Former chef Charlotte Worthington cooked up another golden recipe for Team GB’s BMX stars.
After Bethany Shriever’s gold in the BMX Racing, Worthington won the first BMX Freestyle competition to ever take place at the Olympic Games, rewriting the history books in more ways than one.
An error on her first run left her needing to produce something spectacular – and how she did, landing a gravity defying 360 backflip that has never been landed by a woman in competition.
It meant she scored 97.50 out of a possible 100 to edge hot American favourite Hannah Roberts, who had scored 96.10 on her first run, into silver. Switzerland’s Nikia Ducarroz completed the podium.
Worthington only started competing in 2016 and secured her first World Cup podium within two years, the European champion honing her skills at Corby’s ‘Adrenaline Alley’.
Worthington, 25, from Manchester, said: “It’s kinda unreal, I’m waiting to wake up. I’ve been dreaming about this for four years, and it still feels like I’m dreaming four years ago, I’m still waiting to wake up.
“I didn’t put any pressure on myself. You go in and out of it, you’re thinking there is some pressure and maybe it’s not going to happen this time.
“But you’ve just got to let that go really quick and refocus. I tried not to have any pressure and I tried to focus on enjoying myself and taking it one trick at a time.
“It was incredible. I’ve not been doing that trick [the 360 backflip] for that long, we’ve been trying to find that big banger trick and when we found it we thought, ‘this is the one’.
“We put a lot of faith in that. To be honest, I wouldn’t have had any of those tricks if it wasn’t for Hannah [Roberts, silver medallist]. She’s made me push so hard since day one, this is the first time I’ve beaten her.
“If it wasn’t for Hannah Roberts, we wouldn’t be this far anyway.
“This is a lot of hard work paying off. But the hard work has mainly been on myself.
“Everyone at home, I couldn’t have done this without you.”
