09/15/2026
THE KIDS WHO GOT BACK ON THE BIKE
BMX, Gen X, and the brain injuries nobody was counting.
I saw a post today about BMX riders, brain injuries, su***de and some of the people we've lost from that world.
It sent me down another rabbit hole.
I grew up riding BMX.
I wasn't a professional. I wasn't some giant-ramp hero launching myself into orbit. 😂 I did freestyle and flatland—as well as I could—and I loved it.
My son even had a little 16-inch Dave Mirra Haro BMX.
Think about that for a second.
Dave Mirra became one of the biggest names in BMX. His name ended up on bicycles that kids all over North America rode.
Then, after Mirra died by su***de in 2016, examination of his brain found CTE.
And he's only one part of this story.
Mat Hoffman has publicly described an astonishing history of head trauma: dozens of knockouts and concussions, a fractured skull, a coma and significant memory loss.
That doesn't mean Mat Hoffman has CTE. We cannot say that.
But it raises a much bigger question:
What happened to the brains of the generations who grew up doing this stuff before we understood repetitive head trauma?
Because BMX wasn't alone.
Skateboarding.
Mountain biking.
Motocross.
Hockey.
Football.
Skiing.
Snowboarding.
Extreme sports.
And just being a kid in the 1980s.
How many of us were even wearing helmets consistently?
I remember having a road-bike accident as a teenager without one.
That isn't me saying every bump on the head causes permanent brain damage. It doesn't.
And helmets aren't magic force fields either. They cannot prevent every concussion or eliminate the effects of repeated head impacts.
But they can reduce the risk of serious head injury.
That's why the history matters.
Our generation didn't have concussion spotters.
We didn't have return-to-play protocols.
Nobody was standing beside the BMX track asking whether we'd experienced neurological symptoms.
You crashed.
You got up.
Your buddies laughed.
You checked whether the bike was fu**ed.
And you got back on.
Sometimes somebody would say you "got your bell rung."
Today we'd probably call at least some of those events concussions.
And here's where we need to be careful.
I started looking into the names being circulated in BMX discussions. Some riders died by su***de. Some struggled with mental health or substance use. Some died from completely different medical causes.
We cannot retroactively diagnose every one of them with CTE.
That's not science.
Dave Mirra's CTE was confirmed after death.
Other riders had documented histories of significant head trauma.
Those are different categories, and they need to remain different.
But maybe we've been asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking:
"How many BMX riders had CTE?"
Maybe we should be asking:
What happened to an entire generation of people who accumulated repeated head impacts during decades when nobody was counting them?
And where are those people today?
Healthcare?
Disability systems?
Addiction treatment?
Mental-health systems?
Income support?
Homelessness?
The justice system?
Or simply sitting at home wondering why their memory, emotions or cognition don't work the way they once did?
We don't know.
And that's precisely the fu***ng problem.
This connects directly to something I've been writing about lately:
The Brain Injury Nobody Counts.
Institutions are very good at counting the system somebody enters.
Healthcare counts the patient.
Disability counts the claimant.
Mental health counts the client.
Addiction services count the client.
Homelessness services count the person needing shelter.
The justice system counts the case.
But who goes backwards through those systems and asks:
What happened to the brain?
Maybe BMX is another population worth studying.
Not because BMX is bad.
F**k that.
I loved BMX.
Millions of people did, and still do.
The point isn't to stop kids from riding bikes, playing sports or taking risks.
The point is to understand those risks better, wear the damn helmet, recognize concussion symptoms, give injured brains time to recover, and stop treating repeated head impacts like they're simply the price of being tough.
Because some of us grew up in a generation where the concussion protocol was basically:
"Can you stand?"
"Yep."
"Bike okay?"
"Yep."
"Then fu***ng send it." 😂
We know more now.
Maybe it's time we started looking at the people who came before the knowledge.
Not to scare them.
Not to diagnose them through Facebook.
To find them.
To study them.
And maybe help some of them understand what happened.
Brain dented, not dead.
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X Games
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WEAR HELMETS ALWAYS🧡🧡🧡
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The Doctor
DJ Jesse Hudson
The Brain-Dented DJ
