Family Values | YZ Edition

By Justin Balkos
Senior Marketing Representative
Yamaha Motor Canada

Today’s fast-paced world of ever-changing trends and ever-evolving technology leaves little room for families to truly connect, savour life’s meaningful moments and, most importantly, spend quality time together. “A family who plays together, stays together” has been a guiding principle from the get-go in how my wife and I have approached raising our two girls. The other constant has been dirt bikes.

It was the summer of 1989, at the ripe age of 16, when I met my future wife. We were introduced to each other by mutual friends, who connected us based on our common interest in dirt bikes. Less than 10 minutes into our first conversation we both knew we were meant for one another, and the future was going be one heck of an adventure.

Date nights at the movie theatre became the exception. Riding at the local track together during the week and racing on Sundays was our thing to do in the summer. While we still pursued other interests of our own outside of dirt biking, our common fabric centred around the off-road culture and community. The formative years of going off to university and settling into new work careers can often be disruptive for relationships and we weren’t the exception, but we also had a bond that just couldn’t be broken.

Home ownership made it necessary to realign priorities, but our monthly budget still accounted for two dirt bikes in the garage and vacations centred around racing – most notably, going to Las Vegas for the season finale of Supercross.

Having kids was always in our plans. Our first daughter was born in 2004 with our second following three years later. Battery powered toy motorcycles sufficed for what I like to call their “foundational years.” By the time our oldest turned three, we had a PW50 outfitted with training wheels in the family fleet. As the girls grew so did their interest in riding.

Devoted Yamaha riders, my wife and I were always sporting the Yamaha tuning fork on a shirt or wearing some other moto-related apparel. This always prompted other off-road families to engage in conversation. At a soccer game, while our girls were still young, we met another faithful Yamaha family with two girls of their own following the same PW50 path. This was the start of a life-long family friendship that would give them some of their best childhood memories.

We gathered regularly at the Oshawa Competition Motorcycle Club (OCMC) for Tuesday night races. While juggling flagging duties between cheering for our girls on the kids track and making gate drop for our own races was a whirlwind at times, those weekly Tuesday night races made for a great environment to form new friendships and immerse ourselves further into the off-road community.

As the girls developed more of a competitive edge on the track, we branched out to racing with the Maguire’s Motocross Racing Series (MMRS). John’s program was a perfect fit for us as it was family oriented, well organized and the tracks were relatively close to home. It felt like the old days for my wife and I, and we fully embraced the return to weekend racing.

Our years racing MMRS and travelling to the States to participate in some national race weekends were marked by the transformative years of our girls progressing through Yamaha’s product family of off-road and competitive motorcycles – TT-R 50, TT-R 110, YZ65, YZ85 and the YZ125, which is what they are both riding today.

Racing suddenly came to halt, as did the rest of the world, in 2020 with the global pandemic. As disruptive as COVID-19 was, it served to be the single biggest influence in growing the off-road market. Suddenly it seemed like everyone we knew were getting into riding dirt bikes and we loved it. Weekend gatherings with our close friends at local tracks was our new family ritual.

Over the last number of years, we’ve adapted to the changing times and had to realign priorities and expectations. Our girls are now living their best teenage years, juggling school and part-time jobs. The week’s itinerary is no longer based around the availability of my wife and I. Even though there are times when it seems all our worlds are colliding, the love for riding is entrenched in all of us. And, to this day, I can still thankfully attribute many of our best family moments to seat time on our dirt bikes.