Watching the BMX freestyle final.
The men's runs are a lot more powerful with a lot of front flips and double backflips, more elaborate ramp tricks and so on. The best riders are doing more tricks total, too. Definitely less emphasis on smooth flow. The scores come up in the same range... can't explain that. The Russian rider failed a quad whip (!), apparently in a previous competition he'd landed a quint whip (!!)
The women's event was at first owned by a very big run at the end of the first round by Hannah Roberts (USA). Lots of big powerful tricks. That set the score to beat for round 2. Charlotte Worthington (GB) put down a much smoother run with some more technical moves and beat her by a point. Hannah's second run started out just as powerful but she made a mistake on her second trick and she elected not to finish the run and accept silver.
Something similar played out in the men's round with Logan Martin (Australia) putting down the top score in the first round. No one could meet it in the second round, not even Martin himself, who was confirmed gold for the last run but rode anyhow, having a mistake about halfway through. He was pretty lucky. All the riders from 2-6 improved their scores for round 2. Veteran rider Daniel Dhers (Venezuela) came the closest for silver. For USA, Nick Bruce did not complete his first run, feeling a shoulder injury from earlier in the week, and was DNS for round 2. Justin Dowell just didn't bring it together. They finished 8-9.
The announcers were kind of useless. I feel like they should have been a little more on-it with names of tricks and how impressive they were, but instead we got a lot of "whooooa!" The venue tried for the party atmosphere with the usual loud music but the party just isn't there like it normally would be. It was funny to see all the extreme sports athletes with extreme sports drink sponsors drinking unbranded water at the end of their runs.
At this point, friends, I am going to tune out. This week is track, all week. There are a ton of events. Enjoy!
Last edited by Darth Lefty; 08-01-21 at 10:20 AM.