BMX Star Hannah Roberts Procrastinated Badly Ahead of the Tokyo Olympics

The Paris Olympics didn't go exactly as Hannah Roberts planned. Hannah earned a silver medal in BMX freestyle during the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, an obviously impressive feat, but one that felt like a disappointment after she had entered the tournament as the odds-on favorite.

Hannah wanted to come away with the gold this time, but she couldn't quite make it happen. She came in 8th in Paris, and many now want to know what happened to her.

Hannah crashed out during her first run and put her leg down just seconds into her second run, ensuring that she would finish off the podium in 2024. “It was just a lot mentally, a lot of pressure I put on myself,” she said. “There’s a lot of things that can go wrong in a very short amount of time and today just wasn’t my day.”

She also suffered a hard run during practice.

Hannah talked about the pressure she was putting on herself after coming up short in Tokyo before the games began,

“I’ve never actually said this, but by the time that March or April came around, I wasn’t prepared at all to go to the Games,” she explained, saying that she had basically stopped riding altogether as we entered the second year of the pandemic. “Physically I was in the worst shape of my entire life, and on the bike, I was not confident at all," she added.

“And I thought that was so sad,” she said, “where that was one of the biggest events of my entire life and I can’t remember a thing about it.”

During her second run in Tokyo, Hannah was under pressure after Charlotte Worthington of Great Britain put up a 97.5. Her left foot slipped off the pedal, and she broke her foot just seconds into the run, limping off early.

“I made just a dumb mistake that I wasn’t able to let go of for a really, really long time,” she said. “A lot of people on the internet told me that I gave up, which was whatever. As soon as my foot slipped my pedal, there was nothing I could do. I had to be perfect. I knew that it had to be perfect, and it wasn’t. So that was a super hard pill to swallow.”

“It would be really cool to say that I’m an Olympic gold medalist,” she said prior to her arrival in Paris. “That’s super awesome, and it’s another thing to add to the resume, but I have a pretty solid understanding that my resume as it is right now is very, very strong."

"As cool as it would be to bring it back for Team USA, it wouldn’t affect me much as a person," she added. "It wouldn’t change anything about my life. It would just be extremely special to win it with my whole family there.”

Unfortunately, she came up short, but she remains one of the most decorated BMX riders of all time.