to retire at the end of 1979. In fact you said you were going to retire every year since 1976. Are you going to tell us the same thing this year?"Thomsen: (Laughing) "I always say that. You know me."—BMX Plus! January 1981 The question of his retirement would repeatedly arise until he actually retired at the beginning of the 1987 racing season. According to the November 1984 issue of the ABA's publication American BMXer Stu had the penchant to "grandstand" and make a situation like someone colliding with him worse than it was. Post-BMX career Beginning in 1988, Stu Thomsen competed in mountain bike racing on the National Off Road Bicycle Association (NORBA) circuit as other BMX racers had done and would later do including Tinker Juarez, Cheri Elliott, Pete Loncarevich and Toby Henderson. His biggest accomplishment in organized sponsored mountain Bike racing was his third-place finish in the downhill division at the 1988 World Mountain Bike Championships at Mammoth, California. He ran his bicycle shop, Stu Thomsen's Bicycle Center, with his wife Tanya for eight years. He decided to quit since it was in a highly competitive area with six or seven bike shops within a 10-mile radius of his. Despite being a good bike shop mechanic and was willing to dispense advice to other bike shop owners he didn't like being his own boss and sold his shop in 1992. He tried various sales jobs and was a counselor at a Family Fitness Center as a counselor but neither was successful and he went back to being a bicycle shop manager and bike mechanic (possibly Southridge Cycles in Riverside, California, one of his last sponsors at the time he briefly raced in Veteran pro class.) He naturally worked the BMX section of the store. That local shop with Thomsen as its mechanic would help maintain at least some of the bikes the Riverside Police Department had for their Bicycle Patrol program. That was the possible catalyst for his interest in law enforcement. He is now a Sheriff's Deputy in Orange County, California, making him literally "The Man" (a prison slang term that could be a pejorative that was created around 1950 for the prison warden. It came into mass usage in the 1960s referring to the powers that be that runs society or their servants such as those in law enforcement). When he was a bike shop manager/mechanic