X Games: Logan Martin and BMX Park Gold
Logan Martin is an Australian professional Dirt and Park Freestyle BMX rider. In 2021, Martin won the gold medal in the inaugural Men's BMX freestyle event at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Denoted as the most dominant Park competitor in recent years, Logan has won the last three XG Park contests he’s entered: X Games Minneapolis 2018, X Games Minneapolis 2019, and XG Chiba 2022.
His talent goes beyond his genius skills and fierce moves — triple tail whip, opposite tail whip with a flair, and the 540 flairs. Everyone calls him a machine because his competition runs are meticulous and on-point. Logan Martin is focused — and goes to extreme lengths to be the best.
In 2017, Martin moved to the Gold Coast where he spent $70,000 to build a freestyle BMX park in his backyard to pursue greatness. And greatness he pursued. In 2021 alone, Martin:
- Australian National BMX Freestyle Park Championships: 1st
- 2021 UCI Urban Cycling World Championships: 1st
- 2021 Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics Men's Cycling BMX Freestyle: Gold
What is Cycling BMX Freestyle Park?
BMX freestyle is a spectacular discipline where the riders perform routines which consist of sequences of executing tricks with riders judged on quality of their performance (difficulty, originality, and style).
The competition is a two-round tournament, with a seeding round and a final. Each round has the cyclists compete in two runs. The runs are 60 seconds long. Five judges give scores between 0.00 and 99.99 based on the difficulty and execution of the rider's run — the scores are averaged for a total run score.
In the seeding round, the rider's two run scores are averaged to give a total seeding score. These seeding scores are used to determine the start order of the cyclists in the final, providing a knowledge advantage to the later riders. In the final, only the better score of the two runs counts.
The Trick Mastered by Logan Martin
It’s the gold for gold. Reverse triple tail whip into an orthodox triple tail whip. In a tail whip, the rider lets go of the pedals while using the feet to spin the back of the bike around the handlebars. Logan did it three times in a row. When did this challenging, brutal, and demanding trick become gold for gold?
He completed the first tail whip in his gold-medal performance in the counter-clockwise direction, or in the direction of his non-preferred hand. He then followed this trick with another triple tail whip in the direction of his preferred hand (clockwise). This is a trick no one has mastered but Logan Martin.
