The level of American racing was so much higher at that time that the variables didn’t matter. Maybe one track made it tougher, or maybe we had the wrong guy on the wrong bike. But if the overall level of the U.S. riders was ten percent higher than the rest, and that stuff only makes a five percent difference, the end result would be the same. Through time zones, rain, sand, hard pack, works bikes, hell or high water, Americans just won.

I bring this up publicly after watching Eli Tomac’s performance at Glen Helen. Want to know what things looked like back in the day? It looked like Eli on Sunday. Didn’t matter where he started, he was just going so much faster that he went 1-1 anyway. You cannot, I repeat, cannot, draw any conclusions from this performance. A 1-1 at Glen Helen for Eli doesn’t change the power balance in any way. Eli has ridden that track a thousand times, and it was hot. GP riders have been living on the road for a week and all of the championship positions were decided. Also, it was California hot. This was just the perfect setup for Tomac.

I came to this point after watching all of those Carlsbad 500 USGPs on YouTube. You can draw a five-year line of the historic uprising. In 1980, fans were just hoping that someday, some American, somehow, could actually win the freaking race. By 1985, the Carlsbad USGP was basically the American All-Star race. The top Americans just wheelied away from everyone else and turned it into a private showcase of their season for the ABC television audience—be it Glover or Bailey, Ricky Johnson or Jeff Ward. Even back then, the announcers would always bring up the oppressive heat of this summer time event. That was just giving the Americans an incalculable edge, but even still, it took a long time for their skills and speed to rise far enough to even take advantage of that.

But once the Americans figured it out, it swung far in the other direction. Now comes the confusing part. Do you want to know what, in my opinion, brought America to the forefront of the global motocross game? Old-schoolers will say it’s, “lessons from the Europeans” and certainly that helped. But that only got the Americans up to the level of the Europeans. That made it a close game. The lid blew open because of supercross.

Yes, supercross. That’s the tipping point of it all. That was the American contribution to the sport, and it changed the game completely. Take a tour through the photos and videos of supercross from 1977-1987 and you’ll see an absolute revolution in tracks and motorcycles. Bikes gained suspension travel, linkages, radiators, power valves and disc brakes at the very moment supercross transformed into what we know it as today—whoops, doubles and triples, bowl berms. That era featured the biggest changes in the history of the sport, not even four-strokes changed the way the races looked as much as that span when bikes and supercross grew up together.

The new tracks and bikes found perfect harmony together. Supercross put the skills and intensity of the American riders on fast forward. It’s nostalgic to think change came from toughness and fitness on rugged, old-school terrain, but the fact is that supercross put all of motocross’ skills into the multiplier. The Americans focused on it, and became much better racers. Soon, the American riders were guns that occasionally participated in knife fights. They were doing slam dunks when everyone else was shooting two-handed set shots. American racing kept getting more intense, more skilled, more year-round. Love it or hate it, Americans need to thank their lucky stars and stripes for Southern California. Year-round testing and racing upped the ante in a massive way, and it’s fitting that the first supercross took place in the nucleus of Southern California—Los Angeles—and only slightly less fitting that it was a dreamed up by a rock concert promoter, Mike Goodwin. Goodwin was just trying to sell tickets—it wasn’t set up to start a global motocross revolution.

But it did. The Bercy supercross popped up in France in 1984, and a kid named Jean-Michel Bayle got to watch his heroes, which had names like O’Mara, Ward, Bailey and Johnson as much as Vimond, race on a supercross track, which was even dreamier than a motocross track. Bayle forged his own path and made it to Anaheim, blowing up a hay bale 30 seconds into his first attempt, but nearly winning it in his second, and then becoming champion in his third. The dream was no longer Carlsbad or Namur—the dream was Anaheim. Moreover, it was an American dream, and it was attainable.

Plus, supercross was big business and easily televised and marketable, and cable and satellite TV and the internet all came around, to which point any rider anywhere could watch those races in those stadiums. It’s crazy that a young Chad Reed came out of Australia with a riding style that looked just like Jeremy McGrath. That wouldn’t have happened if he could only have looked at pictures in a magazine.