FIM Trial World Championship history
While the FIM celebrates its 120th anniversary in 2024, the Trial World Championship reaches its own landmark of 50 years going strong. 2024 also marks 25 years of female involvement with the FIM Women’s World Cup.
With both Gold and Silver Jubilees in the same season, 2024 is undeniably a momentous year for Trial and the perfect time to take a look back through the history books at the riders, results and events that have helped to shape the sport over the last half-century.
The origins of the sport go back well over 100 years, but it was not until 1964 that an international competition – the Challenge Henry Groutars – was established, only to be superseded by the FIM Trial European Championship that ran from 1968 until 1974 before it was elevated to full FIM World Championship status.
Apart from back-to-back wins by Germany’s Franke Gustav in 1965 and 1966, these early years were dominated by British riders with Don Smith winning three times, and Sammy Miller and Mick Andrews each winning twice before Martin Lampkin and Malcolm Rathmell took a victory apiece.
The historic inaugural FIM Trial World Championship season in 1975 saw a titanic title battle that eventually resulted in a one-two for Spanish manufacturer Bultaco with Lampkin emerging on top by a solitary point from Finland’s Yrjö Vesterinen before the great ‘Vesty’ struck back with a hat-trick of titles for Bultaco from 1976 to 1978.
In 1977 a young rider from Los Angeles by the name of Bernie Schreiber made his FIM World Trial Championship debut. It was not his first taste of top-flight action – that came in 1974 when, aged just fifteen, he competed at Saddleback Park in California – and while he was too young to be eligible to score points on that occasion, three years later he piloted his Bultaco to seventh in the rankings.
The following year he advanced to third, just ten points behind second-placed Lampkin who in turn was only two behind Vesterinen. The stage was set for a history-making season in 1979 when Schreiber claimed Bultaco’s fifth consecutive crown, securing the title from his Finnish rival at the final round at Ricany in what was then known as Czechoslovakia. It was the first and so far only time the championship has been won by an American rider.
The title returned to Scandinavia in 1980 and Montesa claimed its first championship when Sweden’s Ulf Karlsson narrowly defeated Schreiber who won the final four rounds, but ultimately came up short by ten points and the following year Gilles Burgat emerged on top riding for Italian manufacturer SWM. It was a momentous achievement for the nineteen-year-old Frenchman who, in breaking the Spanish manufacturers’ monopoly on the title, became the youngest champion in the sport’s history – a record that still stands to this day.
Burgat’s win also paved the way for a string of titles for riders on Italian machines, although before this happened the Japanese motorcycle industry also wanted to get in on the action.
From 1982 to 1984 the championship belonged to Belgium’s Eddy Lejeune who achieved his hat-trick riding for Honda. Lejeune’s trio of titles were the first FIM Trial World Championships to be won on a four-stroke, but they would not be the last…
Riding for Fantic, Thierry Michaud – the current Director of the FIM Trial Commission – took back-to-back championships in 1985 and 1986 and a third in 1988 after regaining his crown from a talented young Spaniard called Jordi Tarres who dominated the 1987 season for Beta, winning seven of that year’s twelve points-paying rounds.
Tarres was back on top in 1989 and in complete control – winning ten of the twelve scoring days – and he remained the man to beat until 1992 when the title returned to Finland in the hands of Aprilia-mounted Tommi Ahvala following a close-fought campaign that saw the Finn dethrone Tarres by just nine points.
For 1993 Tarres switched to the Spanish GASGAS marque and he extended his title total to seven with another hat-trick before being defeated by his compatriot Marc Colomer who won Montesa’s second crown in 1996 as Tarres slipped to third behind a young British rider who was aiming to emulate his father who had won the first-ever title twenty-one years earlier.
Putting Beta back on top in 1997, Dougie Lampkin reeled off a hat-trick of titles for the Italian manufacturer and following his move to Montesa at the start of the new millennium he added four more from 2000 to 2003 to extend his unbroken win-streak to seven to equal Tarres’ record total.
While Lampkin held the men’s side of the sport in his iron grip, his female counterpart – Spain’s Laia Sanz – was about to set a few records of her own, starting in 2000 when aged just fifteen she steered her Beta to the first FIM Women’s World Cup, an achievement she repeated for the next three years before moving to Montesa in 2004 and adding a further three crowns that, from 2005 onwards, carried full FIM World Championship status.
Having finished runner-up to Lampkin every year since 1999, in 2004 Takahisa Fujinami finally defeated his team-mate across the course of a full season to claim a hugely popular championship victory, the first and up to now only title achieved by a Japanese rider as his reign was short-lived. The following season, while ‘Fujigas’ was adjusting to the factory’s new four-stroke machine, Spain’s Adam Raga claimed the title for GASGAS before making it back-to-back championships the following year.
It was all-change in 2007, a season that will forever be known as the year Toni Bou won his first title and kicked off a run of championships that continue unbroken to this day. With his current record standing at an amazing seventeen consecutive crowns, all achieved on Montesa’s four-stroke – and with a clear championship lead this year with just three points-scoring days of competition left on the calendar – Bou has eclipsed both Tarres’ and Lampkin’s records to become the most successful rider in the fifty-year history of the FIM Trial World Championship.
Bou’s first gold medal in 2007 coincided with Sanz’s only unsuccessful championship campaign when she lost out on a tie-break with Scorpa-mounted Iris Kramer from Germany. However, Sanz responded in the style of a true champion and from 2008 until 2013 she was unbeaten in the FIM Women’s Trial World Championship before switching her focus to Enduro and Rally-Raid events.
Runner-up behind Sanz every year since 2011, Emma Bristow gave the Sherco factory its first FIM Trial World Championship in 2014 and the British Lioness seized control of the class to win every year until 2021 when Sanz’s commitments allowed her to return. In a closely-contested championship, the pair traded wins for the full season before GASGAS-mounted Sanz reclaimed the title with victory at the final round in Portugal.
Sanz then returned to her other incredibly successful motorcycling activities and Bristow went on to win the title a further two times and currently lies in pole position to claim her tenth FIM Women’s Trial World Championship crown with three scoring days remaining in what she has announced will be her final season in top-flight competition.
