City riders participating in the creation of a sport—before established tracks, national events, professional careers, and extensive media coverage made BMX history easier to record.

Kyle Mallot was not simply watching when Kansas City BMX began.

He was riding.