Longtime Rocky Mountain House resident and cycling advocate Loyal Ma was honoured with the 2025 Community Builder Award from the Rocky Chamber at the March 6, 2026 Denim and Diamonds award ceremony.
Ma dedicated the award to his father and father-in-law.
He says both men were shining examples of community building as his father-in-law was a Community Builder recipient himself 45 years ago as Chamber president at just 31-years-old. He also served as chairman of the local school board for 25 years.
Ma’s father was a prolific fundraiser and champion of minor hockey in the community, among other initiatives.
While Ma says many of his achievements and work were outside Rocky, his father and father-in-law were heavily involved inside the community.
However, Ma says his wider work has benefitted those closer to home, as he had a hand in the design and construction of the Red Deer BMX track where Molly Simpson and others cut their teeth.
While the original BMX track he helped bring to town decades ago is now gone, Ma says the BMX club helped fundraise for Rocky’s trail system, with a plaque near the tennis court commemorating the group’s effort.
“The Olympic motto is ‘Higher, Faster, Stronger — Together’, and that’s what community is to me,” he says, pointing to the success of recent events such as the 2019 Canada Winter Games in Red Deer.
He provided the following biography which outlines his decades-long contributions to BMX and MTB cycling, as well as officiating, training, and value-added initiatives in Rocky.
In 1957, Loyal and his mother immigrated from Hong Kong to Rocky Mountain House, Canada to rejoin his father at the age of seven. Loyal helped in the family restaurant and in the summer of 1960 won a Schwinn Sting Ray by collecting bottle caps for a Pepsi promotion. This launched his passion for cycling as it was the perfect freedom machine to escape to new adventures.
In the early 70s Loyal was riding and touring on a Sekine road bike with two young children on board. Loyal had his kids riding by age three and by 1979 realized his community needed a BMX race track. He went to work and helped fundraise and build the third BMX race track in Alberta. This brought Loyal to be on the board of the Alberta Bicycle Association, Canadian BMX Association and International BMX Federation. He attended the 3rd IBMXF World Championships in Suzuka Japan in 1984 as the Assistant Chief of Race and the following year in Whistler Canada. However, there was a lack of trained coaches and officials to help the sport grow. Loyal took on the task and wrote the early training courses for BMX provincial, national & international officials.
In the early 80s he started racing MTB and won a hand-built Brody MTB. There was no formal training for MTB officials or coaches in Alberta so he sought to remedy that. He became a national MTB commissaire but at the same time got the nod to help the Canadian Cycling Association create the MTB technical coaching modules for the National Coaching Certification Program. Along with 16 other MTB coaches and high-performance athletes from 1994 to 2007, Loyal created the Level 1 to 3 technical manuals to train MTB Coaches in Canada. Due to his work on the technical manuals, NCCP named him as master course conductor and asked that he help write and update the theory components of the NCCP program. As an NCCP master course conductor he taught on average four to six of both theory and MTB practical course annually from Alberta, Nova Scotia, Yukon Territories and Hong Kong.
Loyal was given the opportunity to attend the second UCI International Commissaire Course in Mount Snow, Vermont in 1991 taught by Dean Crandall. He was so taken with Dean that when asked by him what he wanted to do after the course he said “a UCI Course Conductor like you.” For the next 30 years, he set out to be like Dean Crandall by inspiring other officials and mentoring them. Through the years Dean has become Loyal’s friend, mentor and a big part of the Ma Family.
Serving as a cycling official for over 40 years and as the Chair of the Cycling Canada Officials Committee for over 25 years, the “MTB Yoda” has helped write and develop the curriculum for both MTB & BMX officials at the provincial, national and international level. Since the inception of the UCI Elite National Commissaire Courses, he has delivered 14 MTB & BMX courses with over 300 participants around the globe.
Loyal has been assigned to the commissaires panel of over 200 international events, 30 national championships, 12 continental championships, 24 world championships, four continental games, London 2012 & Rio 2016 Olympics. In honor of his retirement in 2020 from international officiating the International Cycling Union presented him with an engraved Tissot World Champions watch for his years of dedication and contribution as a commissaire and instructor.
Since retiring he has devoted more time to MTB Trail access advocacy and an outreach program for MTB riding and maintenance for seniors. He also continues to mentor and advise his “Padawan” coaches and officials from around the world. May the Force be with you.
~ submitted by Loyal Ma
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