FATBMX Your Online BMX News Resource Since 1998

Name: Jonathan Sherwood
Hometown: Durban (South Africa), now living Durham (UK).
Started riding BMX in: Had a BMX from a very young age but only properly discovered BMX in 1992.
Number of BMX bikes in your collection: 35 completes, 14 frames, and a whole lot of random parts and race gear.

Being from South Africa originally, what were popular BMX brands when you started?
Jonathan Sherwood: BMX was huge in SA in the 80's, so all of the major brands from that era were popular (GT, Mongoose, Kuwahara, Hutch, Patterson, etc). In the 90's however there were absolutely no BMX bikes for sale in SA, so you could only get bikes from mail order stores like Dans Comp, ACE, and

Woodward, the global leader in action sports experiences, is excited to announce its 2024 Signature Athlete partners for its Camps division, along with the weeks that each athlete will attend the organization’s residential Summer Camps in Pennsylvania and California.
“Youth around the country eagerly await this news each year, with hopes of having the opportunity to advance their skills alongside some of the most famous names in action sports. We are so excited to get this news out early this year, enabling families to plan ahead and help make their campers’ dreams come true this Summer, capitalizing on the January discount of $200 off camp as well,” said Phoebe Mills, the Vice President of Camps and Programming for Woodward.

Name: Adrian Varela 
Age: 22
Hometown: Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Hook-ups/Sponsors: PUSHER, Grindwheel, Animal, Sunday

The FAT favorites list:

-Spot to ride: Valdez Handrail In Denver 
-BMX video: Stevie Churchill OSS vid

The Solarena hotel in Newport Beach was going to be our home base for the next 12 days. With a fridge, wifi, coffee machine, bed and shower, it had all we needed. After the long travel and LA shopping spree the light went out early the first day. As usual getting up the next day is easy as the time difference of 9 hours makes you wake up in the middle of the night a few times before you had enough of it and simply get out of bed. California doesn't always provide sunny days of 25 degrees but getting outside without a winter jacket in January still felt good. We had spotted a coffee shop around the corner of the hotel and decided to get breakfast there. It was right next door of the Deus shop. The capucino at Vacancy Coffee was amazing. Without giving my email address I received the receipt in my inbox a few seconds after paying with the Mastercard. That was a first for me. Mastercard apparently doesn't take privacy too seriously when they provide my email to coffee shops like that. Oh well.

10:30hr. That's the time we had set to meet Niek Kimmann over at Troy Lee Designs in Corona. Niek's mom had dropped off a camera for Niek at our place in The Netherlands and brought the camera for him as his old one had some focusing issues. We made good timing as the roads were rather empty (surprisingly) and stopped by Pro Circuit first to walk their shop with all the championship bikes on display. TLD was new to us at their current location.

Last year Philip and I made a trip to California together. It was such a good time that it had to happen again. This year's traineeship at HGS Exhaust company allowed him to make the Cali trip to visit two Monster Energy Supercross races, MX dealerships and companies left and right. Of course while in SoCal lots of BMX companies could be visited as well as friends, spots and whatever came up basically. Through a couple of episodes we'll take you through our trip starting at the beginning.

Traveling is an advanture. Every time. It's anticipating to the situation and it started off shaky when the alarm clock went off. Next to the railways being under construction, an other message showed