The vacant lot near the corner of 7th Street and Bellflower Boulevard in Long Beach was perfect for the young Scot Breithaupt.
Amid run-down Quonset huts and maintenance shacks for the nearby oil wells, Breithaupt cut a few dusty trails through the weeds with his bicycle, invited friends over and helped start a craze that in time would transfix the world.
The renegade races that Breithaupt organized on that dirt lot soon evolved into BMX — bicycle motocross — a sport that draws hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts and, in 2008, debuted in China in the Olympics.