Jeffery Bottema (born April 14, 1960, from Norwalk, California United States) is an American former professional "Old School" Bicycle Motocross (BMX) racer whose prime competitive years were from 1976 to 1981.
[1] Note: In the early days of professional racing, 1977 and prior, many tracks offered small purse prize money to the older racers of an event, even before the official sanctioning bodies offered prize money in formal divisions themselves.
Hence some early "professionals" like Stu Thomsen turning "pro" in 1975 at 16 years old where racing for small amounts of money at track events[2] when offered even before the NBA, regarded as the first true national BMX sanctioning body, had a professional division.
For the sake of consistency and standardization noted professional first are for the first pro races for prize money offered by official BMX sanctioning bodies and not independent track events.
This is why during the early years of the pro division the national number one racer of a sanctioning body could be either an amateur or professional.
Primary sponsorships can be verified by BMX press coverage and sponsor company advertisements at the time in question.
Toby Henderson: "...I was getting a couple of good contracts coming up, and I turned them all down, because I kept calling Raleigh, and saying, "Well, are we going to do something next year?"
Here we turned down like three or four good contracts in October, when all the other teams were setting their budgets up and looking for their riders for the next year.
Note: Listed are District, State/Provincial/Department, Regional, National, and International titles in italics.