Saya Sakakibara overcomes setbacks and trauma to win BMX gold for Australia and her brother

The setbacks for Saya Sakakibara just didn’t let up. The trauma from her brother’s BMX accident, gnawing at her in the months before Tokyo. The impact of her own crash at those Games, ruining dreams and leaving her in hospital. Another stack, a year later, that triggered lingering concussion symptoms.

It was all getting too much, and she was close to giving up. Close, but she persevered. Built the foundation again. Started tearing in. Gaining confidence. Putting the fears aside. And then – three days out from competition in Paris – a test for Covid came back positive.

“My heart kind of sank. I was like, ‘oh no’, like, I can’t believe that. This is my Olympics,” she said.

In the end, she was right. Paris has become the 24-year-old’s Games, after she claimed gold in the women’s BMX racing event at the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines stadium on a raucous Friday evening.

Rest and medication may have helped her recover from the virus, but the feeling of that initial dismay hasn’t left her. “Your mind goes to the worst case scenario of like, I’m missing this and I can’t believe this is how it ends. But, you know, I still had time on my side.”

If time was her friend this week, on Friday so was the clock. Four times she raced around the course, made up of a steep starting rump, four bumpy straights and three banked corners. All four times – three in the semi-finals, and once in the all-or-nothing final run – she blitzed the eight-rider field. The margin back to second placed Manon Veenstra from the Netherlands was ultimately a huge seven tenths of a second.

So from setback and trauma, there emerged an explosion of joy, of gratitude. Tears on her cheeks glistened almost as much as the medal around her neck. “I’m just so grateful for all the hard experiences that I had ever since Tokyo, ever since Kai’s accident,” she said.

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Sakakibara’s brother Kai – himself a promising BMX racer – suffered a severe brain injury while racing in 2020. Saya and her family have supported him during his slow recovery in the years since.

“Those are the moments that made me really dig deep, really go internal and just find myself with BMX again,” she said.

In an unforgettable night in front of Kai and the rest of her family, Sakakibara’s triumph followed a one-two-three finish for France in a BMX arena overcome with local fervour in a forest in western Paris. The men’s bronze winner, Romain Mahieu, also happens to be Sakakibara’s boyfriend.

“I’m more happy for her than I am for me right now, because she’s been through a lot of things and was so, so close to give up a few years ago,” he said. “Now she’s an Olympic champion, so it’s crazy.”

Sakakibara’s coach, Luke Madill, said it has only been in recent months that she has really overcome her fears, repeatedly dredged up by her own injuries and those of her brother.

“If the conditions aren’t right, if it’s a bit windy, that triggers things in her, and we just have to reset, reprocess or sometimes just scrap the day and start again,” he said. “In all honesty, probably the last three or four weeks, I’ve just seen the biggest change that I ever have, and I knew that coming into this we were on something special.”

Rather, Sakakibara’s biggest fear became not meeting her expectations. “I knew that the times were showing that I was the fastest rider here, and if I just commit and just believe in myself, I was going to get through the track,” she said. “The evidence was there, I just had to believe it.”

Sakakibara has had several near misses at major championships, and leading into Paris wondered whether she just wasn’t cut out for it. “I was kind of worried that I was going to be one of those racers that doesn’t get those big, big wins,” she said. “I just wanted to be able to look back on the videos of my performance and be like ‘yeah, I’m proud of that’. And I definitely did that.”

For good and bad, Sakakibara knows now the setbacks are part of her. “I really wanted that fairytale ending at Tokyo and when I didn’t get it, it was definitely definitely heartbreaking, and it took took some time to recover from that,” she said. “But I think it was the experience that I needed to have.”