My brain is always running a million miles a minute. Often about things that really aren’t even worth thinking about (how else could you explain a 7 paragraph blog about why Snafu’s website is dumb or a 10 paragraph blog about why getting a job sucks?), so you’ll have to bare with me. I had a few thoughts that I wanted to share, all of which relate to the concept of sponsorship or being a pro BMXer but no real tangible thread to connect them all together. So I wrote them all down and well, here we are.

I was talking to a friend of mine a few years back. He’s an industry dude… he’s been a pro rider, a judge, a team manager, a magazine writer… actually now that I think of it, that narrows it down pretty good and you could probably guess that I’m talking about Brian Tunney (which is totally irrelevant to the point I’m about to make and that alone makes me guilty of name dropping… fuck). Anyway the news had just leaked that Daniel Dhers had been added to the DC pro team. I said something along the lines of:

“Don’t you think that’s kind of crazy that Daniel’s on pro and probably getting at least 50k a year when Brad Simms is on flow and all he gets is free shoes? I don’t know Daniel and I’m sure he’s a good dude but in terms of actual BMXers, Brad is way more popular.”

I probably didn’t phrase it exactly like that since that’s not really how most people talk when having a casual AIM conversation, but that was the gist of it. So Tunney knocked some sense into my head and said something like:

“You’re probably right, but it’s irrelevant. Brad doesn’t get on TV and Daniel does. TV exposure is the reason contest pro’s make shitloads of money and that even the biggest street riders don’t make nearly as much.”

He probably didn’t say “shitloads”, but you get the idea. And I was like… how did I not think of that? It’s pretty obvious. TV commercials are really expensive. I don’t know exactly how much but I would say that a 30 second commercial during the X Games is at least a few thousand dollars. So of course a company who wants to put their logo onto the shirt/helmet/bike of a well known bike rider in the X Games is going to have to pay a lot for the privileged. There’s a lot of competition between sponsors at the highest level of BMX, and if DC weren’t willing to pay Daniel Dhers X amount of dollars, you can be sure that some other brand would notice an opportunity to get a lot of exposure for a relatively low price and they’d go for it.

Which brings me to my next thought… competition. Competition between brands is the reason why pro riders get paid in the first place. Think about it, if a company could sponsor a rider for free, would they? Of course. Why don’t they? Because if they didn’t, some other company would. Smart sponsors hold off on starting to pay their riders until they don’t have a choice anymore. Dakota is a good example. He was on flow from Fit for a while, but then he really started to get hot. Kids started to jock him pretty hard and he was getting more coverage. I don’t know it for a fact, but it’s safe to assume that he had other sponsors talk to him about riding for them and it’s only human nature that he regardless of his loyalty to Fit, he probably thought about it. It was only at that point that Fit put him on pro and started to pay him. I’m doing my best not to turn this into Economics 101: Supply & Demand, but you get the idea.

The truth is though, most BMX companies don’t pay much. I feel comfortable saying that 90% of pro riders out there make less than $500 dollars a month from their frame sponsor. However the opinion of most people (and I’ve said this before too and I’m about to contradict my past statements) is that “you’re not a pro unless you’re getting a monthly paycheck”. Is that true though? Because really, there are a lot of ways to pay someone for a service aside from just giving them money every month. For instance, there are riders out there who have a signature frame (of which they get royalties on), photo contingency deals (so they get paid whenever their sponsor’s logo shows up in a magazine on their bike or their shirt) plus a video contingency deal (so if they get a popular web video, a Props bio, a video part in a DVD etc) they get paid for that too. And on top of that they obviously also get all the bikes/bike parts they need, plus in most cases a travel budget.

Which if you think about it, is really a pretty good deal. Granted you almost certainly still need a job assuming you don’t live with your parents or have a lucrative drug dealing side project. But still, you’re certainly in a really good position even if you’re not getting a monthly. And isn’t that really every pro BMXers ultimate dream, to become a successful drug dealer and step away from bike riding, then translate their tales of coke slinging into a triple platinum rap album? I told you this blog wasn’t going to have a sensible ending.