A 23-year-old woman pulls on a green and gold robe, takes a country's Olympic medal hopes on her shoulders and raises a massive piece of cardboard above her head.
It's a big airline ticket — an oversized boarding pass that is taking Queenslander Natalya Diehm straight to Tokyo as the first and only Australian woman to compete in Olympic freestyle BMX.
It almost didn't happen.
Pushed to her limits by near-crippling injuries and years of juggling training and full-time work, Diehm was thinking about calling it quits.
Then BMX racing world champion Caroline Buchanan gave her a personal call urging her not to give up.
No style like freestyle
Freestyle BMX is the gymnastics of extreme sports.
Riders compete in a 60-second rollercoaster of half-pipes, spines and vertical ramps, shooting themselves metres into the air and stringing together a series of gravity-defying tricks.
"Every rider gets two one-minute runs and … you just try to do the best tricks you know that you can do to impress the judges," Diehm said.
Tokyo 2020 will be the first Olympic Games to feature the sport after a committee vote in 2017.
Diehm, one of nine women competing, says the purpose-built Tokyo track will be one of the biggest she has ever ridden.
"It's going to be insane," she said.
"I beat them. I thought I was quite good, but never thought I would be at the stage I'm at now — competing at the biggest event ever."
A rough ride
Diehm's journey to the word stage has been a long, bumpy ride.
She's had four reconstructions on the same knee.
"By that fourth operation I was like, 'Nope, I'm just getting hurt and I'm still working and now I'm out of work, I've got no money — this is crazy, what am I doing?'" Diehm said.
She thanked Buchanan's phone call for restoring her resolve.
"I had never met her before and she gave me a call and was like, 'Hey, I know your situation, but this has been announced at the Olympics — I really think you should give this one more try,'" Diehm said.
"If it wasn't for that phone call, I would have just swept it under the rug.
Rallying the troops
Buchanan was undergoing a sternum reconstructions when she decided to pick up the phone to call Diehm.
"Natalya was that superstar as a young girl in the freestyle world."
Buchanan competed at two Olympic Games for racing and said the opportunity changed her life.
"I just thought, 'I need to call this girl up and tell her the opportunity ahead,'" she said.
"I said, 'I really believe in you' … Fast forward to now and she's in the Olympic Games debuting BMX freestyle."
Women's BMX seeding events begin on July 31 at 11.10am, with the finals to be held on Sunday August 1.
