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WITH A FEW hours off this afternoon, I decided to head into the Place de la Concorde to check in on the IOC’s efforts to Save the Olympic Games.
President Thomas Bach has said the Games have to evolve to meet the interests of Gen Z, and so a suite of sports have been added to roll Boomer eyes, including breakdancing, BMX freestyle, skateboarding, and 3×3 basketball.
(The ancient practice of 5×5 basketball was evidently too much for our abbreviated attention spans. We’re only a few Games away from a heartbreaking quarter-final exit for Ireland in rugby twos.)
“Sport has to go where the people are”, says Bach. “These sports are attracting the younger generation, and the Olympic programme has always to be like a jigsaw puzzle where you have some traditional pieces and some innovative pieces.”
And of course the Games programme has always evolved, save for the few anchor events. Ireland won Olympic medals in painting and poetry a hundred years ago, both of which have long since disappeared. It’s fair to say Olympic progress has not been kind to the island of Saints and Scholars, which, as a great man might say, has never been a breakdancing stronghold.
And so this is why Place de la Concorde, the site of Marie-Antoniette’s beheading, has been renamed Urban Park. Let’s hope the IOC’s attempts to appeal to the masses are a bit more successful.
The heats of the men’s BMX freestyle were kicking off shortly after I arrived, but of more immediate relevance was the actual heat, which headbutted me as soon as the doors to my hotel rolled open. Paris was squashed until late evening by a brutal swelter, with temperatures pushing past 36 degrees.
So my first main issue in seeing the BMX freestyle was in seeing the BMX freestyle. When I got to the media desks in the stand, I was so bathed in sweat that it mixed with my sun cream and stung my eyes closed. Another reason why these sports are made for TikTok.
The arena commentator at one point told the crowd that “it’s heating up”, before clarifying he was talking strictly about the competition. That crowd was enormous: the three stands arranged around the pit were packed, and hundreds stood along the fourth side, peering in between giant TV screens for free.
The pit in front of me looked like a giant skatepark, through which riders carved and swung on 12kg bikes, pulling off tricks as they soared into the air. Riders had one minute to rip through their routines: what they did was entirely up to them. Those routines are scored by a panel of judges, with the maximum possible score 100. The nine riders with the best average score across two rounds would progress to tomorrow’s final.
The bikes themselves must have wheels 50cm long, but very little else is regulated, so riders can choose whether to use brakes or not. (Fitting to the scene, the organisers’ view is very much a case of let them use brakes!)
The whole event is lend an added layer of televisuality by an in-arena commentator who whips up the crowd and helpfully sneaks in a few genuinely interesting pieces of information. BMX experts no doubt feel patronised by this commentator but, reader, I certainly wasn’t one of those.
Emphasis on the past tense. Such is the heady experience of the Olympic Games: it takes roughly about half an hour of watching any event featuring a bit of commentary to feel confident in opining on it. It took around that long for me to turn to the journalist next to me and lament that Argentina’s Jose Torres wasn’t using the awesome height of his jumps to pull more tricks, unlike the far more economical Marcus Christopher.
It was admittedly more difficult to lean into the jargon. A tailwhip, for instance, is a trick in which the rider kicks the back end of their bike to complete a full revolution around the handlebars. These riders generally did multiple tailwhips while airborne, briefly dismounting the bike as they did so, movements that delivered an adrenal rush through the crowd.
And for all the easy scoffing about the incorporation of these sports amid the IOC’s pivot to video, BMX riders are proper athletes. Christopher, for instance, has a mouthful of metal plates after he broke his jaw and cheekbone in a crash last year.
Olympic champion Logan Martin of Australia, meanwhile, is hardcore, a kind of Handlebear Grylls character. He refuses to practice his routines in a foam pit, and instead works on rubber. He spent $70,000 building his own ramp at home for preparation ahead of Tokyo, where the sport made its Olympic debut.
Others define their identity by it. Japan’s Rimu Nakamaura was named after the rim of a bicycle wheel, while South Africa’s Vincent Leygonie even has handlebars on his moustache.
There were a couple of Olympic-standard heartwarming tales, too. Brazil’s Gustavo De Oliveira was too poor to afford a BMX bike growing up, so his father designed and built him one out of spare parts. You don’t get those kinds of stories in equestrian families. (Given that anyone in equestrian who went to their Olympic Committee for design help would end up getting a camel.)
De Oliveira battled through to the final, sneaking through in eighth place with a couple of consistent runs, albeit the first slightly undermined by a slightly early land back on the ramp from the air.
Champion Martin eased through in third place, with Marcus Christopher in second place. The star of the show, though, was Britain’s Kieran Reilly, who put everyone on notice by racing across his first ramp and doing a mid-air front flip in the process. It was an audacious start and in terms of laying down a marker was BMX freestyle’s version of Keane-on-Overmars. Reilly was the only man to score above 90 across both of his rounds.
The great theatre of the day surrounded the French rider, Anthony Jeanjean who, unusually for a man who rides a bike, has a name that sounds like an engine starting. Jeanjean was the last to ride, and he attacked the course with vigour too, propelled by the home support. His opening round score showed he would qualify providing he avoided disaster in the final round, such as that which befell Croatia’s Martin Rantes, who fell as he landed back on terra firma from the air.
But instead of riding cautiously for the final round, Jeanjean was determined to thrill the crowd and qualify as the top-ranked rider, which would bring the slight benefit of riding last in the final. And so he barrelled around the course in the Flight of la Concorde, soaring above the crowd in a blur of twists and turns and somersaults and, er, tailwhips.
He rolled to a stop a minute later to a wreath of raucous acclaim.
The judges weren’t swayed by the crowd, sadly, and Jeanjean qualified in fifth.
The Olympic Games has many problems: its embrace of sports like these is not one of them.
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