The seven words from his wife that made Logan Martin win gold
BMX hero Logan Martin has revealed the wise advice from his wife that led to his Olympic gold victory, in a new book.
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Hard work, an enormous skate park built in his back yard and a powerful drive to succeed took Logan Martin all the way to the top. He explains his journey to Olympic gold in a new book.
Top of the World
“Don’t change anything you have ever done.”
My wife’s words were front of mind as I landed in Tokyo and began the long process of getting through the airport’s exhaustive Covid protocols. It was the new world, and it called for patience.
Kim had made a lot of sense.
The key to being successful at the Olympic Games is to not think about it as the Olympic Games. It’s just another major event, like the many I’d competed in over the past eight years.
“Don’t think of it as anything bigger,” she said. I’d won world championships and X Games; they hadn’t been flukes. I’d produced my best when the pressure was at its highest. Tokyo was going to be no different.
My calling card was my strength of mind – it had been that way since back when I was a teenager – so I just had to flick the switch now and focus on what I could control.
All the training was done, all the hard work had been put in. Now I just had to add the performance element.
The strategy for my opening run in the Olympic final had been tossed around for months, but the events of the week had solidified my belief that a conservative approach was best. There would be no 1080 or a front bike flip, which had been my highest scoring trick at the world championships.
But I would be doing my signature trick – the switch triple-whip, which no one else was doing in competition.
It was a trick I’d practised during the Covid break, and it came about off the back of the 2019 World Championships, where there was an obstacle on the course that I couldn’t quite get enough speed for, so I had to settle for a trick that wasn’t as big as I wanted it to be.
This had driven me mad, so when I got home I was, like, “Right, what trick can score really well if I don’t have enough speed?”
Then it came to me: Why don’t I do the triple-whip the opposite way? It was almost like writing with your opposite hand, and it took a couple of months to build my confidence. Every day in practice I’d be refining the movements because I wanted to get it to the point where it felt like a common trick. Doing tricks the opposite way was the direction the sport was quickly heading in.
I knew from the recent world championships, where I did both the normal triple-whip and the switch triple-whip, that they were high-scoring moves.
It showed diversity, which the judges were always looking for. All I wanted to do with my first run was put a decent score on the board, and if I executed what I’d planned cleanly, the most likely score would be about the 90-91-point mark.
The key was starting big. When I’d seen the layout of the course, I realised there was a spine straight into a box jump, then a transfer to a wall, but you could only get to the wall transfer if you’d landed at the top of the ramp with speed from the previous jump. These are the types of calculations that continually occupy your mind in the lead-up to a competition.
I knew I could score well on this course if I could do two tricks on the spine and the box and then still do a trick into the transfer.
This meant I had to scale down some tricks in order to have enough speed to make the jump and corresponding transfers.
One of my strengths was doing a flipwhip transfer over something, and on this course there was one particularly tricky spot where there was a six-foot gap across a spine with nothing in the middle.
Not many of my competitors were hitting it, so I thought this was a perfect opportunity to capitalise. The key was finding my strengths on the course where I could do high-scoring tricks but always ensure I landed with speed to get to the next jump and keep the whole line flowing well. The run I’d planned had what I would describe as medium-sized tricks, but my point of difference was that it packed a lot more in certain parts of the course, which the judges liked to see.
It’s funny how all these years of training and competing come down to a one-minute performance.
Luckily I wasn’t thinking like that as I dropped in and went big early with a 720 barspin on the spine, which I followed with a barrel-roll barspin on the box.
From there I was locked in and everything started the flow with an array of tailwhips, flair barspins and a frontflip no-hander.
There were no bobbles – or casing, as we call it, where you do a jump and hang your back wheel on the top of the ramp, which means you lose a bit of speed and have to pedal out of it to get back on pace.
It’s an obvious sign to the judges, the same with landing a jump and your foot slipping off the pedal. That’s another no-no and a points reduction. There were no such issues on my run, which was pretty flawless, and immediately my head went to the parts of the course I would be inserting the bigger jumps into during the second run.
Then I saw the score flash up on the big screen and almost did a double-take.
93.30.
Wow.
I’d done it. The crowd started cheering and I raised both my arms in a victory salute.
This second run was going to be seriously fun now.
