John Tomac is well known as one of the greatest mountain bikers in history. He won national championships in mountain biking in both cross-country and downhill, and he even won the UCI World Championship in Men’s XC racing in 1991, the same weekend he took second in Men’s Downhill at the UCI World Championship. He also won the Elite Men’s XC World Cup title for 1991.
Tomac took second in the Downhill World Championships again in 1997. To our knowledge, he is the only mountain biker in history to have won multiple Elite level World Cup races in both cross-country and downhill.
Recently, someone on Facebook shared the above results from a BMX National in Lansing, Michigan, which show that John Tomac won the Pro class both Saturday and Sunday (we’re not sure why it says “Pro Money” on Saturday and “B Pro” on Sunday) in the USBA Great Lakes National results shared above.
Tomac also took second in the Pro Open class both days, finishing behind Todd Blaser.
John Tomac grew up in Owasso, Michigan, so Lansing was probably one of the tracks he grew up racing. He moved to California in 1986 to live with his sister and his (then) brother-in-law, Rob Rupe, and Tomac soon took up racing mountain bikes and winning major mountain bike events, making a very rapid rise to the top of the mountain bike world.
We googled, “USA BMX, Lansing, Michigan, National, 1985” and found the following photo of Tomac, when he was a rookie pro, at 17 years old:
We offer our congratulations to “Johnny T” for winning two of the BMX pro races that weekend, 41 years ago this month.
BMX Plus! Magazine started using Tomac as a test rider somewhere around the same time. Here’s an article featuring Tomac as a test rider in that magazine:
It’s amazing what you can find when you do some searching on the internet.
If you want to learn even more about John Tomac, there’s a very good article about him on Wikipedia: