"The link to racing a motorbike around a field remains, but the sport has seen more than the odd change of name since the first off-road meeting was organized in 1924. In that year, a group of riders from Surrey [England] decided to run an adaptation of Yorkshire's Scott trial, excluding the observed sections where points could be lost. Without these the event couldn't be called a trial, and one competitor's comment that the race would be a fair old scramble led to the new form of racing being called scrambling. Scrambling's popularity spread from Britain to continental Europe in the 1940s, and in 1947 the first international Moto-Cross des Nations was contested between five-man teams from France, Belgium, the Netherlands and England. In the 1960s and 1970s the sport was dominated by Belgian and Scandinavian riders including Joel Robert, Roger De Coster and Heikki Mikkola. The sport had become known as motocross but was otherwise essentially little changed when it reached America in the late 1960s. Americans had other ideas, and in 1972 the Olympic Coliseum in Los Angeles was converted into an indoor motocross circuit with dramatic jumps. Supercross had been born, and four years later it had grown into an eight-round national championship, was attracting huge crowds and was on the way to taking over as the most important branch of the sport in the States."
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