I didn’t consider not doing it, even though I’d already won, because in the weird way my mind works and how I push myself, I thought it would be cool to have the best score and the second best score of the Olympics.
I was going to put on a show. I was almost laughing as I dropped in and happily gave the crowd what they were wanting: a perfect front bike flip.
It was like I was gliding around, soaking up the moment, but when my foot slipped off the pedal slightly when landing the opposite triple-tailwhip – which I’d nailed in the first run – I knew it was time to celebrate properly.
I pulled up on top of the box jump and saluted the crowd. Then, as I rode off the course, I had to wipe away a couple of tears. The emotions that had been bottled up over the four years since I’d heard BMX freestyle was becoming an Olympic sport were starting to pour out.
There had been a live stream set up for the riders, with vision of family and friends on the screen. I’d elected not to look at it after the first round, but now those tears in my eyes started overflowing as Kim and Noah rushed at the screen.
My wife was screaming at the small screen while the rest of my family, including my parents and brother, were waving in the background. All of the dedication, all of the sacrifices – it was all worth it in that moment as my little boy smiled at his dad.
Bringing It Home
It was madness. In less than 48 hours I had 50,000 new followers on social media. Everyone wanted to know more about Logan from Logan – or the BMX dude who’d built a skatepark in his back yard.
From the moment I put the Olympic gold medal around my neck, my life had been crazy. I’d been ushered away for media interviews immediately, while my phone started going berserk with messages. I tried to answer a few on the bus back to the athletes’ village as I constantly checked the medal that was still around my neck.
I wasn’t expecting the reception I received when I walked into the entrance of the Australia house. There was a hangout spot on the bottom floor where there was a coffee cart and large TV. It was packed with athletes, and they erupted in cheers the moment I entered.
They were going crazy. It was an epic moment, and one I wouldn’t be forgetting any time soon.
We were in a bubble, so I wasn’t allowed to leave the athletes’ village except the following day when I was driven to the official press conference building in another part of Tokyo.
I was operating on a couple of hours of sleep – but not from any sort of wild partying.
I was just catching up on all the messages of congratulations and getting my head around what had just happened. It’s fair to say the lack of media exposure for BMX in Australia was no longer an issue, and that was something that meant a lot to me.
I was already getting messages on social media from people saying they weren’t sure if BMX belonged in the Olympics, but after watching it they thought it was amazing.
I’ve never been more excited to board a plane than the one I did in Darwin, which was taking me to Brisbane, where Kim and Noah would pick me up.
They weren’t the only ones waiting for me at the airport, though, with TV news crews and people lined up clapping and cheering as the athletes walked through the exit doors. I had a special gift for Noah: an Olympic teddy bear that had my gold medal around its neck.
It was all a bit crazy, but when I finally had them both in my arms it made everything worthwhile. Noah loved playing with the medal, and as we crept away from the media pack, all I could think about was hiding away at home with my family.
That’s all I was dreaming of as we turned into our estate … but those thoughts were quickly extinguished as I drove down our street and saw the crowd.
There were people everywhere, lined up with handmade signs, and they were going off as we pulled up the driveway. All of my family was there, and Kim and Noah had written a beautiful sign of their own, which was on the front fence: “Our champ comes home today. We call him daddy.”
If you’d asked me 10 years ago if I could envisage BMX freestyle being an Olympic sport, I would have said there was no way.
As I’ve mentioned before, the future of the big tricks is all about the opposite way – doing everything in the opposite direction to how it is normally done. This is common in snowboarding, riding “switch” and rotating both ways, and I’ve really ramped up that approach in recent years, since it will become the norm.
In a practical sense, there will be fewer and fewer secret tricks, where you turn up to a major championship and drop something completely new. I decided to let the rest of the world into my bag of tricks after the Olympics, posting on social media clips of the three big tricks that I’d had up my sleeve in Tokyo but didn’t use. They were the double-flair, a 720-tailwhip to barspin and a completely opposite flairwhip.
Another popular question was about the neighbours’ reaction to the backyard skatepark. And then there was the big one: “How does a kid from Logan win an Olympic gold medal?”
This one was very simple to answer. My life motto is, “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”
I wasn’t the most talented BMX rider, but I was the one who worked the hardest. And that got me to where I am today … the first ever Olympic champion in BMX freestyle.
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