The sun is fading fast as Ben Holman pedals his BMX bike furiously at the Riverside Skate Park in Centralia Nov. 30. Holman glides down a 2-foot ramp, shoots over a table-top and launches off a 6-foot ramp. He lifts his feet off the pedals midair and swings his bike frame in a 360-degree rotation around the handlebars before landing back on the pedals.
Holman drops his bike, grabs his purple helmet in disbelief and sprints towards the cameraman while shouting, ‘Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh! I did it! I did it!”
Holman has just landed his first tail-whip.
“It was awesome,” Holman said.
Holman, who is 11 years old, competes in the national BMX freestyle circuit. He has gone from hitting 2x4s in his parent’s driveway to now launching off 13-foot jumps, orbiting 20 feet in the air and clearing 18-foot gaps.
While his bag of tricks may look dangerous — and they can be — Ben practices them diligently in foam pits and on air bags for hours before perfecting them and unleashing his new arsenal at competitions around the West Coast.
“We’ve had some friends who will come and watch him for the first time and they’re like, ‘How can you stand watching that? That’s so scary,’” said Troy Holman, Ben’s father.
Most of the people Ben rides with are quite a bit older than him, because there aren’t many kids his age who will attempt a backflip on concrete, let alone land it.
Ben’s first backflip came during the final day of BMX camp in summer 2019 when riders were having a best-trick competition. The 4-foot-8, 75-pound Ben landed the backflip and his fellow campers went crazy, tossing their shoes into the air.
He hasn’t been injury-free. It comes with the territory of being a high-flying caper.
He suffered a broken hand in July, and missed out on being the VIP rider at a faith-based action-sports camp in West Virginia. He was out for about a month while recovering. At a pro event in California, where he was the youngest rider in attendance, Ben rode down a 40-foot ramp, torpedoed across a 25-foot gap and cleared 23 feet before crashing down the backside of the landing ramp.
“It was like ‘Wide World of Sports,’ agony-of-defeat-type crash,” Troy said. “It’s crazy-big stuff that he’s doing.”
Nicknamed the Energizer Benny, catching monstrous air is what Ben lives for. It’s the thrill of flying high that keeps him coming back for more, seeking that next new trick.
“Because you can do big tricks and get lots of air,” Ben said.
Ben’s biking career started when he was just a toddler, a mere 18 months old, when this older brother and sister along with some neighborhood kids were tearing around the block. He wanted to be like them, so the Holmans bought him a 10-inch bike with training wheels. By the time he was 3 years old he had broken multiple pairs of training wheels, so his parents decided he probably didn’t need them anymore.
He took off, rode all the way down the cul-de-sac and hasn’t slowed down since. Ben began hitting the Riverside Skate Park in Centralia when he was 5 years old. Troy didn’t realize beforehand that it’s a large park, more suited for teenagers and adults. It didn’t phase Ben, who spent the next four years shredding the bowl and jumps.
The first trick he ever landed was a one-footer, where a rider takes one foot off the pedal, extends their leg and brings it back onto the pedal, all in mid-air. By the time he was 9 years old, Ben was entering freestyle BMX competitions, both in-state and out-of-state.
He competed in three Hot Wheels junior series competitions in 2019, with riders all the way from Texas to Hawaii, where he ended up with two second-place finishes and a third.
He also entered the Hot Wheels Superchargers Fueled by Nitro Circus in San Diego in 2019. He’s competed in locations such as Phoenix, Arizona, Lake Tahoe, California, in the Mojave Desert, and Huntington Beach, California.
He rides an 18-inch S&M BMX bike, one of the few American-made full-chromoly, full-steel bikes out there in his size. It is so custom that when Ben breaks a part, Troy can’t just run to the local bike shop and find a replacement. Ben is sponsored by Lenny’s Bike Shop, based out of Ferndale, Washington. They had to rebuild Ben’s wheel at one point and they had to order from all over the nation to get the parts to do so.
He’s also tried out BMX racing. Riders have to win 10 races to move up to the next level of competition. It took him just 12 races to win 10, and that’s only because he crashed once and was beaten by a kid two years older than him. But he eventually left that behind after growing bored because the jumps weren’t big enough.
He most recently won the regional championship at the USA BMX Freestyle competition, his first-ever win. Due to COVID-19 guidelines shutting down competitions nationwide, riders from 12 different regions each submitted a 45-second highlight video to judges.
Ben is in Region 1, which includes Washington and Oregon. The win qualifies Ben for the national championship, which is tentatively scheduled for this month in Pennsylvania.
“I can take almost no credit for it because I can’t do any of it,” Troy Holman said. “I just encourage him and support him and we try to get him to places that he can do stuff.”
In February, Troy and Ben built a 17-foot tower with a 6-foot ramp that goes to an 8-foot airbag in their backyard. In March, when the pandemic shut everything down, Nitro Circus, a TV action-sport stunt series run by X-Games gold medalist Travis Pastrana, put on an online video submission titled, ‘Stay Home, Go Big!’ to encourage riders to quarantine at home, a twist on the old mantra, ‘Go big or go home.’
Nitro Circus shared Ben’s BMX highlights on their social media platforms, including on their Instagram story seven or eight times. Ben’s highlights have been shared on Nitro Circus’ main Instagram and Facebook feed five or six times since then.
For now, Ben is practicing diligently while the Holmans are waiting to see if the USA BMX Freestyle national championships get postponed or canceled this week.
“We’ll see what happens there,” Troy said. “The guys he has to compete against are good, and he’ll be about the youngest one in the competition when we get back there, if it happens. If not, we’ll just keep riding and posting and hope to keep growing.”
What’s his next big trick? A double backflip, Ben said.
You can follow Ben’s progress and keep up to date on his tricks and videos by following his social media platforms. Facebook: facebook.com/energizerbenny. Instagram: instagram.com/energizer_benny. Tiktok: tiktok.com/@energizer_benny.
