When racers at an event are called athletes and the race is anything but a race

That's an odd-sounding title for this relatively short blogpost, but it sums up the UCI BMX World Cup in Birmingham, Alabama, which I attended last weekend. When we hear "BMX," we think of adult men racing kids' bikes around a pump track for about 35 seconds. But BMX has another side to it, and it is quite different: Think of skaters doing jumps and tricks on tiny bikes that have no brakes. Welcome to the world of BMX Freestyle.

Even though Freestyle (the Park version only—more on Flatland in a minute) has been included in the Olympics since 2020, it's certainly not as much mainstream in the US as regular BMX racing, and thus one has to see it as a niche sport among niche sports. If there is awareness, it is most likely with the younger crowd because of its resemblance to skateboarding.

Flatland is less thrilling and sexy than Park as there are no jumps and ramps; riders stay on the flat ground and do routines on their bikes that involve twirling handlebars 360°+, rolling back and forth on one wheel, and doing things on and with the bike that require absolute balance and body control. (When I grew up in Germany, once in a while we'd watch Artistic Cycling on TV, a discipline requiring men and women to perform handstands on the handlebars or put their shoulder on the saddle while outlining a figure eight with their coasting bike. Artistic Cycling is still a UCI discipline, but it is totally obscure on our shores.)

For a niche sport, BMX Freestyle is relatively big business, obviously not as big as the Tour de France or mountain biking, but big enough to have a year-long World Cup competition with four events on three continents. Sponsors big and small are on board, and athletes from about 40 nations participated in this round. Birmingham had been able to score the rights to host the second stop for the 2026 season, offering infrastructure left over from the city's hosting the World Games in 2022, an event that attracted more than 3,500 athletes who competed in over 100 disciplines. If you're not familiar with the World Games, they are sometimes described as the "Olympics for non-Olympic sports."

Since I no longer do UCI work you can probably guess why I was in Alabama. Like in every other sport, BMX Freestyle participants are subject to medical controls in and out of competition. I was joined by my friend Linda, with whom I had worked a race in Puerto Rico earlier this year. Over the years we have developed a close rapport with each other, and it is always a treat to be paired up with Linda.

The event was set up in a very interesting location: under the elevated lanes of Interstate 20! The droning of the cars and trucks above us was drowned out by the kind of loud music that you'd expect at an event that counts Monster Energy as one of its main sponsors. Looking at the "crowd" (four-day passes to the event were sold for $47 through Ticketmaster, and it wasn't until the day of the ill-fated finals that there were maybe 200 spectators in attendance; the qualifications were held in front of fewer than 50 individuals who were not directly related to the competition), tattoos are a tribal symbol, as are at times outlandish outfits, spectators and athletes alike. Security was surprisingly tight, with a chain-link fence surrounding the perimeter and TSA-like entry points. Linda and I had to think back to the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup in Snowshoe that attracted an estimated 15,000 paying spectators in a location that required for most at least a three-hour drive.... Remember what I said about "niche." 

Birmingham is a pleasant city of about 200,000 inhabitants, and the metro area is said to top a million people. There are a few skyscrapers in the downtown area, there are several well-kept parks and historic buildings, and there's even a free art museum (that we never got a chance to visit). The general pace seems to be rather Southern, a bit on the slower side. And why hurry in this heat and humidity? During our stay, daily rainstorms added to the sauna-like environment, and just walking the few steps from our hotel, the Sheraton,  to the venue challenged the sweat glands. 

In a perfect world, the venue would have been weatherproof, but with all the metal scaffolding to attract lightning and the one-foot gap between the west- and east-bound lanes of the elevated interstate enough rain made it onto the field of play to cause numerous delays, schedule changes, and finally the cancellation of the Park finals on Sunday. No worries, we had athletes on the podium to take home prize money for winning this first BMX Freestyle World Cup in the United States The winners were determined based on the outcome of the earlier semifinals (men) and qualification round (women).

Linda helping waterproof athletes

Whenever we work such events, Linda and I (and our colleagues worldwide) are dependent on local volunteers without whom we couldn't do what we're doing. One of the highlights of our job is to meet these locals and learn about their life in a place that we're visiting for just a few days. Some of them go out of their way to not only be helpful but make us feel at home. Veon and Ty were two such individuals, and we enjoyed our conversations with them in which they shared so much of themselves. Veon smiled in three days more than other people in a month, and Ty, who initially had signed up for only one day of volunteering, decided to not only return on a daily basis but to also take Linda and me around town to two breweries for a few beers and dinner (even though he himself doesn't drink). We felt so at ease with these good folks and can only hope that we treated them with the respect and friendship they deserve.

Linda left on Monday morning to go back to her real job in the Portland, OR, area, and I left a few hours later in the afternoon. For a while it had looked as if Linda might have to hang out in Denver for an extra seven hours when a (United) crewmember didn't show up in time for her initial flight, but somehow she made it home at a decent hour. My AA flights, for once, were on time (actually, the DFW to LBB hop was delayed by ten minutes since we waited for some late-connecting passengers—for once, somebody at American realized that nobody connects onward from LBB and thus six stressed-out passengers were spared the usual wait for the last-flight-of-the-day routine).

And then, surprise, surprise, Sandy showed up at the airport to take me home! A good trip, indeed!

Jürgen