Cheri Elliott (born April 17, 1970) is an American former champion female bicycle motocross (BMX) racer in the 1980s, and a champion Downhill and Slalom mountain bike racer in the 1990s and early 2000s. During her BMX career, she spent most of her racing career on the national circuit with the Skyway Recreation factory team. She had a relatively short BMX career, but she is a four-time national champion and four-time world champion, including three consecutive National Number One girl-racer titles for the American Bicycle Association (ABA) from 1983 through 1985. She also held the regional UBR Number one girl racer title in 1982. She was the first female racer inducted into the ABA BMX Hall of Fame in 1989, and the first female BMX racer inducted into the United States Bicycling Hall of Fame in 2008.
Biography
Elliott snow-skied when she was two years old.
Elliott's BMX career lasted from 1980 until 1986, and saw a brief comeback in 1989.
From an early age, she was not only dominant in the girls division of BMX (formerly called "Powder Puff"), but was also usually competitive with boys in her age group. An athletic strawberry blond with deep dimples when she smiled, Elliott was approximately five feet tall in the seventh grade, making her somewhat larger than most of the boys in her class at Will Rodgers Intermediate Junior High School and the boys at the BMX track.
During her racing career—and while in the sixth grade of junior high school—Elliott was asked to play "first string"' on the varsity senior high school Basketball team. She helped that high school team win a championship. She continued pursuing other sports during her BMX career, and after leaving the sport in 1986.
Elliott was named Most Valuable Player in both basketball and volleyball during her senior year of high school.
She also played in her college freshman year at the University of the Pacific.
BMX racing career
When there weren't enough girls in her age group at a particular BMX race to form out a separate class, she often raced with them, winning "Motos" (the qualifying heats) and "Opens" (the class that was open to both male novices and experts, and where girls were free to race each other). She would frequently make the "Mains"—the race final that would decide the winner for the day—in the boys division. Even when there were enough girls to form a class, she still often participated with the boys in the United Bicycle Racers (UBR) "11 Expert" class, complaining that the girls were "too slow". At a 1981 UBR National held in Laguna Seca, California, she raced in the 14-and-over girls' competition, despite being only 11 years old at the time, "because the 12-to-13 is too easy".
UBR rules at the time stated that if a girl raced in the boys' expert classes, she could not race in the girls' class. As a result, she mostly raced in the boys' Expert and Open classes. She also frequently participated in, and sometimes won, the "Trophy Dash"—the final event of a race, in which the winners of two closely related age classes and the three skill classes participate in an exhibition race that has no effect on the rider's yearly ranking. Unlike the UBR and the National Bicycle League (NBL), the ABA did not allow girls to compete in the boys' Expert Class until 1984. The ABA did allow her to run in the Trophy Dash and 12-and-under Cruiser Class. She often won on the local level, occasionally beating the male Experts—the highest amateur class. In the 1982 ABA Grand National, she placed second in the Cruiser Class, beaten by only Danny Steplight. She also won a few Trophy Dash races on her 20-inch bike at the national level; she won the 11-12 Trophy Dash at the 1983 ABA Cajun Nationals in Shreveport, Louisiana in January 1983, overpowering 12 Expert winner Jason Griggs, who had dominated his age class throughout 1982 and 1983. She was, at the time, the only girl to win the Trophy Dash at an ABA national that anyone could recall.
Elliott excelled in Quarter Pipe BMX freestyle trick riding, which at the time was unusual for a girl. She was also one of the few girls at the time who could do a "Table Top", where the rider, after launching herself high into the air off a steep ramp or berm, lays the frame of her bike parallel with the ground and righting the bike again before landing.