Argentina’s José Torres Gil and China’s Yawen Deng took home the gold medals in the men’s and women’s Paris Olympics BMX Freestyle park competitions after a thrilling afternoon of action at the Urban Park, Place de la Concorde.
British star and men’s World Champion from Glasgow 2023, Kieran Reilly, was gracious in defeat and delighted with the silver behind Torres Gil after improving his score to 93.91 in an electric final run. In the women’s, Perris Benegas took silver for the USA with a big score of 90.70 in her second run.
The Argentinian Torres Gil put in a monster-winning score of 94.82 in just the third run of the whole men’s contest. As only the seventh-highest qualifier out of nine from Tuesday, he stomped down a series of huge tricks and transfers to wow both the Parisian crowd and judges to take gold.
“I’m very happy. I came to participate in the Olympic Games, the biggest event in the world. I was impressed. I didn’t expect to score so high from the first round so I was delighted,” said Torres Gil as reported by the UCI. “I’m grateful to the crowd, they gave everyone a lot of support, whether we came from America, Europe. All the work I did was so that everyone could enjoy our sport.”
In the women’s freestyle finals, Deng went into her second run knowing she had at least a medal with the top score in the first of two runs, where only the best would count as opposed to a two-run average as was the case in qualifying on Tuesday.
The 18-year-old Chinese rider showed great consistency in improving her 92.50 score marginally to 92.60. With five-time World Champion and silver medallist from Tokyo, Hannah Roberts (USA) to come, though, the gold was far from decided.
Roberts went after Deng in the first run as the top qualifier but crashed heavily after failing a frontflip in the final 10 seconds of her attempt, meaning she was well away from the medals going into the final.
With the pressure on as the last rider of the day, Roberts saw her Olympic dream crumble as a failed backflip on the first hit-up of run two caused her to slip off the pedals on the landing and bailout of the attempt. She would get nowhere near the 88.80 needed for bronze.
“After the first run, I was on top and that gave me more confidence to level up my performance in the second run. If you do every move well, your final score can’t be bad,” said Deng, who didn’t want to get carried away with thinking about Los Angeles 2028.
“I haven’t thought that far yet. I just want to compete well in each race and take it one race at a time.”
Third place was taken by an ecstatic Natalya Diehm from Australia for the women.
On the men's side, French hope Anthony Jeanjean bounced back from crashing after his first trick on run one to double-backflipping his way into the medals, eventually taking bronze behind Torres Gil and Reilly.
Crashes also proved disaster for the likes of the defending men’s Olympic champion from Tokyo Logan Martin (Australia) who finished ninth, and China’s Jiaqi Sun, who after qualifying third-highest couldn’t get a clean run together and took seventh.
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