BMX racing's successful debut in the Beijing Olympics has spawned interest in an aspect of the cycling sport that has been overshadowed in recent years by BMX vert and stunt events.

The Beijing bounce is already showing up on your TV screen.

The Olympics gave a big boost to NBC's Aug. 24 broadcast of BMX in the AST Dew Tour's Wendy's Invitational in Portland, Ore.

With a lead-in from NBC's Beijing broadcast, the park event garnered a 2.7 overnight rating, which made it the highest-rated daytime action sports broadcast in history and the highest-rated Dew Tour broadcast.

It was the third-highest-rated sports show that day, topped only by the two giants: the Olympics and the NFL.

American medalists Mike Day (silver) and Donny Robinson (bronze) will get another chance to perform before a big national TV audience when BMX Supercross — the Olympic version with the big start ramp — will be included in NBC's coverage of the AST Dew Tour Toyota Challenge in Salt Lake City on Sept. 11-14.

"BMX Supercross is a terrific event, and its inclusion in the Olympics has created an exciting time for the BMX community, providing an enormous worldwide stage that will certainly help fuel the growth of the sport," says Wade Martin, AST president.

"We couldn't be more thrilled to have Donny and Mike competing next weekend in Salt Lake."

GT Bicycles, bike supplier and sponsor of Day and women's bronze medalist Jill Kintner, saw a 340% increase in visits to its Olympics website and a 50% increase in its YouTube hits, according to sports marketing manager Sarah Ostermeier.

That's translating into more business for dealers.

One of the original action sports, BMX sprouted in the 1960s in California as a kid's variation of off-road motorcycle racing.

Despite being hugely popular at the grass-roots level, BMX racing didn't follow the action sports boom created by ESPN's Extreme Games (later the X Games), where vert and stunt blossomed, in the 1990s.

But BMX racing helped create the next big cycling boom that decade when many top riders gravitated to mountain bike racing and later to road racing.

"BMX is one of the foundations of cycling," says Steve Blick, cycling sports marketing manager for eyewear and apparel-maker Oakley, a key supporter of the sport and sponsor of Day and Kintner.

"If you look at the icons of cycling, you will find that BMX is where they all got their start."

The women's BMX gold medalist, Anne-Caroline Chausson of France, is considered the best female mountain bike racer of all time, with 16 world championships to go with her first-ever BMX Olympic championship.

Kintner also is a multiple world champion in mountain biking, where she dominated women's gravity events such as mountain-bike cross.

She's debating whether to go back to mountain bikes or stay with BMX.

"Right now I'm leaning towards staying in BMX," she said in Beijing. "I'm having a lot of fun training with people I really like."

But don't look for Kintner or Chausson on the Dew Tour broadcast: There are no women's events in the series.

You might see them and other BMX racers on ESPN, which first broadcast downhill BMX in the X Games from 2001 to 2003.

"I wouldn't rule out the return of downhill BMX," X Games creator Ron Semiao says. "It was a great event, probably just a little ahead of its time."