BMX Makes Its Olympic Debut

June 24th, 2008 by Ron Callahan View Comments

I couldn’t be more excited about BMX making it’s debut at the Olympics this year.

I am fully into road biking and competition now, but my first exposure to any type of bike racing was BMX. I started riding and racing back in the late seventies and raced and rode all the way through college. I think that it’s safe to say that mountain biking would not be where it is today without BMX. I know that they don’t share common roots, but there are a whole bunch of people that grew out of BMX bikes and transitioned to mountain bikes. If it wasn’t for my knees, I think I’d still have a BMX bike around for fun.

Of course, BMX has changed quite a bit from my heyday. The “supercross” style courses were just starting to crop up when I stopped riding, but they seem to be the norm now. The tracks seem to have settled on a fairly common length of about a quarter mile (370m).

The qualifying format that is being used by the USOC is quite different as well. Riders accumulate points by competing in individual one-lap time trials followed by 3 one-lap eight man motos. The rider with the most points at the end of the day (not the winner of the final) gets the Olympic bid.

Kyle Bennett (Free Agent Bikes, Texas) was already slated for one of the three men’s slots and Mike Day (GT BMX, California) was the winner of the trials that took place on June 14th. The third slot will go to someone chosen by the coaches; it’s widely anticipated that that slot will go to Donny Robinson (California), who is the world’s top-ranked BMX rider. Jill Kintner will be in Beijing for the women’s competition.

For the overall Olympic competition, things get a little more complicated. Riders earn points for placing in UCI-sanctioned events that took place between January 1, 2006 and May 31, 2008. These points go into a pool earned by all racers from their country called UCI Nations Ranking. They still belong to the racer that earned them, but for the sake of determining start positions, they are also tallied in this pool. At the completion of the qualifying period ending May 31, 2008, start positions for the Beijing Olympics will be awarded based on the total points by country in the UCI Nations Ranking. Points from the top three riders in each country are used determine Olympic start positions.

32 men and 16 women will compete in Beijing in motos of 8 riders. The top 4 finishers from each moto will go to the next round.

Tags: California, mike day, Olympic, olympics, Texas