“I don’t usually get teary but I did after my last run when I saw them,” Martin said of the footage played on the screen in the arena. “It makes it so much easier coming out of hotel quarantine with a gold medal.
“I honestly can’t believe it,” he said earlier. “To be here on the Olympic team with so many great athletes. I’m stoked to bring home a gold medal for Australia. This gold medal is for you guys.”
Martin,the family man,is in some ways a sign of how much the sport of BMX has changed from X-Games staple to mainstream Olympic discipline.
Venezuelan Daniel Dhers,36,who scored 92.05 to win the silver on Sunday,recalled partying until 6am and hitting the skatepark the next day a decade ago. Dhers said it was all a bit more serious now. The Olympics can do that to a sport.
“We learnt that we needed to keep our body up to date to be able to compete as well,” Dhers said.
As it happens Martin is not the only one with a skatepark in his backyard. When COVID-19 hit,Dhers,who now lives in North Carolina,invited the world’s top BMX freestylers to his place.
“At that point the Olympics had not been cancelled but we could not go out to practise. We had to keep training”.
For the next 18 months they did. On Sunday they met in the park in Tokyo.
“It shows the camaraderie we have,” said Martin. “We are all mates off the field.”
This is a stunning spectator sport,one that you can see marking its place,along with BMX racing,skateboarding and surfing,on the Olympic calendar for decades to come. The Olympics need the TV-ready cool cut-through of each of the sports just as much as they need the professionalism and reach that comes with the Olympics.
“I think this will open our doors and get more eyeballs on our sport,” Dhers said.
Great Britain’s Declan Brooks took the bronze on 90.8.
After years of build-up and delay,on Sunday,eight men and eight women threw themselves around the skatepark.
Great Britain’s Charlotte Worthington,the women’s gold medallist pulled out a trick that had never been done before – a 360 backflip – and nailed it. Even the officials from rival Olympic squads could not muffle their “woah”. She won with 97.5.
Hannah Roberts from the USA took silver with 96.1,and Nikita Ducarroz from Switzerland got bronze with 89.2.
Australia’s Natalya Diehm,who has come back from four knee surgeries and injured it again in a flip on Sunday,finished with a score of 86 to land in fifth place.
After crashing out in her first round Worthington had to wait until her second run to hit the 97.5 score but Martin’s first run put him in another league against the other men.
Martin was the first rider well into the 90s in the BMX freestyle,scoring 93.3 after executing back-to-back frontflips,540 flares and rolls with impossibly small margins for error.
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By the time it was time for him to drop in again from the top of the park for the second time,none of his competitors had threatened his first run. He flew onto the ramp for one last flip before parking himself in the middle of the park,just like the one he built in his own home,pumping his fists at the rest of the Australian team and the officials gathered.
“I already knew I had won the gold medal,” he said. “I was overwhelmed with joy.”
Martin’s medal was not only the first freestyle BMX Olympic gold,but also allowed Australia to complete its best medal haul of any Olympics ever. Four golds went to Australian athletes in Tokyo on Sunday.
“To win the first BMX gold medal,that’s history,” said Martin. “To be a part of the four gold medals is just a huge honour.”
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