Olympians, National Champions and former UCI World Champions were among the BMX Freestyle Park riders competing in an international competition at the UCI World Cycling Centre (WCC) in Aigle, Switzerland, on Saturday.
Last year’s winner of the Swiss C1 event, the USA’s Justin Dowell, was victorious again in Aigle on 7 September. The 2018 UCI World Champion and Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024 Olympian was joined on the podium by Colombia’s Luis Rincon (2nd) and Hungarian Kristophs Krausz.
In the women’s competition, German Champion and Paris 2024 Olympian Kim Lea Müller took the honours ahead of two Swiss athletes: Tokyo 2020 Olympic bronze medalist Nikita Ducarroz and Michelle Neuner.
Ducarroz and Neuner had finished first and second in the Swiss Championships held the day before, also on the UCI WCC BMX Freestyle Park. The men’s Swiss title went to defending Swiss Champion Alexandre Sideris.
A considerable number of the participants will travel to Spain this week to compete in the Extreme Barcelona. For the Europeans, the European Championships will take place in Catenazzo, in the Swiss canton of Ticino, in two weeks’ time.
Judging seminar and Commission meeting
The two days of competition in Aigle were also an opportunity for new BMX Freestyle Park judges to gain practical experience at high-level competitions. Fifteen judges from 12 countries attended a two-day judging seminar at the UCI WCC, with five judging the competitions overseen by two experienced international judges.
To complete a week dedicated to BMX Freestyle at the UCI WCC, the UCI BMX Freestyle Commission met the day before the competitions. Two Commission members from the USA also competed in the C1 competition: Cory Coffey, the first woman to do a backflip on a BMX bike, and Ryan Nyquist, head coach of the USA Olympic BMX Freestyle team and 16-time X Games medalist.
The BMX Freestyle Park at the UCI WCC was inaugurated in 2019, ahead of the discipline’s debut on the Olympic programme in Tokyo. Regularly used by athletes for training, it hosted the C1 competition for the first time in 2023, also in conjunction with a judging clinic with the aim of establishing an even wider network of top-level judges for the ever-growing discipline.
Photo credit: Bart de Jong /@fatbmx