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Logan Martin wins third BMX Freestyle world championship
Dec 21, 2024
The ARA Australian Cycling Team has finished the year on an incredible high, with Logan Martin winning an unprecedented third BMX freestyle world championship at the 2024 UCI Urban Cycling World Championships in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates overnight.
Australia also had more to cheer about in the women’s competition, with Natalya Diehm and Sarah Nicki both posting top-ten finishes in the women’s final.
Martin’s victory goes some way to erasing the disappointment of a silver medal at the 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships, and the ninth-place finish at the Paris 2024 Olympics where he crashed in the final.
As had been the case all week, athletes were treated to perfect weather for the final day of competition in Abu Dhabi, with clear skies, mild winds, and temperatures in the low-20s creating ideal conditions for riders.
Elite Men
The men’s BMX freestyle final featured a stacked field including the last two world champions in Rim Nakamura (Japan) and Keiran Reilly (Great Britain), and 2024 Olympic gold medallist Jose Torres Gil (Argentina), ensuring riders would need to be all-in to reach the podium.
After qualifying sixth in the semi-final, Martin was one of the early riders on course in Heat 1. However, the Queenslander was clearly switched on from the outset, laying down a technically perfect first run, highlighted by an opposite triple down-whip, tail-whip to tabletop, and a 360-double bar spin, posting an opening score of 91.10.
Incredibly, Martin wowed the crowd and the judges with a blistering second run. After starting with an opposite quadruple tail-whip, Martin swung for the fences, laying down an opposite double tail-whip, a forward bike flip, and a flip-bar spin to finish. With the best score from two runs counting towards the rider’s final standings, Martin’s score of 94.30 was almost 10 points clear of the next best rider in his heat.
Martin then had to sit back and watch the Heat 2 riders take two attempts to top his score, and Nakamura threw an early scare through the Australian camp with a 90.48 on his first run, as did Torres Gil with a score of 91.60 on his opening ride.
However, Martin’s high score clearly raised the pressure on the latter riders, as one by one they either made a technical mistake or fell pushing for bigger tricks throughout their second run. And when final rider Jordan Clark (Great Britain) was unable to break 90 on his final run, Martin was alone at the top leaderboard, adding a third world title to his previous victories in 2017 and 2021.
No other rider has more than a single world championship to their name, and the win cements the 31-year-old’s place as the best rider of his generation, with Martin revealing the work that had gone into preparing for the event.
“I’m absolutely stoked,” Martin said.
“I really wanted to pull my first run. I landed that run and then it was all or nothing. I had to go out there and send it. I was in the first group so there was a lot more guys to go after me, so I had to go out and really send it in my second run and that run really paid off and that’s the one that won. I’m absolutely stoked to win my third world championship.
“Those tricks are the tricks that I practice every day at home. In my first run I played it a little bit safer, and I’ve been doing those tricks in my second run every single day. I planned to do them at the Olympics earlier in the year and it didn’t pay off, but it paid off here and I really worked for these results.
“I do it for my kids, my beautiful little boy Noah and my little girl Luna, and my beautiful wife back home. My wife holds it down while I have to travel and compete, and it doesn’t happen without a team, and my team is back home and it’s really awesome to have their support.”
Torres Gil and Justin Dowell (USA) took the silver and bronze medals with scores of 91.60 and 90.74 respectively.
Elite Women
Earlier, Australia’s women were able to improve on their qualifying position in the final, with Diehm and Nicki finishing in 9th and 10th respectively.
After qualifying 11th, Nicki was the second rider on course and attacked her first run with trademark speed, completing a technically impressive series of tricks across all of the course, including a huge no hander, one-foot tabletop, and a one-foot x-up to can-can, to post a handy opening score of 84.30.
Pushing to boost her standings on the second run, the 17-year-old came unstuck on a bar spin-to can-can, and finished 10th overall.
Diehm’s opening run featured a no-hander to tyre grab and a perfect tail-whip that set a score of 83.54, but the Olympic bronze medallist went all out for the second run, landing a perfect backflip to start, followed by a no-hander to tyre grab, alley-oop 360, and another tail-whip.
The Queenslander bumped up her score with an 85.28 and was momentarily in second place but fell to 9th overall after Heat 2 riders had completed their runs.
Hannah Roberts (USA) continues to break new ground in the sport, winning her sixth BMX freestyle world championship with a score of 95.70, ahead of Chinese pair Sibei Sun (94.06) and Xiaotong Fan (93.72).
For full results and more information on the 2024 UCI Urban Cycling World Championships, visit the competition hub.
Replays of the finals are available on Fox Sports and Kayo.
The next major event on the Australian BMX freestyle calendar is the 2025 AusCycling National Championship from February 15-16 on the Gold Coast.
Main image: UCI